Henry Bierbauer house

[deemery]

All sounds great to me Dave, except I haven't a clue to what you just said. I am one of those people that are glad just to get the computer on, took me two years to figure out how to load pictures. Guess I will just start over. I will have to check on one of the photo uploading sites and see if I can figure one of them out. Last time I tried I lost a bunch of pictures, couldn't figure out how to get them in.

OK.  The simple solution is to buy an external USB hard drive.  Every time you think of it, and before you delete any photos, plug that drive into your computer and copy your important files to that external drive.  Then unplug it and put it in 'a safe place'.


dave

[ak-milw]

Thanks Dave, I will look into it.

[deemery]

The other simple alternative is to sign up for a cloud backup service:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/maintenance/tp/online_backup_services.htm


dave  (who doesn't trust any cloud but his own :-)

[gnatshop]

Dave, I was glad to see your suggestion!

I've been thinking about this - I've previously backed up weekly on DVDs, but it has become
too time consuming!

I'm now trying to decide between WD and Seagate external USB drives.
They're both less than a hundred dollars!

I've downloaded their on-line user manuals to try to help my decision, but any
suggestions from you would be appreciated!

[deemery]

WD, not Seagate!!!    I had 4 of 6 Seagate drives fail within 18 months, and swore I'd never buy another.


dave

[gnatshop]

WD, not Seagate!!!    I had 4 of 6 Seagate drives fail within 18 months, and swore I'd never buy another.
dave

Thanks, Dave!
A user that you trust recommendations go to the top of the list!!

[jbvb]

This is definitely way off-topic for a scratchbuild, but I've had enough pre-packaged external drives fail that I get the idea that the vendors buy "sweepies" grade hard drives, assuming they'll survive to the end of the warranty because they won't be used a lot.  So I bought a Rosewill enclosure, empty, and a Western Digital "Caviar" server-grade drive to put in it.

[deemery]

This is definitely way off-topic for a scratchbuild, but I've had enough pre-packaged external drives fail that I get the idea that the vendors buy "sweepies" grade hard drives, assuming they'll survive to the end of the warranty because they won't be used a lot.  So I bought a Rosewill enclosure, empty, and a Western Digital "Caviar" server-grade drive to put in it.

There have been some great studies of disk drive reliability "in the wild" and it doesn't look like "server grade" drives are worth the significant extra expense. Drives tend to fail in the first couple of months, or run reliably for several years before starting to fail of 'old age'.  I think the better strategy is to buy consumer grade/cheap drives, and plan to replace them every 3 years.


dave