Disaster strikes...

[johnske]

Well, my old machine has been playing up lately and finally died. Put it in for repairs and the technician looked at me a bit strangely then told me "it's so old it's really not worth the effort, if we repair it you'll still only have a little 4 Gig, 233 MHz Windows 98 machine - we can upgrade you for less" (that all sounds a bit like me I spose - I just wish I could be upgraded so easily).

My main concern was recovering the data that'd accumulated over the years and of course like all responsible ppl naturally had not been backed up... Not a problem I was told - for $155 we can give you a 2nd-hand 1 Gig Hz machine with 20 Gig H/D and 256 meg RAM with a Windows 2000 O/S - another $30 will cover data recovery off your old drive.

Now it seems like I'm really flying, just gotta sort everything out and re-install all my old programs... :beerchug: :thumb

[lucas]

Sorry to hear that John. Seems like it takes forever after something like that. It's happened to me a few times. I've tried about everything over the years for backup.

Thought I really had it made when cd burners came along and then the hard drives got really big....doh. I now use a 300 gig external with a one touch backup that gives me control over what gets backed up. I have two hard drives so I have my system one one with all programs which can be re-installed fairly easily and I back up all data saved on the other hard drive regularly as well as a few directories on my system hard drive. I feel a little better...at least I have a chance this way.

[Charlize]

Hopefully the guy knows what he is talking about to restore your data.

I know exactly what you are talking about (and how you are feeling now). Lost 3 years of pictures (photo's) of my children. Lucky me that I gave my father a copy of the most of those pictures and I already had an album of my oldest child. Nowadays I use an external drive (300 Gb) and cd's for all those photo's, videos and music ... and I store them by categorie on an online album that I use (just in case and to be sure).

Anyway, good luck with the recovery.

Charlize

[Cosmos75]

johnske,

Sorry to hear about your troubles! Hope your data recovery goes well.


and I store them by categorie on an online album that I use (just in case and to be sure).Charlize,

Just curious, what online album are you using?

[Charlize]

Charlize,

Just curious, what online album are you using?
I'm using picasa web albums 2.0 (free 1 gb) - with picasa - If you have a gmail account you can sent pictures to that account to (2 gig). And there are tools to use that room as an online storage space (gdrive or something like that is that program called) (total of 3 gb).

Used to have Adobe Photo Album but that thing was so slow ...

Also tried ACDSee ... and some other ones.

But the easiest to use was picasa. They seem to have the feeling to create usable programs that run well and are easy to use. What more can you ask (and for the moment it's all free).

You can create backup cd's (and you can include picasa on that cd). Once a month I create one of the past month (during the month I copy them to my external drive and they online album). Making a slideshow cd is also a snap (usefull feature for when you're in a hurry. Click some maps, click a button, put in cd and ready - off you go).

--- While I'm writing this, I think, what are you doing man, you're making more copy's than doing something else on that pc. ---

Charlize

[johnske]

Hi Cosmo,

I use a private forum on my site to store things (when I get around to it) unlimited space for free... I've also now re-installed my Nero re-writable program for backups - I had to uninstall it on my old PC cos it was using too much of its very limited system resources.

Hope to be back online soon, had another problem - I picked up some viruses that slowed all online access and emails to a crawl (like 5-10 min just to open one page), I think AVG's got em all now though :)

John