Ah yes, the backups - definitely best to pluralise them.
I once lost a number of docs at work (long ago, before I retired) that represented months of research and work. It's a bad feeling. At least I had some prints albeit it was tedious to type them all in again. (They wouldn't cough up for OCR).
The worst thing was that the organisation I worked for supposedly did the backups via their network. It turned out they did taped backups that were never tested and were in fact corrupt. I now take responsibility for my own backups. I don't have enough confidence in "cloud" backups where someone else is actually doing and keeping them (maybe).
Some things matter more than others. It's convenient to be able to auto-rebuild from a system backup but most will have the original O/S disk anyway, along with original programs disks. However, in the days of digital downloads, it pays to keep a backup of the file. Some vendors will let you re-download the software but others are very naughty and want to charge you for it again.
It's the worst when you lose things like photos, which are irreplaceable. Trainz data could always be re-downloaded but if you're like me you will have endless numbers of self-fixed items and all sorts of amended routes/sessions that took hours & hours to make.
So I keep 3 backups: one on a separate hard disk in the PC, one on an external HD permanently connected to the PC and a 3rd on another external HD that also gets kept in another building (my woodworking shed) apart from the couple of hours when it is re-connected to the PC and got up-to-date each week.
The advent of Windows7 saw a much better Windows native backup and recovery service. It works automatically once set up, updating only changes after taking the intial image (unless the changes are vast). I know it works because I tested it by doing both a system and a data rebuild to a different disk from the BU disk. No problems at all. If you do a lot of changes in a day, it's also possible to tell it, "Do a backup now" but its not a real-time BU service. Otherwise I have it set up to perform the backup every week.
The ladywife has a real-time backup program that came "free" with a Samsung external hard disk. It seems to work very well but only handles data files; it can't take a system image. It doesn't seem to slow her laptop down despite writing changes to the backup file on her external BU hard disk as and when they're written to the laptop hard disk.
A couple of years ago our local substation went through a series of brown-outs and voltage spikes, who knows why. Before the lecky company rebuild the offending switchgear those spikes fried a number of computers hereabouts, including mine. "Luckily" it did for motherboards and processors rather than hard disks.
So, I now have a nice Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) atween the PC and the mains. I bought a Belkin, which is quite good (4 outlets, monitoring software) but there are others. Unfortunately, you will need an expensive one if you want to drive a big PC power supply and/or the screen/monitor as well. The one I got was around £150 and handles the 650W PC power supply as well as a couple of small transformers for external hard disks. But it chokes on the monitor if I add that. Generally monitors are more tolerant of voltage shenanigans though.
Such a UPS is less expensive than a fried MB & processor, if your electricity has those spikes and other nasties in them. A good UPS smooths all that away. And you won't necessarily know if your electricity supply is in fact less stable than it ought to be.... It could be cookin' your mother right now!
Lataxe
