My December Stockpile

December 24, 2008 ·  

Here are random things to post that don’t deserve their own post:

It’s a Christmas miracle.For those of you who lamented with me about the loss of our pink and white animal cookies, hopefully you saw the news that our little friends were saved. It was reported that Kelloggs purchased Mother’s Cookies and all of the recipe trademarks.

Tis the season to backup. If you were lucky enough not to have a hard drive failure this year…don’t push your luck. Make it a point to get a good backup of your computer in the week after Christmas. This will save all of your Christmas pictures and all those from the other holidays this year. (I do a lot of data recovery work and it’s a sad thing to see people realize they’ve lost all of their pictures for good.)

The Joseph Smith PapersFor Christmas, I badly wanted a copy of The Joseph Smith Papers. This was a new book released by the Church Historian. It’s the first in a long series of books that will chronicle all “documents created by Joseph Smith or by staff whose work he directed. The project also includes papers received and “owned” by his office. These key documents include, especially, the diaries, outgoing and incoming correspondence, revelations, contemporary reports of discourses, editorials, and notices.” Elder Marlin K. Jensen, Church historian and recorder, has called the Joseph Smith Papers Project “the most significant Church history project of this generation.” This book screams “BRIAN READ ME!!!!!!!”

Once I found out that none of my family was able to get a copy, I searched and finally found one for an early Christmas present to myself. This book is incredible.

Enjoy the season. I hope everyone has a nice Christmas season.

Comments

5 Responses to “My December Stockpile”

  1. Brenda on December 29th, 2008 12:46 pm

    Brian, which method of back up do you recommend? I just put things on a flashdrive. Any better suggestions?

  2. Brian on December 29th, 2008 12:51 pm

    Brenda, I wrote a while back about the way that I back up. (Though I have changed a bit since this writing.)

    http://www.brianstucki.com/blog/my-approach-on-backups/

    But the main thing for me is to a) have a full copy of everything and b) keep a copy of it offsite.

    In short, I use a program called SuperDuper which clones my whole computer to an external hard drive. The nice thing about this is that the external hard drive is completely bootable. So, if my computer were to get stolen, I could plug this drive into another machine and boot right from it.

    The part that is just as important is having a copy offsite. For instance, each week I go back and forth between two drives. While the one is at home, I have the other in my data center. Then, on Thursdays I’ll switch them out. All the time, only having one in my house. That way, if there is fire or theft, I have another copy offsite.

    I need to do this regularly since my computer is my lifeline for work. But, for most others they could just do it every two or three weeks. For instance, the second and third Friday you could do the backup. THen, keep a second drive at Grandma’s house that you can swap out every other Sunday that you visit. (Or something like that.)

  3. Brian on December 29th, 2008 12:51 pm

    PS…I’m pretty serious about backups. =)

  4. Brenda on December 29th, 2008 8:23 pm

    Thanks for the ideas. Kris’s computer was stolen a month ago when her home was broken into. Her biggest regret was losing all her years of church talks that were on the computer.

  5. Tara Maxfield on January 15th, 2009 10:02 am

    Why didn’t I read this post earlier? It might have possibly reminded me I was being careless and should have backed up.

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