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
