Todays catchup two-fer is brought to you by Enders Game, and my first time eating at Julias. Im not sure why I have not tasted their delicious food before today. But their steak quesadilla? Everybody needs to make a pilgrimage. Like. Soon. Fact 1: While Im certainly not the most organized person (though I can certainly be that), there is one thing that I can do with considerable amounts of competence: recognize when things are organized and when things arent, and feel good or bad in a fashion that is appropriate to the state of things. And while that may seem like a worthless skill to have, it does have a very real impact for me. The impact? When I see a hard drive that isnt organized, I dont just notice it. I feel it, and its absolutely grating. And Ive learned, over the years, that a disorganized hard drive is typically a pretty much battered hard drive. Not because disorganized people just break things (they dont), but because information that is in disarray is information that doesnt get taken care of. And I assure you that organized people are just as prone to sloppy hard drive habits as messy people. If one had to be organized as a person to have a properly organized hard drive, my hard drive would be begging for a mercy killing. Of course, depending on your hard drive, it may be more or less resistant to certain ailments. But considering that solid state drives are still relatively rare in all but ultra-portable computers, well focus on the classic hard disk drive (HDD).* A hard drive disk is surprisingly complex while also being surprisingly simple. Enclosed in that little magical metal box that is a hard drive are three key components: a disk, an arm that pivots, and a tiny little electromagnet on the end of that arm.** Whenever you start your computer and you hear that whirring sound start, thats the sound of the disk starting to spin. As it spins, the arm moves over the surface of the disk. To write data to the disk, the electromagnetic head pulses onto the disk itself, varying at incredible frequencies between North and South polarities. Lets say that North is positive (1), while South is negative (0). It does this over one specific, unbelievably tiny area of the disk as it spins, and as the magnet pulses it creates changes on the surface of the disk itself. Then, to read the data back, the arm will pivot to a designated area and the arm will then read the imprints left by the magnetic signatures assigned to each individual speck that it previously passed over while writing. With that said, there are three ways to abuse a hard drive: 1) Physical damage. While the drive components themselves may be pretty tough when not moving (the arms are solid aluminum, the plates are platinum-plated aluminum, the casing is machined aluminum... you get the picture), when they are moving any real variations in stability can cause severe and lasting damage. A read/write armature, when in motion, can be jostled fairly easily. Which means that during its read/write cycle its not doing what it needs to be doing, nor is it where its supposed to be. This is bad. And, unfortunately, pretty common. But to make things worse, if the arm is jostled, it can also throw the disk itself off balance- which can result in the disks rotational stability going to pot. The final result of this is quaintly deemed to be “catastrophic failure.” Which is a fancy way of saying that the imbalance causes the disk itself to shatter due to its own loss of balance. Long story short: your drive asplode. Of course, this is pretty easy to remedy. Dont move your computer when its powered on- and if you do, do it gently. Think newborn baby gently. Dont be up in the club dropping your PC like its hot, because thats a great way to turn your HDD into a very fancy, precision made paperweight. 2) Never defragmenting your drive. Over time, as you write, delete and write more data to your drives disk, things get out of whack in a process called “fragmentation.” Fragmentation occurs when data that should be kept together in a neat little package happens to get scattered, physically, across your drive disk. This has some very real and imminent side effects in terms of using the data on that drive- data retrieval slows down dramatically, and in some cases (depending on the severity of the fragmentation), fails altogether. Result? Crashed programs. Crashed computers. Angry users. As a brief side note, angry users tend to hit their computers, or at least be less than gentle with them. See abuse numero uno. But the good news is that even a drive thats fragmented to the point of being barely operational is easy to avoid, and almost as easy to fix- all you need is a little patience. You see, Windows has this amazing utility called “disk defragmenter.” Using this utility, youre literally two clicks away from having a happy, productive HDD. What do you do? Open up your Start menu if youre using Windows XP, Vista or 7. For Vista and 7, you can simply type “disk defragmenter,” or just “defrag.” The return from that search is the utility you want. Click on it. You know you want to. Then select your main drive (it is almost always labeled as “C:”), and click “analyze.” When the analysis is done, click “defragment.” Depending on the severity of the fragmentation (read: if its over 20%, you should strongly consider giving up computers for lent in a very permanent way), it will take a while both to analyze and then defragment. If its over 60%, I want you to know that a lot of people in this world would fight for the opportunity to hit you in the face with a ping pong paddle until youre reduced to a weeping, gelatinous mass on the ground. For Windows 8, its more or less the same except that you will access the search function differently. Place and hold your cursor in the top right of the screen until that handy dandy (yet somewhat useless) menu pops up. Select the “search” option. Then type “defragmenter” and select the “settings” result filter. Open the disk defragmenter and proceed as listed above. Depending on your version of windows, some minor details will change, but you will