This week (well two, really) we have been looking at ways to protect our computer systems from hard drive crashes and from malicious software. I can honestly say that I've had many computers over the years "die" because of these things.
In 1994 my family had a Macintosh LC that I thought was the best thing that was ever invented. I played video games for hours on end on the machine. In '94 there were not many people that had a mac, but one of my friends had one and we shared games back and forth. After installing one of the games my friend had lent me my computer would not open a couple of the programs i had installed previously. We took the computer to a shop and they told us that we had a computer virus and that they could fix the computer for $50. Needless to say my folks were not happy with my use of the computer and there after made me show them what I was installing.
I had violated a couple of rules that are now big parts of a safety strategy when dealing with computers: don't share files you don't know the source of, have anti-virus software installed on your computer and always have a backup to restore your machine back to functionality.
Fast forward to 2007. I was working on my school issued MacBook on a final exam. I thought that I was a brilliant teacher in getting done my final exams done a month early. During that time I had all of my files saved on the hard drive, the school network and, this is important: a pen drive. The school network was having some trouble backing up files so I started saving my files to a directory that was not backed up by the server. (You can see the trouble coming) The laptop started running hotter and hotter as time went on and soon the hard drive failed. Had I not been backing up my files manually after each day I would have lost countless hours of putting together those final exams.
I had followed most of the rules of backing up: have a separate drive to store backups, establish a schedule for backing up and keep the drive physically separate from the computer so that natural disasters do not take down both your computer and your backup.
It sounds like you really learned your lesson back in '94 when you infected the family Mac with a virus from your friend's program! While that might have been frustrating at the time, it looks like that lesson helped prepare you for the hardware failure in '07--think of how put out you would have been had you not learned your lesson about backup those years before?!
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned that you had followed MOST of the rules in that last hardware failure...Since that experience, and through what you have learned in this class, what would you now do differently in order to follow ALL of the rules? (If that is even possible!)