No backups = Disaster!
Filed under: Business, IT History —
Posted: 6:44 am
17 April 2008
How many business do you either deal with directly or know that do backups? A large percentage I would say however how many individuals (home users) actually do backups? Not so many. If you ask a home user about backups then they will usually tell you on of two things:
- I don’t really have anything important to backup
- I brought some CD’s to do it just haven’t got around to it yet.
Let’s address these one by one….
- I don’t really have anything important to backup.
Lie, Fact most people these days own a digital camera which they use to take photo’s of their kids, family, friends, holidays…..you get the idea. How many of the photos taken do we print? Well I find typically less than about 10%. How many do we want to keep? All of them. And rightly so, these are memories that can never be recovered. In the days before digital camera’s we got out film’s developed and kept the photo’s and short of a house fire these were never lost. Now with digital camera we can take more photo’s for less but if you are leaving them an a hard drive somewhere then they stand a very high chance of getting lost. BACK THEM UP. If this means that you have sit there for a couple of hours feeding blank DVD’s to the computer then do it. At the very least make a copy onto another computer. When it comes to photo’s I always advise everyone to make three copies of each DVD full of photo’s; Disk 1) Use this one to look at photo’s; Disk 2) Store this one at you house in a loft/safe or whatever; Disk 3) Store this a another family members house, so if yours burns down you still got them. - I brought some CD’s to do it just haven’t got around to it yet.
So goes to you just BACK THEM UP. The fact is that if you don’t YOU WILL LOSE THEM I guarantee it, it may take a few years but it will happen.
The other option is to get yourself a NAS box (Network Attached Storage) and connect it to your router. When it’s on the network it will be available to save data to which will give you a little redundancy in your storage network. There are programs that you can use to automate the backup task such as SyncBack which is available as both a full retail version or also as a Freeware version. What this application allows you to do is create a profile for performing a backup copy of data from one location to another and while this will not help in a house fire it will create redundancy for hardware failure which is much more common. So make sure you get those backups sorted out and if anyone want’s any further advice then don’t hesitate to contact me.
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Old friends reunited…….
Filed under: Business, IT History — Tags: bbc, bbc micro, IT History —
Posted: 1:47 pm
20 March 2008
The creators of the BBC computer which many of you out there from the same generation as myself would have been taught in school. At the time the “beeb”, as it became known, became the a pioneer in the shaping of many aspects of the modern computer systems that we run today. The original machine was launched in 1981 for £375.00 and was powered by an 8bit processor, 6502 CPU running at 2Mhz, 640×256 screen resolution and eventunally sold 1.5 million units which 
by far exceeded the expected 12,000 units forecast. This was amazing really at a time when computers were really considered to be the route of all evil and many of the folks around were still carrying wooden clubs and crying “ugh”.
The computer conservation society has organised the reunion of the original creators Hermann Hauser, Steve Furber, John Radcliffe and David Allen; Hauser and Furber worked at Acorn while Radcliffe and Allen came from the BBC. The project was born from the National Computer Literacy Program which was initiated by the BBC to find a computer which would help to educate both children and parents.
I will personnally have fond memories of the beeb, as it brings back those years at school and obviously I’m not alone as there are many websites out there dedicated the beeb as well as a host of emulator so I say a big salute to the beeb the pioneer of its day.
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