I try and practice what I preach. Clients back up your stuff. Family and friends back up you stuff. Kids backup your stuff. Why? Because until we all have solid state memory in our PCs the good old hard disk drive (HDD) will continue to keel over with little or no notice. And then your stuff will be gone. Often with much mental torment and without recourse.
I have a number of PCs. An equal number of laptops and desktops. I don’t use them all at once. My main desktop PC is used every day for work. It’s a self-built machine that was first put together in 2006. It’s been upgraded, enhanced, improved. It works and works well. It does seem to like eating hard drives however. It’s now on its third in six years. I’m not sure whether that’s good, bad or indifferent.
I first invested in the Cloud probably around four years ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Right now it has proved to be a very, very good idea. The HDD in my main desktop machine decided last weekend that it was no longer happy on this mortal coil. It left no message. It gave no clues. It didn’t wake up.
Previously this event would have created a somewhat calamitous situation but now it was fortunately no more than a minor inconvenience. A new HDD. Another Windows install.
The cloud though it’s always ‘on’ 24/7. It’s only ever a mouse click away. My Cloud application lives on all of my PCs (and my tablet and Smartphone) and syncs all my stuff across all my machines and devices. It’s brilliant. No question. Simple. Easy. My stuff is out there somewhere. I don’t know where. Safe and sound. I hope.