always be presented with separate options for analyzing and defragmenting, or you might be presented with an “analyze and defragment” option. Either way it does the same thing in the end, so you go for it. Go for it real good, you hear? Because otherwise you wind up with... 3) Overworking your HDD. A drive that stays together lasts longer. Conversely, a drive that never gets fragmented and gets jostled around has to put in a lot of overtime to make up for its physical handicaps- which you, the loving user, have bestowed upon it. Quite simply, this is because moving parts only last so long. Bearings wear out- and they wear out more quickly if your drive is actively spooling to find data all the time because nothing is where it should be due to fragmentation or the drive being bumped around. By the same token, the more you work a drive, the more you open up its electronic components to wear and tear and premature e-death. Which should make you feel bad about yourself- not deep down in your e-conscience, but your actual, literal conscience. At the end of the day, taking care of your hard drive takes a few minutes out of your day once a month, and requires that you not treat your computer like its Bam Bams club. Its pretty straightforward, but it can help a lot. Keep your files organized and understand how you have your drive laid out. Take a few minutes to get to know its layout. Defrag it once a month, unless you do a lot of data turnover, then you might want to do it once a week or every other week.*** And for the love of everything you hold dear, stop keeping open-topped drinks by your computer; when you ruin your PC, you only have yourself to blame. Fact 2: But lets say that youve ignored everything above. Your drive is in disarray, its never been defragmented, its overworked, its old (because you never thought to check into getting your current drive mirrored to a new drive, then having that new drive installed and continuing on as if nothing changed), and it finally dies. Or worse yet, you have the internet browsing habits of a Soviet despot, and youve done nothing to keep all the trash from making a home of your PC and infecting it with whatever it feels like, resulting in a cataclysmic contamination that requires a total system wipe to fix it. In a lot of situations, that goes poorly for the schmuck who winds up replacing the drive for you, or wiping it to fix what you did to it to begin with. Most of the time the owner of the PC gets a bit churlish. At which point said schmuck will seethe inside with a raging black vitriol and judge you for being the type of person that would obviously chew out a mechanic for noticing that your car is totaled after you tried to do an aerial barrel roll at 168MPH. Why? Because thats sort of what youre doing now, except you did it to your computer and not your haute McMansion BMW. But theres good news for everyone, because this problem- data loss- isnt one that you should ever have to worry about. Whats even better is that the security of knowing you dont have to worry about data loss is quick, easy and painless. What am I talking about? The fact that you should back up your data, and that its really easy. Like. Really easy. Here are the three ways to do it: 1) Get a flash drive. Depending on how much data you want to save, this is a perfectly viable solution. Most people can save all of their important data to a single 64GB thumb drive or smaller- a huge majority of average PC users can save all of their important/valuable files to a 32GB thumb drive. Speaking as someone with just a hair over 650GB of data lying around, I can tell you that all but about 50GB of that stuff is completely replaceable. Using a thumb drive to back up your data is as easy as selecting your files, right-clicking, copying them, then pasting them into a folder on the thumb drive labeled “Backup.” Its typically best to update the folder name each time to reflect the date at which you backed those files up. That way you wont back up twice in a day. You may think that would never happen. But guess what- it can. Ive done it. Twice. 2) Get an external hard drive. At this point in time, if you have a lot of data you dont want to lose (as in, you dont view any of your files as expendable, or you take more pictures than anyone else, ever, or its work-related date), having an external hard drive is an incredibly affordable option. You can go to any number of big box stores such as Walmart, Staples, Best Buy, Office Depot, Sams, Costco, you name it, and snag yourself a portable 1TB Western Digital My Passport for $90 or less, which is compatible with USB 2 and USB 3. Which means that if you have a USB 3 port on your PC, your files will fly off of your computer and onto that external like you just launched them out of a pan-galactic quantum cannon.**** That movie collection youve earned with an eyepatch? Yeah, itll transfer in a couple of minutes. 14GB of family photos? Sure- itll take a few seconds. And the best part is that 1TB is a lot of space. Let me say that again: 1TB is massive. I know in a few decades people will laugh at the idea of “just 1 terabyte.” But for now? Thats like upgrading from a mansion to an football stadium. 