On Monday 29 November 2010 16:47:31 Camaleón wrote: > Oh, c'mon. There is no need to be a "computer scientist" to care about > your data. Not today. You can buy a USB external disk (or DVD media) and > put there your beloved files. Even Windows can automate this task for you.
In my experience hoi polloi simply don't understand the value of or need for backup. I frequently find people who have data that is very important to them, even crucial to their business, who have no backup. They think of the computer as some sort of incomprehensible magic, not a machine whose behaviour can be predicted or analysed, and which can fail. I'll give you an example. One old lady, whose computing I supported, took 'photos of all her holidays, which she looked at often to cheer herself up and remind her of a happy experience. These 'photos were very valuable to her. I repeatedly advised her to have an off-computer copy, instead of having only the one copy on one HDD. (She wiped the 'photos from her camera memory card as soon as she had uploaded them.) One day she messed up her registry to the point where reinstallation was essential. She assured me when asked that her precious 'photos were all fine and she had off-computer copies of all of them. When, after the event, it became obvious that a small percentage of the photos was missing, she asked me to install Picasa "because that is where those 'photos are". Don't underestimate the gulf of incomprehension that exists in the non-geek world at large. Lisi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201101041558.40983.lisi.re...@gmail.com