Unless you live under a rock, you probably use Google at least a few times a day and you probably also know that Google changes their logos to reflect various holidays. Today’s logo reminds us that google is 8 years old. Can you believe it? My how time flies.

Do you remember when searching the Internet was a pain? There were several competing search engines (altavista.com, yahoo.com, etc.), but they all very much sucked. A large part of that suckiness came from the commingling of paid search results with natural search results. Also, each of the popular search engines had messy pages with tons of links crowding the page. They took a while to load. As well, the search engines encouraged the use of boolean-esque search modifiers like “AND”, “OR” etc. It was not user friendly. It was hard to find anything.

Then along came Google with a clean, fast interface that clearly delineated paid from natural. It was accurate. So very accurate. It was and is amazing. Now Internet searching is even called “Googling”. They’ve been verbed.
Then Google took over the earth. But that’s another story.

Today we’re talking about my laptop. Laptops don’t live forever, you know. I have (or rather had) a Dell Latitude D600. Yesterday it died. At first my mail client threw an error. Then I scandisk’d my hard drive and it threw up a ton of errors. Then I tried to backup my files onto an external drive. Then the CRC errors. Then it blue screened. Now it comes up with a BIOS error saying it doesn’t see a hard drive.

Backups

Making backups is like cleaning out the refrigerator. You know it’s important and that by doing so your life would be better, but you never get around to it. So your kitchen stinks and you lose data.

There are lots of ways to mitigate your data loss. One is to email stuff to yourself and hope hotmail/yahoo/google don’t go out of business. Another way is to purchase an external USB/firewire connected drive. Prices are falling. They used to be about a dollar a GB, but co-worker William just sent me a link to a 750 GB drive for $350 dollars. Finally, you could always print out short important documents and keep hard copies laying around. Let’s not forget that there are a number of programs that attempt to recover data from crashed hard drives. And then there was the time that my friend Grady hired a local company to recover the data on a hard drive that had crashed. Not only did the company NOT recover the data, they went to great lengths in their efforts to extort nearly 1,500 dollars from Grady. Way to add insult to injury.

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