Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Computer Woes in the Rear-View Mirror for Now

Michael Salsbury
Recently, within a two or three day span, I had a hard drive, video card, and CPU cooler all die in the same machine - my primary PC.  Hundreds of dollars later, there's a new video card, a new CPU cooler, and a backup utility restoring data from the cloud to a replacement drive.  As it turns out, the original drive has not died completely.  It seems to periodically disconnect from the PC.  It has to be powered off and on when this happens, but between failures I've been able to copy usable data from it.  With any luck, I may get most or all of it back before it dies completely.

All of this has reminded me that having both on-site and off-site backup is important.  I'm going to take a crappy old PC I have and configure it with enough storage to backup the things I care about most on the main desktop.  That way I've got two levels of backup.  The local backup is here if I lose a drive and need to recover it quickly.  The cloud backup is there if something significant happens, like the house burns down or is flooded.

I'm looking forward to a day when high-capacity SSD storage is cheap enough for us to be able to switch to it for both our main and backup disks.  Given the reliability of SSD, it will make disk failures relatively rare.  Given the speed, in those rare cases when a restore is needed, it will happen very quickly.  The NVME technology holds some real promise there.

Hopefully with my computer woes behind me, mostly, I will get back to writing at full speed again.

About the Author

Michael Salsbury / Author & Editor

In his day job, Michael Salsbury helps administer over 1,800 Windows desktop computers for a Central Ohio non-profit. When he's not working, he's writing, blogging, podcasting, home brewing, or playing "warm furniture" to his two Bengal cats.

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