[LincolnSpector]

I just went through a day and half's worth of PC World forum posts. At least three of them (I stopped counting) were from people who for one reason or another could no longer access data files on their hard drives. Not one of them dealt with the obvious question: Why were your precious files only on a single hard drive?

I feel bad about lecturing people dealing with disaster, and I didn't add comments to any of those discussions. But for each one I wanted to shout "Why didn't you back up?! Why did you assume that the hard drive containing your documents and family photos would never die or be stolen?"

Okay. Done with rant.

Lincoln

[StevenSinofsky]

Some people aren't educated about the proper precautions to take in regards to personal computing. They don't recognize the importance of backing up; they don't know that all hard drives fail eventually. You can't blame them for not being a geek.

This post has been edited by StevenSinofsky: 08 August 2012 - 11:32 AM

[compnovo]

Windows 7 has a very user-friendly Backup and Restore function that not only backs up files, it creates a system image that I've used several times to restore my OS after playing around with a beta. Also, the new backup function in Windows 8 is amazing.

[ElfBane]

Lincoln,
Rant On
We(you) see that kind of stuff ALL the time. For example; someone wants to know how to do a MS Word function, so they ask us here. If I don't know it off the top of my head, then I Google it,,, why can't THEY Google it???

The military taught me that if you don't know how to do something, you will at least know how to find out how to do it!
Rant Off

[SnyperTodd]

Lincoln, you're absolutely right, and it doesn't make any sense to not have any kind of backup. To add a little more, you should have an off-site backup as well. I have all of my important stuff backed up on my network server, which sits headless in the attic of my house. The problem with that is that my house burned in July of 2010. Thank God it didn't burn completely, but had it done so I would have lost both my originals and my backups. Now, I have a third backup on my parent's server at their house in a geographically separate location. Nothing short of extreme coincidence or a major catastrophic event will cause me to lose all of my backups.

Elfbane, I get your point and I agree with you, but my absolute biggest pet peeve is the forum reply that contains "Google is your friend" and nothing more. It's the single most worthless, time-wasting reply a person could possibly make, and it's rampant on some forums. PCWorld is one of the most helpful, friendliest forums on the 'net, and I hope we keep it that way.

[mjd420nova]

I can understand some who can't figure out their PC and the concept of backups. Without them, I might have retired many years ago due to lack of work. In many aspects, the notion of backing up your data was, "It's not my data, it's the companies and their responibility". Having had to duplicate work while programming a simple four bit controller, I found documentation to be just as important. Simple to mark your data, regardless of the media, with content and dates. Having watched the backup hardware make advances for dedicated tape drives and eventually to using the cloud. Their are no iron clad gaurentees but failures can be make a little easier if you have multiple copies on multiple media. I use DVDs and an external drive. Individual disks are used for data sets and such to be used alone to allow me to use different platforms (PCs and OSs) to duplicate or copy to other machines. All I ever got from a user whose drive crashed and he had no backup was a sheepish grin and a bowed head. I think he expected me to break out the holy water and start the "laying on of hands" resurrection. Sorry, I'll try not to laugh when you get the bill for the time it took to load all your programs for you on a new drive. Yes, there is a "site charge", regardless of how long I spend in your presense, under two hours, then you pay by hourly increments. You're going to pay me to do something you can do?? Well, they've messed that up before so might as well do it right. Save me from having to see you again. Maybe. From the very beginning, I got the habit of saving everyline of code I generated, then things got more reliable and I only saved when I got a screenful. Now it's only once a week.

[Flashorn]

Hey Lincoln !

I usually stay away from posts like this but, today I'll make an exception.

Yes it's true that people should learn how to better protect their important information BUT, not all people are (as was stated) "Geeks".
In my family, (Uncles , Nices and Nephews) we have a couple of very good IT people and some are very smart but, when it comes to PCs
and their day to day routines well, I have to educate most of them. The most often reason for this is that they either don't have the time
and when they do, all they want to do is have a life. Now, who can blame them. Not everyone has our drive to learn more about technology.
Even younger people who should know more about how PCs work, have a life of their own. They work hard all day and when time comes to
relax, they want to play or watch TV or do repairs around the house or help their children with homework.

