Can't live without it (2)

[ewx]

Comments:

• Four people apparently have exactly one irreplaceable thing. I'm curious what it is l-)
• Quite a few people don't have backups despite having lost data because of it. Perhaps they now have nothing left that's irreplaceable, but apart from that, what are you people thinking?
• Lots of people have lost data because their backups failed; which points out a question I missed, whether people test their backups - untested backups having a nasty little habit of turning out not to work, or not containing the files you thought they did.
• Another arguably missing question was about whether you'd actually be able to replace replaceable things - I couldn't afford to replace my house on my own if it burned down, but it's insured against that. (You can't conveniently test this kind of backup, but you don't hear so many stories of people's home insurance turning out not to work as you do data backups.)

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Time Machine (http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html) looks like a good idea for "backups for Mum and Dad" though of course I've not seen the implementation.

They seem to have appreciated that the difficulty of backups is not (solely) a technological question ("set it then forget it").

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

I've played with it a little, and it looks quite good, certainly the right level for non critical stuff. Moving files didn't appear to faze it, which was good.

Since the thing is partially a freebie from the Spotlight indexing (it's got to flag stuff for reindexing so you don't need a second process looking for updated file) I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't get hooked into the Spotlight interface a bit more, which would be incredibly useful.