3) But lets say that you dont want to trust an external, and you have too much data to (realistically) back up to a thumb drive. Or lets say that youre like me, and youre kind of lazy. Thats fine. Theres this new thing called “the cloud.” Its pretty great, and it has a lot of options. Possibly too many options. You see, the problem with the cloud at this point is that its still trying to figure out just what it is. A lot of people have a lot of ideas for how it can be used, but nobodys really sure how to use it properly yet. Sort of like back in the 80s, when computers could theoretically be used for anything (random dialing, anyone?), but nobody quite had a polished and easy way to do those things. The result is that old friend, fragmentation. Since everybody has ideas and none of those ideas are really worked out just yet, everybody has a different way to do the same thing. Which makes it pretty hard to decide. Especially since the only thing everyone can agree on is that cloud storage is officially a Thing. But theres one small problem- by and large, cloud storage isnt really a viable option for truly backing up your data. Unless you pay at least $50/year for something like Carbonite, which is still a pretty sweet service- Carbonite monitors your computer, scanning constantly for changes while it is connected to the internet. As soon as something changes on your computer while connected to the internet, Carbonite updates that data in the cloud. But you have to pay $59.99/year to start. For one computer. Can we say “ripoff”? This is America. What do they think we are? A population that should appreciate quality service and pay accordingly for the peace of mind that comes from giving our business to the best possible businesses we can find? Please. Thats so 20th century. Which means you can use free, or at least cheaper services- and in return youll get a pretty small amount of space. Figure on the average being roughly 20GB of space. Not bad, but not great if you have any real backing up to do. So you start playing the “free” game. Got some Apple products? Congratulations, youve got some free space in iCloud. Microsoft products? Microsoft cloud. Google account? 25GB per Google account, free, with live updates via Google Drive for your desktop (providing that you are okay with a wildly disorganized Google Drive interface- see Fact 1). By the time youre done, you could have about 125GB of free(!) storage, but at what cost? Organization. Knowing what went where, and how to retrieve it quickly and without any frustration. Having a lot of different logins because, lets face it, the biggest problem with the online revolution has been that everyone wants you to make, maintain and remember a user account for every single little worthless thing. Honestly, youve got two good options here. I strongly recommend ponying up and paying for a yearly service if you really want someone else to host a significant amount of cloud storage. The good news here is that you can use most of your favorite cloud services to do this- iCloud, Dropbox and Microsofts cloud service (didnt they just rename it again? What is it now, Azure?) all offer paid expansions that scale depending on how much space you want. Or theres my personal favorite- MyCloud. I know this sounds like a plug, and I promise Im really not a fanboy here. Even though it may not sound like it, Im incredibly harsh on services and products that I like explicitly because I want to like something because its actually good, not because it seems good. So when I recommend two Western Digital products in a single status, please be aware that its because Western Digital is really a big old bag of kickass, not because I hate Apple and think Linux could trump Skynet in an old-fashioned bout of robot-fueled fisticuffs. Heres how it works: you pop out to one of those big box stores (or Amazon) and drop $150. That $150 will get you a 2TB external hard drive that connects to your network via ethernet, and to any PC via USB 3. Congratulations! You now have 2TB of backup space... thats accessible from anywhere, on any device. Want to watch a movie on your tablet? Grab so wifi, log into your own personal cloud, and start rolling. Need to retrieve a document at work, but you forgot it at home? Log into your drive and retrieve away- since its also a hard drive, it functions the same way because you can edit the file and save the changes. Got a Dropbox, iCloud, Azure or Google Drive account? It interfaces with them. Want to pull up some stuff on your smart TV? Get the app, access the drive, job well done. Its a pretty big win for you, because its all of the perks of an external drive for backup purposes while also being a completely self-contained (and free) cloud capable of holding 2TB of data. Thats 1,000,000 megabytes and some change. 2,000 gigabytes. For free. Of course, there is one disadvantage: possible drive failure. If that drive goes, so does your data. But typically a drive offers up some symptoms before it fails, so its not like youll be blindsided. If it starts clicking and getting really loud, its time to replace it. But honestly, Ive been using a 1TB Western Digital MyBook drive for almost 5 years now, and not only have I still not managed to fill it up, its still kicking like its brand new. So I think youll get your $150 back and then some. And, in the interest of being thorough, your actual important data should never only be backed up to one device, Murphys law being what it is. And if youre a professional storing media pertaining to your job (audio engineer, photographer, etc.), then what are you doing without a redundant system? Thats your livelihood, man. Get a RAID box and sleep like a boss knowing that youll never wake up without an ounce of intellectual property to your name. Stick around for tomorrow. Youre going to learn why you should knock the dust out of your computer every now and then, and how not to do it. Youll also learn why most of the people youve talked to are wrong, because Windows 8 isnt too bad (unless youre trying to work on it). * I have to apologize for a mistake. Up until this point in the week I have relied on the auto-fill function of OpenOffice while transferring my notes to my computer. This has resulted in my unwitting use of the wrong term for a traditional hard drive, resulting in “hard drive disk” instead of “hard disk drive.” Thats my bad, yo. ** Its also entirely common for any given HDD to have multiple disks as well as multiple arms, all of which work in perfect sync while moving at speeds in excess of 7,000 revolutions per minute. Pretty cool, huh? *** Unless its a solid state drive (SSD). Then it doesnt ever need to be defragmented, because there are no moving parts, and even a severely fragmented SSD reads and writes a lot faster than any HDD out there. **** Im not entirely sure if these are real. But they should be.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 07:41:46 +0000
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