Waiting to back up
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for data to be backed up. Go all the way back to punch cards, when copying a single card took a measurable amount of time to be threaded through the teeth of the card reader. Move forward, through the cassette, to the floppy. Follow that with more tape, and the 1X CD burner. Keep on going.
It all took time, but doing a backup is a necessary requirement of data storage. I’ve dealt with piles of floppies, and piles of CDs. And now, “hard drive to hard drive” has reduced my wait time to mere hours. OK, a lot of hours; I received a new 4 TB drive yesterday, and copied the contents of a pair of 2 TB drives. Took the whole night, but only because USB 3 is so much faster than USB 2.
This morning, with my backup complete, I prepared a small box and sent the drive on to son #2. My offsite goto. And even with the time required by Canada Post, I’m winning. You see, if I was trying to duplicate this task onto an earlier technical iteration, I could be on standby for weeks, not just days. This way, I’ve completed the task before the snow even starts to fall. Yes, winter is back, a little bit.
But seriously, the job just became acceptable again. In terms of cost, a drive required about twelve hours of “minimum wages” for the initial outlay. Add in another twelve hours, and I’ve turned what could have been months of data recovery into a day. Pretty good deal!
