This post is all about the complex set of thingies that you plug in together and collectively call “the computer”. After spending some time today working on my family’s computer, I thought it might be useful to share my family computing knowledge, so that those of you who don’t have a resident genius in the house can still figure out what kind of gadgets and gizmos you REALLY need to get that hunkajunk workin’ right. Because it really can be a scary topic. So I hope maybe I can be enlightening. I plan to talk about two things: some basic components and the importance of backups.
This all came about because last night, my family’s computer had a crisis. Somebody had a project that needed to get done RIGHT NOW, but it couldn’t. Thousands of photos, hours of video clips, and a huge music library had made it so that our iMac–normally a workhorse machine–was running more and more slowly over the course of the past few weeks, and now it was refusing to function, because its hard disk was absolutely full.
I had meant to take a look at the computer for awhile now, but I’ve been pretty busy lately and I have two laptops of my own, so it didn’t really score high on my list of priorities–until this project needed to be taken care of. And truly, with a bunch of peopel sharing a computer, and a bunch of those being underage, there are any number of things that can get mucked up. I wasn’t actually expecting the hard disk to be totally full. But at 11pm last night, that’s exactly what happened. So I deleted some files, and moved some to an external hard disk, in order to free up enough space for some breathing room. But that was just a stopgap measure.
This week we had Acton University at work, so I did a lot of IT work and frantic running around today. However, I was able to find some quiet space in my brain to work up a more ideal solution to my family’s space problem.
My family loves photos. We take a lot of them…on our 3-week trip to the Grand Canyon a few years ago, I seem to recall we shot something like 46 rolls of film. That gets expensive. So about a year ago, my Mom bought a digital SLR camera and we’ve been an all-digital family ever since. We have 3 digital cameras: the Olympus SLR, and 2 smaller Fuji FinePix cameras (one is mine, one is Mom’s) that you can slip in your pocket, purse, or diaper bag and go anywhere with.
Well, after a year of being a digital-only family, it’s no wonder our poor computer was filled up. For more space, I decided to stop at Best Buy and pick up another external hard drive, one that we could use exclusively for photos and videos. I spent the evening cleaning and organizing the computer desk and copying over files from one drive to another.
So here’s the final setup–a 21″ Intel iMac. The iMac is a “dual-boot” machine, meaning I have configured it to run both Windows and Mac OS X. The kids use Windows for games like “Star Wars Clone Troopers II” and my Dad uses Windows to run ProE engineering software. We use OS X for everything else: Photos, videos and video editing, music, internet, other games, Microsoft Word, etc. etc. etc.
OK, now here’s a detail photo of all the important little gadgets that make our computer system work. We’re going to talk about them top-down.
The green and silver, UFO-like thingie is our DSL modem. It connects to the internets for us. It sits on top of the white Airport Extreme and these two little boxes are connected by an ethernet cable. The Airport Extreme is our network router–it takes the internet signal from the DSL modem and divides it up so that all the computers in the house can have some. All of our computers have wireless cards, so they connect to it (and our guests with wireless devices can connect to it as well).
The second shelf has not one, but two external hard drives, which are both connected to the computer via USB cables. The black one on the left, with the glowing yellow stripe, has 500 Gigabytes (GB) of space and it is now our designated media (photos + video) drive. The silver one on the right is an entire Terabyte (TB — a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes.)
The silver terabyte hard disk is the all-important backup drive. Every night, Time Machine (a feature of Mac OS X) makes backup copies of both the computer’s internal hard drive and the 500 GB external drive, and puts those copies on the silver external drive. So, when either of those drives fails, we will have copies of their files. If somebody accidentally deletes a file, we can simply grab a copy of it from the backup. Or in a theoretical house fire, somebody could just disconnect that silver drive and take it with them, and thereby save all of the files and family photos and videos from our computer.
In a perfect world, my backup system would have a 3rd hard drive in it–another one of those sliver 1 TB disks–and every week I would swap them out. One of them would be hooked up to the computer, the other would be kept in a fire safe or brought to my office at Acton for safekeeping. But I didn’t have the money to get one today. So this will do for now.
In this new era, most families have probably switched over to digital cameras, just like us. They’re so fun, and easy, and cheap–no film processing fees and only print the photos that turned out well! But there is a danger in digital photography as well–the danger of losing all your precious photos when your hard drive dies. Notice that I didn’t say if, but when. Your retro photos fade and get yellow with age. A lot of 60’s and 70’s photos acquired a warmish distorted glowy look that I love. If stored well, printed photos and negatives last a while and you can generally catch their natural breakdown and make copies before they’re totally dead. In contrast, your computer hard drive has maybe a decade in it (if you’re VERY lucky) before it goes kaput. Sometimes they make grinding noises that warn you of their impending doom and you can quickly move your files to safety, but usually they just die–one moment they’re fine, the next they’re not at all fine. I’ve had it happen to me twice. One time, the drive was a mere 2 years old, and it took with it several hundred photos for which I didn’t have any backup copies. Those are gone forever.
So I can’t stress enough the importance of having regular backups of your computer. If you’re on a Mac, use Time Machine. If not, I’m sad for you. But you can buy a program like SyncBack which does kind of the same thing. The important thing to remember is this: the weakest link in any backup system is not the technology, but the human. I have yet to meet somebody who was diligent enough to make the manual effort daily (or even weekly) to do a backup. Before the advent of Time Machine, I haphazardly backed up my system onto DVDs on a “whenever I thought of it and had a free moment” basis (so, every couple of months–aka not nearly often enough.) Get yourself an external hard drive and install a program that will do it for you every night. Then you can forget about it and have fun with your computer.
Once I had the two hard drives set up, I added one more gadget, called a USB hub. Nowadays pretty much every computer thingie you could add on (printers, cameras, hard drives, joysticks, keyboards, mice, phones, coffee cup warmers, etc) use USB for power and to communicate with the computer. This is great, until you run out of USB ports and then you have to start swapping out devices and cords go everywhere and it’s just kind of a mess. In my opinion the only great flaw in the iMac design is too few ports: You look at a modern Dell desktop and it usually has about 10, while our iMac has 4. So I plugged in this USB hub, which takes one USB port and splits it 4 ways, so that the family will be able to play their games and charge their phones without swapping out cords (thereby theoretically mitigating the chance for somebody to unplug one of the hard drives and screw up the backup system.) For now the hub is taped to the bottom of the iMac but I want to get some sticky-back velcro to hold it on there. This way it’s convenient and nobody has any excuse not to use it.
And that, in a nutshell, is how I roll.
(With respect to a desktop computer setup, I mean.)
To review:
- Computers get slow and crabby when their hard disks are too full. This is partly because then it takes them forever to search the disk, but more because they use “empty” space all the time for “swap” memory. That basically means that when the RAM memory (RAM memory is what the computer processor writes to when it’s performing its thousands of calculations per second) gets filled up, it turns to the hard disk. Writing to the hard disk is slower but better than nothing. If you’re out of hard disk, your computer doesn’t know what to do. Opinions vary but in my experience, keeping a good 10-20 GB of your computer’s internal drive free will definitely boost performance.
- External drives make great storage for all of those digital photos and videos that you’re making.
- You should have at least one really big external drive (bigger than your computer and your external drive put together) to back up your files to. Having two is even better. If you don’t have two you might want to consider making periodic DVD backups of your photos for extra safety points.
- If you want to experience an annoying and potentially tragic and catastrophic loss of data, then don’t do anything I’ve said here. It might take a year or two but sooner or later your hard drive will write its last zero and chuck a wobbly, and your data will be toasted. Cool huh?
Any questions?
