On Sat, 25 Dec 2010 10:29:39 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
hah. Last year, I got my wife a USB backup drive, and set it up for her laptop. showed her how to plug it in and start the backup program while she was doing other stuff (this is a Windows laptop).
few months later, I ask hows the backup going? "oh, its fine, see, its right there->" (points to the drive sitting on her work table unplugged). k, when did you last back it up? "Oh, I thought you backed it up for me?". now, see, my wife is a tech writer, she's not a computer novice, she's been using them professionally for 30+ years, up to and including occasional unix shell usage. sigh.
I hear you loud & clear, as we used to say on the squawkbox. Mine and I both cataloged foreign language books into the Library of Congress -- with at least five or six layers of backup between either of us and the actual IT directorate -- until we retired.
When LC shifted from dumb terminals to workstations between us and the mainframe (which the actual catalog ran on, and probably still does), the workstations ran OS/2 -- which at least did real multi- tasking, and didn't crash. Going from that to W98 of evil memory on retirement is what drove me to Linux.