SEND IN THE CLONES

Oct-29-2006

One of the challenges that faces everyone who owns a computer is hardware failure. You can take all kinds of precautions, such as plugging your gear into a UPS or a surge protector, and still end up with a bad motherboard or a damaged hard drive for reasons related to lifespan or hidden defects.

Sometimes it's the fault of the manufacturing process, and other times it may be that you've forgotten that hair and dust accumulate like a blanket inside your machine because the fan draws them in. Cleaning is not difficult but it takes time and attention, if it's a desktop model. Laptops, on the other hand, are not for amateurs to take apart.

The current worst example of manufacturing defects is, of course, the Sony battery recalls. A few laptops have caught on fire as a result of defects in manufacturing. So you have to pay attention to recalls when they are issued. This one was serious enough to become an international news story.

For years, there was no convenient and cheap way to back up an entire system. Until the CD came along, the domestic user had only floppy disks. But then, you could back up a system on floppies because the size of the operating system and the types of data files were pretty small.

The internet, of course, has changed the scale of operations, and disk storage has kept pace. So has the approach to digital storage, as typified by Google's offering of 2 Gigabyte email accounts, and their mission statement to make all the world's knowledge available. The home user can install Google Desktop and forget about keeping things organized: indexing and searching have replaced organization.

This shift is leading to outsourcing of both services and storage. The thrust of this idea is that your computer becomes a terminal (old computer terminals) but with a nice, understandable set of desktop icons that allow you to connect wirelessly to whatever services you want to use. And this direction, in turn, leads to extreme portability and location-independent access, without worries about whether your data will be available when you need it.

Along with this come the concerns about who is using your data, for what purposes, and the unfortunate reality that some of us misplace our glasses, keys and pocket PCs (not to mention passwords) on a disconcertingly regular basis. The solution, according to some futurists, will be implanting of computing chips.

All well and good, but what about those of us who have an older desktop or laptop machine, and like it, with no plans to upgrade in the near future, thank you very much?

Well, the main issue is, of course, to keep the drive alive. Here are three alternative solutions:

Buy an external USB drive. If you don't have USB support, you can also buy a USB card which will support the drive. Use the software that comes with the drive to backup your important data. Get a drive big enough to accommodate at least the size of your current hard drive.
Install an internal second drive. The cable you have will normally have a second connector, and if the jumpers on both drives are set properly, they'll be recognized as "master" and "slave", in the unfortunate but clear terminology of hard disk storage. The slave can be used to backup the master, and can also have room for such things as Internet Temporary Files and Swapfiles: two of the largest files whose loss is not critical should they fail, and may improve the performance of your computer if they are relocated off the main disk drive.
Create a software clone. The program used must be able to copy the system areas even though they are in use, if it runs inside Windows.
The luxury solution: buy a drive cloning machine. This solution is cost effective where multiple computers are involved. These machine run linux, which is independent of your operating system, and therefore can back up the entire drive and restore it to a new drive if necessary. They can be set to ignore unused disk sectors, which means the stored copy of the drive is as much as ten times smaller than the original.

Disk drives have an expected life that varies with the manufacturer, but generally is about five years on average use. But those estimates are probably not based on things like the amount of dog and cat hair and dust that get sucked into the intake grill of your cooling fan.

So cleaning and backing up are the two essential habits to develop. And don't forget to blow the keyboard dust out every so often. Save wear and tear on the disk drive by defragmenting at least once a month. And when the fatal moment finally arrives, remember to recycle your computer. Throwing it away is, in many parts of the country, illegal, and, from a land use perspective, undesireable.