Contrary to popular beliefs, it's not an easy life. At one point, technology was supposed to make our lives so much more pleasant. WoW,
what a load of crap. If anything, it made it much harder. We , who love to dabble with hardware and software find it fascinating to be able
work (play) with all this hardware but, to those who don't have a clue how to go about it or just simply can't wrap their heads around the
concept of PCs all together, this is more of a chore than anything else. I have a cousin who is a Oral Surgeon. Extremely intelligent but,
don't ask him to hold a hammer. He would probably hold it the wrong way.

This is why we have sites like this and people willing to help. It's not given to everyone to be able run a PC the right way or even understand
how too.

Please, be more patient and appreciative of the fact that we can understand and most importantly, have the Time to spend to understand.



FLASHORN

This post has been edited by Flashorn: 08 August 2012 - 08:22 PM

[LiveBrianD]

With a lot of people, they probably know they should backup, but keep putting it off until later because they can't be bothered. I wouldn't be surprised if some don't know how. (even though it's not hard) Granted, if I were one of those people in those posts who just lost data, the last thing I'd want to hear is someone lecturing me on why I didn't back up, even though I should've.

In my case, I have at least 3 copies of most things (documents: desktop, laptop, external drive, dropbox; music: desktop, laptop, external drive, some on dropbox; photos: desktop, external drive, CD/DVD), though they're all local with the exception of dropbox and hotmail. Now that you mention it, snypertodd, I might burn another copy of my photos on DVDs, and leave them at my grandmother's house. (she's on the other side of town, so I see her often enough, but then if a natural disaster comes, it'll probably also affect her. But then again, we don't get tornadoes here or anything.) My grandparents on the other side of the family live an hour away, but their internet connection is only 1.5mbps/384kbps DSL, so it wouldn't be practical to backup to a server there over the internet, and I don't see them super often. (maybe once every month or two?) See, procrastination affects me to!

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 08 August 2012 - 08:33 PM

[smax013]

LincolnSpector, on 08 August 2012 - 10:47 AM, said:

I just went through a day and half's worth of PC World forum posts. At least three of them (I stopped counting) were from people who for one reason or another could no longer access data files on their hard drives. Not one of them dealt with the obvious question: Why were your precious files only on a single hard drive?

I feel bad about lecturing people dealing with disaster, and I didn't add comments to any of those discussions. But for each one I wanted to shout "Why didn't you back up?! Why did you assume that the hard drive containing your documents and family photos would never die or be stolen?"

Okay. Done with rant.

Lincoln

I would say there is no simple answer to that.

For some people, hard drive crashing and/or data loss is something that happens to other people..."not me" (this is a common sentiment for things BEYOND computer backups). Thus, since they have never lost data, they just cannot conceive of the notion of it ever happening to them. For such people, the only way they will learn is by the "school of hard knocks"...i.e. they lose some data...even then, some will not learn the lesson. I will also add that there is a good chance that at least a few "power users" on the forums who now know to backup and maybe even preach it learned that lesson that hard way.

For others, it likely comes down to a matter of computer knowledge. For those of us who post regularly, the idea of not knowing how to back up files or even learning how to do it is unfathomable. But the reality is that there are lot of people out there who just do not understand computers or might be "afraid" of computers and who would be at a complete loss as to how to back up their files. Heck, they might be at a complete loss as to where/how to find their files that they need to back up. While backing up with utilities built into the OS or third party utilities has gotten much easier, they are still not fool proof. For example, Time Machine on a Mac is (from my perspective) VERY easy to use, but I still recognize that for some it is still mind baffling.

Then there is the "hassle" factor reason. Backing up can be a hassle, especially for laptops. While there certainly are ways to "automate" backing up and have it all happen invisibly in the background (one of my multiple backup methods for both my Mac laptops is for Time Machine to backup to a NAS drive which happens automatically over the network), for most people backing up means dealing with an external drive. For desktops, it is not a problem to just leave an external drive connected to the computer and use some backup utility to automatically backup files. But for laptops, you have to remember to attach the external hard drive and run the backup. Of course, there are online backup methods that will do the backup automatically in the background and they do tend to fairly easy to deal with, but 1) they tend to cost money unless you have a VERY small amount of data and in word where everyone wants "free", a lot of people don't want to pay money; and 2) some people just don't trust online backup companies with their personal data (I don't...and yes that makes me a little paranoid...I do use Dropbox, but for very limited purposes). So, while it is generally fairly easy to backup, there is still some hassle and need to remember to do it and that trips some people up.

