- Mar 22, 2011
- 8,463
- 5,266
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Male
- Faith
- Christian
- Marital Status
- Private
- Politics
- US-Others
Yes, a person who takes adequate backups is often a person who has learned the hard way to do so, and that includes me as well. Many years ago I lost a lot of stuff, and swore it would not happen again. Since then I've been pretty good about it, though once I came within a hair of losing everything again.I think this is a lesson almost no one (including and maybe even especially me--considering I've been well aware of it for over thirty years) takes seriously enough. I (somewhat) recently accidentally scrubbed a 2 terabyte external USB drive full of data and it was a nightmare recovering what little of it I could. The filenames were all lost and many of the files were corrupt. The utility I used was able to recover the filename extensions, but because OSs use so many text files it was practically impossible to find any of my lost documents. I didn't lose any vitally important files, thankfully. I keep multiple copies of those types of things.
To be fair, though, with Linux almost 99.9% of my problems have been my own fault, especially if you include ignorance and/or laziness. With Windows, probably closer to 50%. I realize I've crossed over into fanboy territory here but I can't seem to shake the notion that Linux gives the user so much more control than commercial OSs (albeit with a much steeper learning curve). Alas, with much control comes much responsibility, eh?
Another good idea (if you're not overly concerned with privacy) is taking advantage of the various free cloud services available nowadays. Google and Firefox have been very good to me, however invasive they may be.
I take occasional disk images, usually after a significant system upgrade or the yearly quarter, whichever comes first. I automatically take daily user data backups, unencrypted so it's easy to restore if necessary. Both go to a dedicated backup drive, but as I'm typing I see that I need to make at least one copy of each on another hard drive.
And then I encrypt my personal data locally and upload it to the cloud once or twice a year. This way no one "out there" can read it.
Linux-desktop has come a long way, and I've been able to install it on several non-techie friends' machines. I think it's fair to say it has no disadvantage to Windows regarding user complexity at the superuser level. But for just turn on and go users, MS has always had a vision for dumbing things down to the least common denominator. That's fine to a point, but unfortunately they go too far and hinder the superuser's ability to control and customize things. And delving through Windows' (faulty) boot partition repair routines, or the DISM commands, is in no way easier than dealing with Linux. I do think Win10 is their best one ever, though, and they finally have gotten Updates about right. At last.
After all is said and done, though, Linux has the freedom, privacy, and user control advantage, which I think is worth a lot.
Upvote
0
