My latest obsession on the web is going to IMDB and looking up trivia for movies I’ve seen. I finished off the trivia for all the Harry Potter movies this morning and went through all 11 of the Star Trek movies this evening.
It was in doing this that I realized the importance of backing up my data. One of the bits of trivia was that, through a computer malfunction, an entire class of starship was lost. I would have thought that people who use the more technical powers of a computer would have the common sense to backup their data even if it is an enormously huge amount. Actually, I would think that the fact that there is a huge amount of it would make it even more important.
Some people save it to disks and keep their disks somewhere but in case of fire, you’d need a safe deposit box to really be safe and that’s hard to access when your computer crashes at 7pm on a Friday night. (Yes, your house burned down, but you saved the computer that then crashed.)
You could also save it to an external hard drive but that also gives you the risk of destruction through runaway fire in your house. And how would you feel about your brilliant method of backup if you manage to survive the fire? Not so good. So it, too, needs to be kept elsewhere and even your parents aren’t going to be too happy that you’ve came to their house in the middle of the night to retrieve your life’s work.
The common theme here is that retrieval is inconvenient. Unless there were some way to store it in a fashion that makes it accessable from, say a cable or phone line. Wait – there is. You use secure online storage so that you can use your parent’s dial up line to restore your computer, now that you’re crashing at their house after a fire burned yours to ashes.
Problem solved.