Nature's Way...

Today I had to reboot Vista. Not something I do very often, or by choice, but I'd just installed some new software and it needed a reboot, so off we went.

On the way back it did a checkdisk. Something about broken chains somewhere. I'd not seen this message before, but I figured out it might be nature's way of saying it was time to take a backup. I fired up the Backup and Restore centre in Vista and two clicks and two hours later I'm the proud possessor of a bunch of files on my network storage device which will probably allow me to reconstruct my life should my laptop disk decide to tip over. The next thing I'm going to do, of course, is pick a file or two at random and try to restore them from the backup. When this works I can relax.

I remember a horror story from the back in the mists of time where a system manager (not me) had a hard disk crash. He was feeling quite relaxed about this, as he loaded up his backup tapes. Ten minutes later he was feeling less relaxed, when he found that his backup command saved the directory structure, but not the files. He hadn't thought to check that he could actually get anything off the tapes that he had been carefully creating and saving for years.....