Willie, Haven't used it myself as the worst we could lose is a bunch of pics, but I've heard to put everything you can't lose on an external hard drive.
Mike

 

I had, and still have a remote hard drive. It can hold everything. It does plug in to the same power source as the computer. It was set up for automatic backup but that caused problems with the program freezing, and the whole computer having to be shut down. The local "expert" then suggested manual backup. The computer demands undivided attention. If I did every task it calls for, there'd be no time for earning the money the computer looks after. I should back up each time I enter anything, but get lazy about it.

Now I've found new experts, a pair of women in a distant town. They have added a cloud based backup, it's automatic.

 

I don't trust anything new until it's been around 10 years.

Unfortunately, now everything is new every couple years...

So now I don't trust any technology...

Someday I may trade in my pencil and multi-scaled ruler for CAD - but I'm not placing any bets :laugh:

 

For less than $72/year you could have had an automatic cloud based backup. You'd have lost nothing. All my clients use it and none have lost anything despite failures, employee error and malware. I've been paperless for more than 20 years and haven't looked back.

Feel free to pm me if you have any questions.

 

willie; i hate to nitpick but backing up data is key.

 

Or use a service like Dropbox, which allows you to keep copies on your hard drive and automatically stores copies of your data in the cloud. It also keeps track of all file changes and versions for the last 30 days, so you don't just have a backup, but you can access all the different versions of your files as well. Dropbox offers something like 99.999999999% data durability. You will lose one file every 10,000 years. It's that secure.

 

Dropbox offers something like 99.999999999% data durability. You will lose one file every 10,000 years. It's that secure.

I'm not buying that line. Companies can promise ALL they want.... hackers and trouble makers work very hard to infiltrate "the cloud" the web, and everything else.

Anyone remember Equifax ? The place that was supposed to keep you safe?

I don't store anything on the cloud. I have a 1 TB external usb drive for each laptop.

If my laptop crashes, I lose nothing.

I also routinely (well, couple times a year) drag all my iphone pics to the drive ...

Do I trust external HD's completely? NO

But IMO, it's Much much safer than the cloud.

Clouds are for rain.... Or nuclear fallout
Whichever comes first.

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Anybody else remember TRS/DOS?
1981 it seemed like a really good idea, after all every supply house in town was computerized and the box for the desk with twin 5¼ floppies only cost 2200 1981 Dollars with 600 extra for the printer, dot mattrix. A year later we could play games and learn to despise Robert Frost and his damn Snowy night at 300 baud.

Dreams of bubble dome memory getting under $500 per and hard drives right there at head level spinning a 20" aluminum disk at Warp 4.

DON'T HIT THE DAMN BREAK KEY! And if you did stop everything and wait for help.

What the hell you mean the system is no longer operable and we gotta switch to IBM
(Anybody nostalgic for a Luggable IBM or a factory new copy of 8 in 1?)

OK, this DOS **** will last forever, right?

Read my Memo, I have no damn desire to learn Cobol and what the hell is Machine Assembler? Mark is not in that little box and he assembles machines.

Why does any cop need a computer in his car at 5 grand a copy?

NO, I have no desire to invest in a chunk of a NonWireline License for Celular whatever that is. I may build myself a cell to hide from computer nerds.

Who the hell says we gotta upgrade to WinDos, DOS is forever.

I don't give a rusty rats azz what the 14 year old who keeps this monster running and plays games says, it's faster than I can type and it's staying on Windos 95 till hell has 7 inches of ice covering it.

NO I don't want to store everything someplace in frozen Alberta for safety, we have A, B and what the hell happened to C copies on hand.
Told ya that Canadian company storing all kinds of information was going to Bankrupt. Who has your information now?
Who has the vault full of microfilm containing 5 hospitals records that went in that Bankruptcy auction?

New and Improved you say, where's my pen and sticky notes?

 

I don't remember that. I was a 15 year old high school Junior when I took the ASVAB test brought by the military. I scored very high in aptitude. The Air Force offered me a tempting package of training in computer repair. I could commit at 15, would need parental permission, and would be inducted on my 17th birthday. My father had been Army Air Corps in WWII and again in Korea when it was US Air Force. His advice was "Don't trust them. Once you sign your name, they own you. You might end up changing oil in a motor pool, or worse."
Computers were BIG then, size, and expense meant civilian computers were only in big cities. I had no interest in living there.

From 1971 to 2004 everyone in the country was becoming computer literate except me. In 2004 I bought my wife a new computer, and I took over her old one. I enrolled in a night course in the business program. This was my "baptism of fire" I was utterly ignorant, and quite a source of amusement to the other students who were there to hone their skills, not learn to turn the damned machine on.

Most people love learning to use computers. From the beginning, I've hated it! It's the only machine I've ever failed to learn to control.

