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. -- Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck Not Quite Clueless Power User I have precious (very precious!) little idea where up is.