[ExI] from the other side

[Emlyn]

Tip #349: Computer backups are now insanely easy.

(This is way after the fact for everyone involved, and doesn't help
when you have a real paper based notebook.)

If you use a computer, and you keep valuable work on it that you
wouldn't want to lose, consider an online backup service. I personally
use DataDepositbox.com, but it looks like there are now better
services.

A particular example is Carbonite:

http://carbonite.com/

US $49.95 per year per computer, to back up everything on your Windows
PC to their secure online, offsite storage.

These services backup everything initially. After that, they notice if
you change any file, and back up the new version as soon as possibly
(ie: in the next few minutes usually).

You just sign up, install some software, configure it if you are a bit
of a geek (but that's not really necessary I think) and forget about
it.

If you lose your machine (disk dies, machine stolen/lost, etc), or
just delete some files you shouldn't have, you just get online and
download them from the backup site. Easy!

You'll need a pretty serious always on broadband connection, but
that's nigh on ubiquitous these days.

If you are not doing this, try it out!

Since using datadepositbox, I've had to change laptops (for unrelated
reasons), and found the easiest way was to just get the new one,
restore everything that mattered from backup onto the new one, and I
just reformatted the old one. So easy!

(note: Linux and Mac users: Carbonite wont work for you, but one of
the other equivalent services might, have a hunt).

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com

On 30/11/2007, giovanni santost <santostasigio at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi Amara,
> sorry for your notebook.
> This why whenever I travel I carry my notebooks and laptop with me.
> I feel exactly the same, that I would rather loose money and precious
> valuable than my research notes or codes.
> It is horrible that people in a state agency like Poste Italiane stole your
> stuff.
> But I had stuff stolen in USA too.
> In fact, similarly to you, I lost my dissertation original files and 3 years
> worth of research material, stuff that was stored in a laptop that I left
> overnight in my office at a college in Baton Rouge. Somebody with access to
> the offices stole it. Of course, I was very stupid in not saving the
> material on a CD.
> The college authorities were not able to find out who did it.
> So there are bad people everywhere.
> But again, I'm very happy you are at home.
> I hope you will find peace and happiness.
> Giovanni
>
>
>
> Amara Graps <amara at amara.com> wrote:
> Hi extropes,
>
> For what it's worth, I arrived in Boulder on November 17, with only my
> toothbrush and my new passport and my extra carry-on of photocopies of
> my identifications as a side-effect from the large theft of my
> wallet-purse on October 29. I'm still shell-shocked and disoriented
> because after I arrived on the 17th, I left on the 20th (12 hours after
> my luggage from Rome finally arrived) to San Jose to have new driver's
> license and social security (like the codice fiscale) cards. Those two
> things took 15 minutes in total. I spent Thanksgiving with my sister and
> saw two close friends (Hi Samantha), and returned to Boulder on the evening
> of November 23. I was only in Boulder one day, however, before I went to
> San Antonio, Texas and saw two more friends (Hi Damien and Barbara) and
> to attend the 'orientation' for my new job. The 'mother ship' (I call it)
> of Southwest Research Institute is located there.
>
> So now I'm in Boulder, and probably know Denver Airport far more than
> I know the town that I moved to, even though I technically moved to
> Boulder 10 days ago. In my home, I have a futon mattress, two lamps,
> enough warm clothes, cooking-ware, one Mac G4 laptop: useless with a
> broken memory cache on the logic board that will cost $700 to replace,
> a two seasons newer Mac G4 laptop to replace it, but completely
> unconfigured so far with the exception of this email (Eudora) program
> and Firefox browser. It seems that I picked up this newer computer from
> my UK colleagues (six weeks ago), where they were storing it for me from
> my UK Ebay purchase, just in time. I will not try to salvage my old
> G4 laptop Mac.
>
> The tragedy of my International-Move-From-Hell is my notebook of two
> years of calculations of my
> water-on-the-terrestrial-planets research
> project. The notebook is gone, a result of my mistake to send it through
> Poste Italiane. I consider it a much larger tragedy than the theft of
> all of my identifications in my wallet-purse, three weeks before. This
> notebook was in one of 22 brown padded envelopes that I had sent of my
> in-progress writing and research projects. After the moving company
> picked up my home, I still needed to send these notes and notebooks. I
> couldn't use Poste Vaticano because I didn't have any more my
> identifications after the wallet-purse theft to enter the Vatican. DHL
> is expensive and then (and now) and I'm still desperately broke (that's
> _why_ I needed to leave Italy). I figured because I had no bad
> experiences in the past 5 years with brown padded envelopes (only boxes;
> seven in the last 5 years were stolen), I could trust that Poste
> Italiane could send these. I was wrong. Four arrived to Boulder with
> major tears at the edges, with two of them, taped up by the US Postal
> Service a second time. Of those two, most of the contents had fallen
> out: that was my thick calculations notebook; which had my name and
> email address and phone number, by the way. On the more recent packages,
> one of the postal clerks on the US side had written: 'All Closed'. I am
> still waiting for 3 more padded envelopes, but, if those were stolen
> by the thieves at Poste Italiane too, then at least those contents are
> orders of magnitude less valuable to my than my research notebook.
>
> So what can I say? I will have the opportunity to sharpen up my
> arguments for that project, but some significant part of it is
> irreplaceable. I doubt it was an accident with so many torn; the thieves
> at Poste Italiane were probably looking for valuable Christmas presents,
> and I probably disappointed them. Who else would find scribbles and
> photocopies of journal articles valuable?
>
> I will tell the relocation company not to let their customers moving in
> or out of Italy to use Poste Italiane. The only good thing I can say
> about my move, so far, is that at least the baggage handlers at Rome
> Fiumicino airport didn't steal my stuff while it was on the ground for
> those two days, since my four pieces of luggage was carrying alot of
> valuable things. I have my bicycle, in which I have my old Heidelberg
> riding lifestyle back. And of course, the SwRI people here are
> wonderful. It's incredibly nice to get so much support and interest
> from my workplace after my last years of feeling like I was thrown to
> the wolves.
>
> Amara
>
>
> --
>
> Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com
> Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> Be a better pen pal. Text or chat with friends inside Yahoo! Mail. See how.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>