Should I schedule continuous or daily backups? My brother, Laurie, has requested a credit for inspiring this week’s blog by asking this question, so “thank you, Laurie, consider yourself credited”. What does the question mean? Actually, this is a different slant on a recent blog post called “Should you leave backup drives connected?” A lot …
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Tag:external drive
Expanding Laptop Storage Easily
You may not need a new laptop to increase your storage capacity It might be my imagination, but I think that my computer support clients are keeping their computers longer than they used to. If that’s the case, then one critical factor that could nudge them into the direction of replacing it is that the …
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Protect Data when Disposing of a Computer – 1 of 2
How do I get rid of a computer but keep my private data private? This is a simple question that I’m often asked by my computer support clients. Pity the answer isn’t as simple. In fact, it can be complicated – technically and/or financially. If the drive is in situ in a complete computer and …
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Long Term Data Retention
Can you assume that your computer data will be safe and accessible for as long as you need it to be? How should we store our important computerised data so as to be reasonably sure that it will be available to us for us long as we need it? Is there any electronic format that …
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External Backup Drives
“Should I buy an external backup drive” is one of the most common questions I am asked by my computer support clients My answer is usually “yes”, because the question implies that the client is not backing up anything at the moment. The next question is, of course, “what should I buy?” The main considerations …
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USB Matters
Years ago we used to have parallel ports, serial ports, scsi ports and goodness knows what else. Things are a lot cleaner and more straightforward now that most things connect to computers via a “USB port”. USB stands for “Universal Serial Bus“, strongly suggesting that this is a method for connecting all kinds of things …
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File Sizes – 2
What are the factors that make file size relevant? The first that comes to mind is the size of an email attachment.It’s possible that an attachment of greater than 5mb will not get through. CD – if you are copying (“burning”) files to a CD then you have about 730MB available (less if it’s a …
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File Sizes
How big are files? Last week we looked at hard drives in terms of the different definitions of their size. Let’s have a look this week at the range of different sizes of files that will be stored on the drive. The size of computer files can be important for a number of reasons: The …
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When is a Gb not a Gb and why doesn’t it matter?
Let’s suppose that you’ve finally decided to buy an external drive to back up at least some of your important files. Maybe you’re doing this just because you know it’s a good idea or maybe you are a computer support client of mine and you’re tired of me dropping very heavy hints about backups. I’m …
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Backups – 1
Notice the rather ominous “1” in the title. This is a subject that will take more than one blog post. So, today let’s just think about what “backups” mean and what they don’t mean. When I asked Google to define “backup” the first offering was an accumulation caused by clogging or a stoppage; “a traffic …
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