Re: I'm back
- From: Jane Vernon <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:20:53 +0200
Ben wrote:
"Jane Vernon" <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:79ef34F1peifoU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI seem to be back. Laptop had dust removed. That's all. They didn't even re-install Windows, the failure of which was the symptom it was sent with. Still, Windows did re-install.
I'm still extrememly grumpy about the thing and extensive questioning from any helpful umrat is likely to result in my calling her/him a patronising git ;) I'm a normal person, living in normal domestic surroundings with quite enough intelligence to work out that the fact that three other Dell laptops have lived in the same environments without dust being a problem confirms my estimation of my home being normal.
The last Dell tech support person suggested I buy an external drive. I said that implied he thought I could not rely on my Dell laptop and he replied that he did not think one could totally rely on anything.
Well, fair enough. But does this mean that I should live in a permanent state of worry? I mean, if external storage sites may be thought insecure, CDs are damagable, external drives have a limited life (how would I know when that had been reached?) and computers are subject to random failures because of normal amounts of dust, how is one ever to relax that information is safe? This is actually a serious question, btw, as well as being part of a general rant ;)
The technician also said that yes, you can take the back off a laptop and clean with compressed air from time to time. I had never heard of this being possible/advisable with a laptop, though I do it with my desktop once or twice a year. Does anyrat else do this with a laptop?
It's not that I don't do backups. It's that the computer failed four days after the latest backup. I lost some of the best photos I've taken :( All attempts to get Dell to help me rescue any data eventually failed. I'm sure if I'd been prepared to lose the use of my computer for the next few months and wait till I could pay a private IT bod in UK, they could have been saved, but I can't do that long without my computer.
Dust or no dust, any disk on any computer in any environment can fail at any time (hence your use of the word "random"). There are laws of averages which indicate how often it is likely to happen, but it could happen in 10,000 years time or right now. So you don't know when a disk reaches end of life until it happens (or if you're lucky, it'll start behaving oddly shortly before failure, giving you a chance to rescue data before it dies).
This being the case, everyone has to take a view on the amount of time/effort/money they want to spend ensuring nothing is ever lost against the value of those potential losses. In large data center environments with critical data, everything is replicated in real-time to a secondary set of disks (often in another location in case the first meets some catastrophic event), and database log files will be archived off every 10 minutes or less. The home/small business scenario cannot afford such expensive contingencies, so daily or every-N-days backup has to suffice.
Adopt a policy. Follow it rigorously. Accept the potential consequences (e.g. N-days lost data).
Personally, I never delete photos off my camera until they are safely stored in at least TWO other locations, e.g. PC's disk and a backup.
(Hope this doesn't come across as patronising - I don't think I want to be called a git :-)
Thank you, no, it's not patronising and as far as I can remember you have never appeared to me to be a git :)
Good idea, I suppose, about the two locations. My dad asked weren't the photos still on the camera but as I shot, for instance, 120 at the one location where I took the really nice ones, you can see why it has been my practice hitherto to delete photos from the camera once I have downloaded them to the computer, picked out the ones I want to keep and stored those separately, though also on the computer.
I have started looking at 320gb external drives and it seems one can get one for <£50 so I think that may be the way to go.
--
Jane
The potter in the purple socks
email jane at cloth and clay dot co dot uk
http://www.clothandclay.co.uk/umra/cookbook.htm for recipes supplied by umrats
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