What to get that someone you love for [December Holiday of Choice]

[yesthattom]

As a system administrator, I can’t recommend anything better than the gift of good backups. For $200 you can get a 300G external USB hard drive that will be able to backup your loved one’s laptop multiple times (it’s always good to have weekly backups going back 3-4 weeks) plus provide plenty of room for extra photos, and so on.

If you really feel generous, buy two so they can make a backup and keep it off-site.

Rather than trying to guess which files to pick and choose, use a drive that is so large they can just click “back up EVERYTHING” and be done with it. I know I used to spend hours trying to narrow down my backups to just the right files that would fit on a disk. Each time I swear I picked a different set of files. Inconsistency is bad. It was really liberating to finally get an external drive bigger than my computer’s disk, so I could just click “backup everything”

A lot of drives have a button on them that automatically starts the backup process. That makes it a no-brainer to do backups.

Comments

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you WRT macs. For Windows boxes, I don't trust bringing back and EXE any way other than the Install program that put it there originally.

I would be glad to find software for Windows that was good enough to change my mind.

(As far as the disk space concern... usually when people lose a drive they buy a new one that is 2x bigger than their old one. If they don't, the external drive just becomes where they have their old data.)

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

oh, ignore previous post.

but oh my god, that's brutal. I mean, sure, on my step-mom's machine that'd just be a couple of hours. On my dad's, about 35 hours of work is what it took me to migrate him from 98/millenium to XP, and most of that time was installing apps, telling them their prefs, and testing to make sure they saw their data.