Backing up the laptop

As many of you know, I’m a fanatic when it comes to backing up my laptop. My dad (a computer expert and retired electrical engineer) hammered that wisdom into my brain years ago, and I’ve never regretted following his advice. Indeed, backing up has saved my fanny any number of times.

The information contained on my laptop is probably the single most valuable thing I possess. It includes all my writing and all my photos (somewhere on the order of 110,000+ of them!). I would be devastated to lose these data, hence my fanaticism in backing up.

Needless to say, I never use “the cloud” for this purpose (which is not a celestial weather formation, but merely someone else’s computer). I used to back up to an external hard drive, but a couple years ago Don bought me a thumb drive which holds a massive amount of data – on the order of 512 gigabytes.

This faithful little thumb drive has served me well. Every Saturday, when my work week is finished, I first back up this blog (a harsh lesson from Granny Miller many years ago), and then I do a full-scale backup of my computer, including any new photos I uploaded. Because this represents so much data, I usually budget about three hours for the whole shebang. My archive of photos is so massive that it took about fifteen hours – no exaggeration – to back up the entire thing the first time I used the thumb drive. For this reason, I don’t re-back-up the full photo archive each week, but instead just add any new photos I take.

A few weeks ago, I turned to Don and said, “I’d like you to do some research and make a purchase for me. I’d like to get another thumb drive for an extra backup.” Backups to backups are always wise. (Besides, such a purchase is a write-off on our taxes.)

Anyway, he did his research and purchased a larger thumb drive, one terabyte in size.

You can see the size comparison below with my old thumb drive.

But how well does it work? I plugged it into my USB port and sample-copied a file with a bunch of photos. It was done so quickly I hardly had time to blink. Whoa!

Encouraged, I spontaneously decided to back up my entire archive of photos (remember, in excess of 110,000 pix). It – took – fifteen – minutes. Remember, the old thumb drive took about fifteen hours!

So I settled in to back up all my documents, a process that took three hours with my old thumb drive. The new thumb drive took twelve minutes. Twelve minutes!

So I’m hooked. This is a marvelous little bit of technology, and it offers me great peace of mind.

While you may not have 110,000+ photos to preserve, I strongly urge everyone to heed my father’s advice and back up your computer. You won’t regret it.