The Plucked Chicken:
Update 2008-10-11
Amazon has shipped the new hard drive. (Amazing how cheap storage has become!) They estimate delivery on the 15th of October. I also need to buy a new fan for the power supply. The new hard drive will be the biggest in the house. I may use it in the machine that hosts the Plucked Chicken, effectively making it a file server for our house to which we can back things up. Or, I may swap it into my desktop machine. I like the idea of a large file server, though. Hang tight.
The Plucked Chicken is offline due to a hard drive crash. It may be possible to recover the old posts and comments from the database, which resides on a different hard drive. Whether or not that's possible, the Plucked Chicken will rise again... later. Right now there are other things to do.
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GJ - Hard drives crash, often without backup. There are many ways to backup the most valuable files on a hard drive:
1. Upload them to a website, with the knowledge that people can find and read them, even when they are not linked on webpages.
2. Save them to your backup computer in the same location (not so hot when there is a fire or a flood).
3. Save them on a thumb (jump) drive, although these little miracles are the best way to lose large amounts of confidential data.
4. Back them up remotely with Norton 360, a service provided with their virus protection, firewall software.
5. Back them up remotely with Dell's service.
6. Back them up remotely with Carbonite.com ($50 a year). A new hard drive is cheap. Remote backup is probably cheaper.
I am not being holier than thou, because I have crashed three hard drives. I have lost work, but not enough, according to Rev. Mouse.
The remote backup is the best solution because remote Internet storage will check the computer every night and backup the newest files.
