Integral Task of Moving Information

Last July, our world Dell crashed striking fear in my heart.  My thoughts screamed, “Oh, NO! My pictures!” Then, the realization hit. We had countless, valuable documents on our system. Would we be able to get that information off?

We were fortunate. The data recovery facility Best Buy used was able to remove the data from the failed hard drive.  They had the unit for 2-3 months and from there we began the integral task of plucking the data from the temporary storage to our new hard drive.

Normally, transferring data from one computer to another is a piece of cake. That being said, you may have to clean up some crumbs before relocating files. In our case, we discovered the file names were too long. It took us all fall through the end of last year to carefully manipulate each file into place.

Note: Max file name cannot exceed 255 characters including the file directory (this is the path from the file’s desktop placement to the hard drive root folder). We place files within folders within folders and it takes no time before we run out of characters because all of that makes up the file name.  Window based systems really don’t like this, so make the file name as short as possible.

At the start of the year, I became heavily involved in the major overhaul of how our computer’s information is to be stored. I have barely scratched the surf with the tedious organizing process – renaming files (shortening length) and trashing duplicate & obsolete files.

The cleanup process not only affects our Dell but two other computers. My method at this point is work from the oldest computer to migrate those cleaned up files to the other computers. This will work beautifully, I hope, as I incorporate photo and document data from one stand-alone system to the next.

The idea is once I get all computers properly integrated, then each has its own dedicated external hard drive for routine backups. Only our newest computer will house all photos and scheduled auto daily backups in place. This gives us peace of mind toward any future calamities and our data can be retrieved instantly. We are exploring other archiving options to keep crucial information safe.

1. Traveling along the Super Information Highway, what is the best site you have found on giving self-help answers to technical issues about computers?

2.  What’s the best investment (time or money or both) you have made for protecting yourself from such a huge computer fiasco like what we experienced last year?

Visit Miss Jenny and the rest of the Alphabe-Thursday classroom for more homework assignments of the letter ‘I’ and while you’re hopping around, be sure to play along with Miss Amanda in her latest edition of Thursday Two Questions.