We returned from holiday to the computer equivalent of a burglary: a virus had attacked my computer, not completely enough to wipe it, but enough to make it so slow that it would take me fifteen minutes just to log on to my email.
Those were lots of fifteen minutes of my life that I will never get back.
I’m such a geek freak that in my head I sat there shouting things at my poor beleaguered laptop like #COMPUTERFAIL. With the hash key in front of the word.
You’d have thought a holiday with an enforced week away from the laptop might have fixed me from doing stuff like that, but no. Eventually Matthew got sick of me tutting and sighing and offered to wipe my computer.
Oops, too late! The virus decided it was bored lurking about behind the laptop screen and did just that while Matthew was out at work.
Luckily I am a Type-A person (not often you hear someone say that, is it?) and my job is computer-based so I am fanatical about backing up everything on my computer. In fact my backing-up skills are probably rather better than my house-cleaning skills and some days they are certainly better than my parenting skills. Which is nothing to be proud of but the way my children behave some days, particularly on cooped-up rainy days in the summer holidays, I enjoy backing-up my laptop more than I enjoy parenting.
A year or so ago I had to get a new computer when Harry, in a rush one morning to get his school bag, brushed by my laptop and knocked it fatally to the floor. Despite my lovely backups, it was a real pain setting everything up again, like lots of different email addresses on Outlook and all the addons for Firefox. In the last year I have moved increasingly to cloud computing, using web-based applications, which have the added advantage of being accessible from any computer and don’t mean the end of the world when a laptop dies on you. To be able to work on any computer I have to carry around a list of login names and passwords but for daily use I am on my Asus laptop which remembers all my passwords, where all my originals are saved and which is attached to my faithful Western Digital back up hard drive. A second hard drive is in our fire box. A third hard drive is in my bag. It requires me to be organised and disciplined about noting down login details and backing up everything but I know in the event of fire, burglary or a dead laptop I will survive. (It has however crossed my mind that if my presence disappeared from the web I’m not sure I would.)
Here are my favourite cloud computing, web-based applications:
What are your favourite web-based applications? Are you prepared if your laptop goes belly up?
Photo: kevinkrejci
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I hope you had a lovely relaxing holiday!
Thanks for all of that information Ella, I will definitely be using all that I can understand. I lie awake in bed sometimes and worry….what would happen to all of my photos if…I have got to start doing what you are doing, if only for my photos. I would be devastated if I lost them. I dropped an external hard drive a while ago which had lots of photos on…we’ve tried retrieving them but it’s not happening.Do you have any suggestions?
If when you plug in the external hard drive it makes a clicking noise it probably means the disk is dead and there is no real way to recover it without spending a huge amount of money to have it professionally recovered. If it sounds like it is all powering up OK but there are no lights, or the lights come on and stay on (rather than flickering) then probably the board inside the enclosure is broken. This is the board that connects the hard disk to the USB cable. In this case you might be able to replace it with a new board (if you can get hold of one) or just buy a new enclosure with the hard disk in it and then plug the hard disk from the broken enclosure into that (which is probably the easiest and safest route). This is the sort of thing you would need:
http://bit.ly/aBjgBF
If the hard disk was just a small one (in terms of disk size, not physical size) eg around 50 gig then it might be cheaper to buy a new hard disk and backup all your photos again on to it.
I’m so not ready if my computer dies. I really must do some of these things, I keep saying I don’t have time but if you have time to do it then I certainly do!
I could definitely argue I don’t have time but it is soooo time consuming when things die that I figure the time spent on backing-up is actually less.
Ooh I didn’t know about Delicious bookmarks. That could be good, thanks.
I love delicious. I have a kidney-related delicious bookmarks if you are interested.
I love cloud computing, if only for the fact that i can keep everything synced between by laptop and phone. My new favourite bit of cloud tech is evernote. I can make notes on my phone or computer and it all syncs together. As a fanatical note taker who is sick and tired of all the bits of paper lying around, this is brilliant! And I can’t lose these notes either!
I think the majority of my computer stuff is on the web. Google docs is another good one. you can access all your docs through the internet.
If I had a smartphone or had the computer somewhere central I would be addicted to evernote. As it is I rely on the motherboard on our kitchen wall. Doesn’t always work though!
Wow that is impressive. You have a better back up strategy than most banks. Working for an IT company and being the operations manager, I’m used to pc’s going bellyup and backups are the way to go. Not only physical ones but the Cloud is the way forward. Well done you. Hope you had a great holiday. x
Thank you. And yes, we had a lovely holiday. x
Great compilation!
I personally could not live a day without Gmail and Delicious bookmarks. Since I have tons of tabs open all at once, I never close one until I bookmark it for later reference on Delicious. Priceless.
Oh, and I like how your blog design is simple and readable… No clutter, simply lovely.
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Thanks,
I had not seen sophos before. I’ll check it out. Does bluehost or anyother hosting company make backups easy and painless?
Google docs comes in handy when you want to collaborate ideas with others. It is a little scary how much google is getting into all parts of our internet lives, though.
One other thing you should do on the backup and computer protection front is to create a malware/virus recovery DVD or USB Flash drive. This will come in handy when you get a trojan/malware or virus and it has disabled your internet service. Just boot up in safe mode (this assumes a Windows system), grab the malware recovery DVD/USB, and go from there.
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