Backups, to me, originally meant CDs, then DVDs. But doubts were raised about the permanence of optical media, and my backup load was too large to periodically refresh everything, so I moved to hard drives. A couple of years ago I saw a product called Clickfree Automatic Backup, which is a small device placed in the usb cable between a computer on a wifi network and an external hard drive. With a little bit of software running on each computer in the network, they'd all be periodically backed up with no attention required. Great! And in all honesty it worked a treat. My son and I had all our data secured across 3 computers.
But... and there's always a 'but', isn't there, the time came when my 500GB drive wasn't a big enough repository, so I got a 1TB WD MyBook, and my troubles began. Although there was nothing wrong with the MyBook, it had its own backup software, didn't it. No worries, thinks I, I'll just delete it from the drive. I don't want it, didn't ask for it and won't ever use it, so why not? The answer to 'why not?' was that WD had put the backup software on a fixed partition, and all my subsequent research on forum after forum informed me that the partition resists every attempt at deletion or reformatting. Bastards! Never mind, thinks I, I'll just ignore it. But... a week or two after the MyBook went into service I noticed that backups had ceased to occur on schedule. Then I noticed that the Clickfree icon in 'My Computer' had gone plain, when it should appear as a logo. Uh oh. Looking into it I found that the device, which came filled with installation files and firmware and such, was empty. The Clickfree help desk was great, I couldn't ask for better. They gave me a link to download the files needed to reflash the firmware, but to no avail. Then they emailed the files to me to ensure that I had uncorrupted copies of them. Still no success. So without any hesitation they sent me a new device. And that's where the Clickfree story ends for the moment, because it seemed to me that the MyBook had killed the Clickfree, and I wasn't about to give it a second chance. Now I was back to doing manual backups. No way was I going to use the WD backup software. I would plug the Mybook into my netbook computer and send to it, over my home network, the new files and changes from each computer . Even at 54Mb/sec it was quicker than doing a disk to disk copy on one computer, because the source computer only had to read the filefrom its disk, and the destination computer only had to write the fileto its disk. Doing the job on one computer leads to a lot of disk swapping and appallingly slow copy and paste times. It was a perfect solution until about two months ago when I took the netbook on a long car trip. At the end of the journey I found that I'd forgotten to shut it down, it was only on standby which doesn't safely park the hard drive's read/write heads. Soon afterwards it developed the faintest of clicks. Soon after that it crashed and has been out of service since. My backup strategy had been derailed. Fast forward to last week. It was cold, so our heaters were cranked up to full power. It was a wet, grey day so the family was inside using televisions and Nintendo Wiis and computers and all the accessories that go with those things. The kettle was on to brew a pot of tea. The washing machine was in mid-load. Then... my dear wife, who knew not what she was about to do, started the clothes dryer. Everything went very quiet for half a second, then our son complained about 'unsaved progress', but no harm was done, or so I thought. I was wrong. The external hard drive on my computer, where I keep my documents because they're safer there than in a laptop's internal drive, was gone from the drive list in 'My Computer'. The unexpected shutdown had prematurely ended its life, and I'd lost all my new files and changes of the last two months, because I hadn't put a new backup process into place. The only positive spin I can put on it is that I've been in a creative doldrum, and very little of any value has been lost. Which brings us to now. The MyBook drive is now my computer's full time document drive, with its backup software sector disabled in disk management. I've got a brand new 2TB drive formatting in a brand new double hard drive dock. Down the track as needed I'll get more and bigger drives, but NO MORE external drives with manufacturer embedded crapware for me. From now on it's internal drives, which are delivered clean and unformatted, in a swappable dock. And soon I'll get the Clickfree Backup installed again. Who can remind me how to make different versions of Windows play nicely on a network? And who can tell me how to make EVERTHING sharable in Vista? You can make a folder sharable only to find that its contents aren't shared. Bastards! Thanks for reading. regards, Anthony -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