 

Well.I'm a dumb ol country boy but not dumb enough to tely on Mac or Wondows for anything I give a shiit about so.
I have my laptop, the ol lady's laptop, my desktops/1 in the house office/1 in the garage/ one in my barn shop and 1 in my town shop, all with a dropbox folder stored on each as well as in the dropbox pro cloud.
I can be dropped on Gilligans Island and if I can find something that will get me on the net, I got my stuff, no problem.
All of that data is also backed up on these lil critters too.
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I can move to marz, buy a computer, sign in to Dropbox and sign into Chromium and be back on a perfectly "normal" computer customized to me in under an hour.If no internet I can use one of these thumb drives which also contain mirrors of my OS ( Debian Stable MX17 and Linux Mint Debian Edition 3.and all programs and files are right there. JUst go into the BIOS of whatever machine, set to booyt from usb and be on " My Computer" in a minute.
Computer disaster is a thing of the past for those willing to spend 20-30 hours setting up something worth a damn............and avoiding "computer experts" at stores,"repair centers" and schools.
You know the ones. 3 screens. Game or Porcelain Thrones opened on one, Farcebook/Whassapp on the other and Windows 10 doing it's perpetual update on the third.

 

Dont buy if you don't want but Dropbox is not "just" the cloud. It doesn't work that way. Everything in that cloud MUST be in duplicate on your machine(s) too.
Ahkmad cant just send all the goat vids to his dropbox from his iPhone. It has to be in a local folder somewhere too. Dropbox is for when the hippo eats your laptop, you buy another one, install dropbox app and " sync" to their cloud. Then its on your new machine and still on their cloud( and in a hippo turd somewhere---password protected and encrypted)
Same with using Chromium. Install it, sync up to their cloud and all your bookmarks and passwords etc are back on the new machine in a few minutes.Click control H to get back where you were when the hippo flipped the raft.

 

John, you don't have to buy it, but that's the way it is. Dropbox stores its data on no less than 3 zones that are all geographically separated, on separate power grids, in separate flood planes (if any), and on separate fault lines (if any). You could literally drop nukes on 2 out of the 3 zones and still have access to your data. Each zone is made up of multiple data centers, so even if a data center goes down, the zone will remain operational. Its that good. Its even better than your external hard drive. And as Bonzoo noted, you still have local copies on any computer that shares that drop box account.

 

Sounds great on paper.

you should be a salesman.

I like to keep things simple.

No Cloud for me. It simply is not necessary.

todays society is so lazy and spoonfed that they need everything convenient....

This world is TOO CONNECTED.

no thanks.

I'll be in the garage.

 

Every external drive you buy will die without warning and usually at the most inopportune time.

I've been in IT support since 1978. I may know jack **** about welding but I've been staking my reputation on my IT skills probably longer than most.

DO NOT TRUST EXTERNAL DRIVES.

Their only good use is for moving data from a to b (very short term reliance!).

 

I back up once a month pics and important data( not much of that) onto a external hard drive and 2 separate cds or dvds and they are kept in to different areas of the house, once in a routine todo it , it goes fast..anything that leaves your computer via internet or wireless to a cloud or any of the places that backs up data its not secure, period..it can be looked at and manipulated or stolen....but if it makes you feel good its safe then keep thinking that...

 

No Cloud for me. It simply is not necessary.

LOL...that's like saying "I don't need electric lights, I have kerosene lanterns". If you own a smart phone, you already use cloud every day whether you know it or not. Waze, Uber, Netflix, Realtor.com, airbnb, anything from GE, all the big banks, and 90% of your smartphone apps either run exclusively in the cloud or store data there.

 

Always wondered about that... those texts that show up 6 days late had to be stored somewhere. They don't just bounce around as loose electrons in space that long...

 

Do yourself a favor and invest in a Solid state hard drive. As long as you have clean protected power you're golden.

 

Willie, I feel your pain and struggle. I have been trying the computer thing off and on for the last 22 years. Paper and pencil works, but there are times I truly need some information that is back in my office. I just got a new to me Panasonic Toughbook with a solid state hard drive. The hard part is there just aren't that many options for accounting programs for the computer any more that isn't cloud base. I want to own the program, and my area cell coverage can be spotty let alone getting data so I can type out an invoice to a customer. I trying, but it is frustrating.

 

Tex (SMS) messages are slightly different. They go over the cell carriers infrastructure, and didn't rely on the cloud as far as I know.

 

I've owned and used computers since IBM XT days, Certified AutoCAD Operator, certified Windows hater, SAP user. I keep a backup of anything important on a Seagate external hard drive. I like the information sources found on the 'net. Technology is a wonderful thing, WHEN IT WORKS!