Now all of the above is not to just provide excuses. Ultimately, people have to be responsible for their own data and thus should backup their files. The reality is that not every one will and the above to me is more of an "explanation" as why some don't.

I will also point out that there are people who should know better who still don't backup. There is the recent glaring example of Mat Honan. While security policy flaws at Apple and Amazon were (to me) the root cause of his problems, his situation would have been a LOT less worse if he had backed up his computer (something that he fully acknowledged in his own blog post about the incident)...and this is someone who "works in computers" for a living.

This post has been edited by smax013: 08 August 2012 - 09:48 PM

[smax013]

mjd420nova, on 08 August 2012 - 02:29 PM, said:

In many aspects, the notion of backing up your data was, "It's not my data, it's the companies and their responibility".

For the situation of a company, then I fully agree. It is the company's responsibility (or specifically the "IT department's" responsibility or who ever deal with IT issues for the company is there is no formal IT department) to have some sort of backup policy/method in place, whether that be having all files stored on a server that gets backed up or whether files are individual machines that either get backed up across the network or to some local external hard drive. It is the "typical" employee's responsibility to figure that out. Now, said employee may have some responsibility to help implement the policy/method (i.e. such as to store the files on the server rather than their local machine or maybe run the backup software manually to backup to the a local external drive), but it is still the company's responsibility to have some system in place.

[smax013]

ElfBane, on 08 August 2012 - 11:06 AM, said:

Lincoln,
Rant On
We(you) see that kind of stuff ALL the time. For example; someone wants to know how to do a MS Word function, so they ask us here. If I don't know it off the top of my head, then I Google it,,, why can't THEY Google it???

The military taught me that if you don't know how to do something, you will at least know how to find out how to do it!
Rant Off

While Google is very useful, sometimes finding the RIGHT information is more of an art form that not all people have.

And sometimes while they might be able to find the information, they may not understand it.

I will agree that ideally people should at least try to find a solution themselves, but the reality is that is not gonna happen all the time.

[LincolnSpector]

SnyperTodd said:

1344455013[/url]' post='642146']
Elfbane, I get your point and I agree with you, but my absolute biggest pet peeve is the forum reply that contains "Google is your friend" and nothing more. It's the single most worthless, time-wasting reply a person could possibly make, and it's rampant on some forums. PCWorld is one of the most helpful, friendliest forums on the 'net, and I hope we keep it that way.

It sometimes requires a level of knowledge and judgement to figure out the best solution offered by Google, or even to figure out exactly what you're supposed to do. Google is a great tool when you're in trouble, but a helping hand from someone with experience is a better tool.
Lincoln

[A41202813]

This Is One Of The Best Threads, Ever.

Having Said That, The First Of You Who Have Never Never Never Lost A File Forever, Have My Permission To Insult Me.

I Will Not Rely On Software To Do My Backups, Ever - I Do Them Manually.

Why, Because I Want To Know What I Am Doing.

Have I 'Crossed My Hands' A Lot Of Times, Yes.

My Most Backed Up Pieces Of Software Are My 20+ Years Scripts.

I Have Them Backed Up Locally Several Times, And I Take Advantage Of Every Free Cloud Storage Service I Can Find ( 90+ As Of Today ).

Paranoid, Yes.

I Have Learned A Long Time Ago That, In Terms Of Back Ups, There Is No Such Thing As Being Paranoid.

So, Backing Up Is A Real Pain, And I Will Never Insult Anyone Because They Have Being Lucky Not To Have Found The Hard Way, What Is Like To Lose Something Forever - Not If, But When They Do, They Will Pay More Attention To The Most Neglected Members Of Their 'Family' - The Precious Files That Are Irreplaceable.

You May Insult Me, Now.