How many times in 2004 did you see an e-mail message with a subject line like, "Help, Computer Crash! -- help recover data!"
Come on, how many times?
In this world of computer virii, Microsoft Quality Assurance and light-fingered crackheads, a few of us are going to wake up one day and find their computer as fucked up as log cabin Republican.
Chances are you will be able to somehow re-install the OS, the applications, but what about the porn? What about the paper you are working on for school? What about my birthday wish list? The best way to make to make sure you can easily retrieve the items is to make sure you have a back-up in the first place.
So I would like to propose a new years resolution to you all...back up your computer files.
Today.
It's rather easy. Pop in a CD-R and start dragging files to the disk. Back up your important papers, your important music files, everything. It might take a disc or two. Storage has never been cheaper.
Do you have gigs of content and CDs are just inconvenient for back-up? As I said before, storage has never been cheaper. Buy an extra hard drive and use that as a back-up. Or use your present drive as a back-up. Buy an external hard drive just for valuable files.
There are lots of excuses for not backing up and not many of them are very good. So do yourself a favor and go out and get a bundle of CD-Rs and start backing up. Get an extra hard drive. Do something. If the data is in two places it dramatically increases the chance that you can recover the data.
Then, while you are backing things up, make an extra CD-R with Joe Frank shows on them and send it to me. Or anything else you think might be fun. E-mail me and I'll send you my address.
