ExtremeTech has a great new article titled New Strategies for Personal Mass Storage. I've been working on a longish post/article on personal storage that I hope to have done in a week or so. This ExtremeTech article is great background material.
While you're waiting for me to post my diatribe on storage consider this:
Some time after our daughter was born I accidentally recorded over two (yes, I made the mistake twice!) VHS tapes that were precious. One was of our wedding and the other was of my wife's ultrasound with my daughter in her tummy. It's bad enough that I destroyed those precious items, but it's even worse that the shows I recorded over them were some Star Trek episode and Aliens IV. To this day, some 10 years later, my wife still gives me an unbelievable (but deserved!) amount of grief about this.
Prior to us having a digital camera (6 years ago?) I lost all data on my PC due to a stupid “user error“. I lost tons of stuff. But I can't remember today what any of it was. It was important, but for the most part it was replaceable or repairable (tax records, money files, letters, email, etc...). I don't think my wife even noticed.
If this same thing happened today, the impact would be very different: my PC now has precious data on it. Photos. 20GB of 5+ years of family photos. If I view these as precious, imagine what my wife thinks? Imagine the doghouse I'd be in if I allowed a PC failure of some sort to destroy those photos?!?!
For the first time in history, home PC users actually have irreplaceable, truly precious data on their machines! This is a big deal (I wonder if you have to be married with children to really understand this).
What are you doing to protect your precious data?
I heard a silly discussion on the radio (Ken Schram...sigh) this morning about a bunch of poeple in the blogsphere up in arms about tipping baristas at Starbucks. Inane.
While I was listening to this I was buying my latte at Jitters (I hate Starbucks; their coffee is too boring; they are the McDonalds of coffee) I had to laugh. The tip cup had a little sign on it:
Tipping: Good for us, bad for the cows.
And, yes, I tipped the barista.
One of the most feared (ha!) people in the Windows organization is now blogging. Check out Iain's blog.
Iain is one of the main reasons Windows 2000 and XP got out the door. Not to mention Exchange.