Ventura County Web Designer

Country singer Trace Adkins’ house was completely destroyed in fire Saturday evening (June 4, 2011).   All family members are fine, but they lost pretty much everything.  Trace’s wife was interviewed on TV.  She said her family photos were the most valuable items she lost – she didn’t backup everything.  “Take your time and make copies” she said.

Most people around me don’t backup their computers.   For normal folks, setting up a good backup system is not an easy task.  Good backup programs will cost you (but not too much).  Hard drives are relatively cheap now, you should really think about backing up your data.  It takes $200 – $300 to come up with a backup system.   Without backup, it can take thousands of Dollars to recover lost data.  Maybe you will never be able to recover data.

Good backup practice will save you many hours of work and a lot of money.

To give you an example of a perfect backup setting, I’ll tell you how I backup my computers at home.

Mirror backup of a system hard drive.

I make mirror backups of the entire hard drive.  That means, my backup drive looks exactly like my working hard drive.   So, when a disaster hit, I simply swap the hard drive with a backup.  The whole process would take 10-20 minutes.   I keep multiple number of such back drives, because I cannot trust only 1 backup.   I make this kind of backup several times a year when I know for sure that my computer is healthy and virus free.

For this mirror backup I use Acronis True Image ($50.00 program)

It takes about 5 minutes to start the backup process.  Then it takes a few hours for entire hard drive to get duplicated.  So, I do this right before I go to sleep.

Daily Data backup

I make data backup almost every day.  I backup all data (emails, documents, pictures, program settings).  For example, if I went to a wedding and took 1000 pictures, I would like those images backed up ASAP.

I make 2 backups.  I keep 1 backup drive at my work, and rotate it every day.  When I go to work, I bring my backup drive A with me.   After work, I would bring backup drive B back home.  So backup drive A will stay at work wile I have backup drive B at home.

The whole point of making backup is to save data from disaster such as fire or theft.  So, your backup should be stored away from the building that your computer is located.

There are number of (free) programs to backup data.  I use backup4all.  This is a $40.00 program

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Your hard drives will fail, one way or the other, sooner or later.  I hope you will start backing up your data.  Good luck.

Feel free to ask questions at the forum.

I own two Das Keyboards, one for work and one for home.

You cannot really call yourself a computer geek when you don’t have a Das Keyboard.   I guess you would be called a “Poor” computer geek.  These keyboard costs $129.00 each.  This keyboard is truly amazing. It’s worth every penny.

As you can see, one distinctive characteristic of this keyboard is that there are no letters on the keys.  The keyboard is blank.   They also sell keyboard with letters.   But computer geeks would buy blank keyboards to make a statement that we don’t look at the keyboard when we type.   If you have to look down at your keyboard (to locate a key), you are not really a computer geek.

This keyboard makes typing fun.

I spend at least 12 hours a day in front of computers (both work and home).  Basically, if I’m awake, I am at my computer.  Sometimes I have to stay all night for a web design project.  Sometimes I have to work on programs and database for hours at a time.   And this keyboard makes typing fun.

Das Keyboard is a fancy toy for professional computer geeks.