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If there is anything better than getting tech delivered inabox, I think it might perhaps be getting tech delivered complete with its user manual, hmm....?
Still, I was bold this morning. I took tech out of its box, unwound all its cables, plugged it in. Didn't need to turn it on, it doesn't have a switch. Nice chunky bit of kit. It made a few clicky noises. Nothing else happened.
I had been kinda hoping for a sudden declaration on the screen, "You have plugged in Tech!" but no such luck.
So. I made a tentative enquiry, did the machine perhaps happen to recognise the notion of a new hard drive, external to itself...?
Yeah, sure, said the machine, shrugging mightily. So what? What do you want me to do about it?
Oh goody, quoth I. D'you think you might, y'know, copy all these files over there?
Okey-doke, quoth machine, and away it went.
Ah, Linux, how far you have come from the old days! I am still totally unused to this notion of hardware just working, straight out of the box. I do like it, though.
And now I have 400 gigs of back-up space, which I will never need; it's currently valiantly copying three years' worth of me, my entire profile on this machine and all that it contains, all my data, all my texts. In eleven gigs.
Which reminds me:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jaylake posted yesterday about his back-up strategy. Which is comprehensive, but strictly electronic. I did grin when he said, "I should probably keep printouts of finished material, but even then I'd have a stack of paper at least ten thousand sheets tall."
Hah. I think it's pretty generally known hereabouts that I predate computers and electronic storage, so it's probably not a surprise that my own back-up strategy is predicated on the fixed belief that nothing is truly safe until it's solid. Ten thousand sheets, what's that? [Twenty reams, quoth smartarse.] I have hard copy of every draft of every novel. And every short story bar the early stuff, which a svengali induced me to discard twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, which I have lamented ever since. My archive is incomplete (but this is the point, or a part of it: it ain't a proper archive unless it's on paper, y'know?). I could see Jay's ten thousand sheets ten times over, and still have paper spare.
Also, this 400 gigs of storage? Cost me the same, to the penny, as the first electronic storage I ever bought: ten floppy disks, approximately that same twenty-five years ago. Um, they might have been 720K per disk? But they might not, they might have been smaller. [ETA: actually, I'm pretty damn sure they were 360K, one-sided. The machine had two floppy drives, no hard disk at all. What did I need a hard disk for? Software in one drive, data in the other and away we went...]
Still, I was bold this morning. I took tech out of its box, unwound all its cables, plugged it in. Didn't need to turn it on, it doesn't have a switch. Nice chunky bit of kit. It made a few clicky noises. Nothing else happened.
I had been kinda hoping for a sudden declaration on the screen, "You have plugged in Tech!" but no such luck.
So. I made a tentative enquiry, did the machine perhaps happen to recognise the notion of a new hard drive, external to itself...?
Yeah, sure, said the machine, shrugging mightily. So what? What do you want me to do about it?
Oh goody, quoth I. D'you think you might, y'know, copy all these files over there?
Okey-doke, quoth machine, and away it went.
Ah, Linux, how far you have come from the old days! I am still totally unused to this notion of hardware just working, straight out of the box. I do like it, though.
And now I have 400 gigs of back-up space, which I will never need; it's currently valiantly copying three years' worth of me, my entire profile on this machine and all that it contains, all my data, all my texts. In eleven gigs.
Which reminds me:
jaylake posted yesterday about his back-up strategy. Which is comprehensive, but strictly electronic. I did grin when he said, "I should probably keep printouts of finished material, but even then I'd have a stack of paper at least ten thousand sheets tall."Hah. I think it's pretty generally known hereabouts that I predate computers and electronic storage, so it's probably not a surprise that my own back-up strategy is predicated on the fixed belief that nothing is truly safe until it's solid. Ten thousand sheets, what's that? [Twenty reams, quoth smartarse.] I have hard copy of every draft of every novel. And every short story bar the early stuff, which a svengali induced me to discard twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, which I have lamented ever since. My archive is incomplete (but this is the point, or a part of it: it ain't a proper archive unless it's on paper, y'know?). I could see Jay's ten thousand sheets ten times over, and still have paper spare.
Also, this 400 gigs of storage? Cost me the same, to the penny, as the first electronic storage I ever bought: ten floppy disks, approximately that same twenty-five years ago. Um, they might have been 720K per disk? But they might not, they might have been smaller. [ETA: actually, I'm pretty damn sure they were 360K, one-sided. The machine had two floppy drives, no hard disk at all. What did I need a hard disk for? Software in one drive, data in the other and away we went...]