R. Craig Collins > ITSE 1294 > Week 5 Reading

Week 5 Reading © R. Craig Collins, 2005

The following information will add to, not replace, your text book reading! Please read the assigned material first, then look over the following 'lecture.'

Chapter 6
Following up on Chapter 5's discussion of Hard Drives, and creating copies of floppies, how else can you protect your computer?

One way is to protect it from power failures with a UPS. Another is to not smoke around your computer, as the little smoke particles can get inside the hard drive, and jam between the disk, and the magnetic read/write head that reads the positive and negatively charged magnetic properties of the disk, which represent bits. If particles get jammed in there, they can scratch of the magnetic media, which prevents that part of the computer from storing information.

This and other errors can sometime be corrected using another one of the tools we looked at earlier, Error checking. However, the most dangerous thing to most computers today is not something Windows has a tool for: a virus, or malicious software. You can get free anti-virus protection called from www.grisoft.com, if your computer doesn't already have this important kind of tool. Make sure you keep the software up to date!

Next, there is always the chance that no matter how careful you were, you could still have a major problem with your computer. Just as you copied the floppy, you may decide you need some way to copy the contents of your hard drive as a part of your disaster recovery plan. Backup it the other tool on the Tools menu, but there are many ways to copy a hard drive... such as DVDs, or a sequential storage solution like magnetic tape.

While slow to locate files, due to the sequential nature or tape, it can be an inexpensive way to backup.

Finally, you shouldn't have to backup everything each time you backup... you can select to just copy files that have changed since you did your last full backup. But how ever you backup, your backup is not really a backup if it is next to the computer. What I mean is, what happens if the house catches fire? Your backup is of no use if it goes up in flames, as well. Find a safe place for the backup.