Well
all that has changed thanks to two things. One a USB2 160 Gig
external drive and two a free software package called Genie
Backup manager.
Most
of you will have had experience of that moment when you realise
that Windows has crashed. First there is that few seconds of
denial, followed by that hollow feeling when you wonder how
much you have lost. Finally the rage when you wish you had backed
up your data. I have images, documents and videos on my drives.
Many of them are backed up onto DVD but that is something I
do infrequently.
An
external hard drive is quite low cost these days, less that
£100 plug and play, hot swap, etc. In my machine I have
3 80 Gig HDDs giving 240 gig in total. This is split into logical
drives of about 40 Gig. Two of these are reserved for Video
editing. So I guess my risk is probably of the order of 40 to
60 Gig of data. So I got 160 Gig USB2 unit and Genie, free on
the cover CD of Shopper, the same one I got PagePlus on.
The system simply lets you name a backup operation, call it
Fred. Then you browse your folders and select all the ones you
wish to backup using Fred. Next you direct the system to where
you want you files backed up to. With me so far?. Next, having
completed that simple operation you are asked if you wish to
backup now. Elect to do so with a click and your files are compressed
and written to your designated destination. It can be a space
on one of your HDDs or it can be an external or even a CD or
DVD.
The
system supports multiple CD and DVDs so if your requirement
exceeds one you will asked to insert a second or third etc.
When you wish to restore, following some form of catastrophe,
simply select “FRED” from the list of backups that
have set up and all of your files are restored to their original
location.
Christmas
Dinner.
It seems that we some support for Christmas Dinner again. We
will begin planning in the near future so please let us know
if you have any useful input.
