Jesus Saves - Buddha Does Incremental Backups
This title I actually came across on a T-shirt, which I found hilarious, because an all consuming worry recently made me buy yet another external hard drive, this one now a Tera-byte (1000 gigabytes) to use to back up my various data currently spread across other external hard drives and my computer(s).
This is it - my volume of physical possessions is gradually decreasing (i.e new music albums, printed photos, design visuals, printed matter) as I rejoice in the space efficient way of storing all this information on my computer. Equally it fills me with worry to know that a growing part of my life in the form of memories and content I value is living not readily to hand to be leafed through, touched and felt, but as a collection of zeroes and ones on a hard disk that may just one day decide not to start, or get infected by a virus or God forbid just be carried out in the pocket of some enterprising burglar. I can't quite fathom him running off with my library of books which take up half of our living room, or the vast collection of academic paperwork, but hard disks are far more juicier a price and guess what? If you don't like the content on it, you can always erase it (!) and put something else on it instead.
I'm also really excited by the new operating system from Apple, called Leopard or OS 10.5, which has this nifty feature called Time Machine, which keeps track of all the versions of files on your hard disk so you never accidentally lose a file again. However, I did spot a problem with this though - where it addresses the problem of backups in the past where everything is more or less backed up and it can be arduous searching through your backups to find specifically the one file you are looking for - if you lose your entire hard drive on your computer and have to start from scratch, I'm not sure Time Machine can help with restoring everything all at once.
That means incremental backups of your entire system are still worth while - having it all, done regularly, ready to be restored in its entirety at the touch of a button, backed up on a drive you hide somewhere in a secure place away from your computer, just so that should things get nicked - your memories aren't one of them.
Comments