Burgled

The house next door, along with ten others in our street, were burgled a couple of nights ago. A sign of the recessionary times? The thieves simply smashed their way in through conservatory and patio doors, searching for money and jewellery and other small items that are easy to carry away and sell. 

This sort of thing makes you feel much less secure in your own home, and I've now installed extra security lighting and other measures to hopefully deter any future burglars. 

It also made me realise that if my computer is stolen, I lose all my information as well as pictures that can never be replaced. I already have a 1TB back-up hard drive in case the main drive fails, but as this resides alongside the computer, it could just as easily go missing to theft, or lost in a house fire/flood.

So I ordered this little beauty, the Buffalo MiniStation for £60 from Amazon. A 1TB portable drive that connects and is powered by, USB. When it arrived, I was frankly amazed at how small it was. My main back-up (which was purchased only a couple of years ago), has the same capacity but is four or five times as big and needs main power. 

I found I had 505Gb of data to back-up, which was another surprise. Via USB 2, backing up this amount of data does take time, a number of hours in fact. Firewire would have been much better, but that is not available. USB 3 would have been good, but again, I don't have it. 

Anyway, it's done. Using the iMac's Time Machine, back-ups are done automatically every hour. Now I can give this extra drive to a friend for safe keeping in his house and back this one up perhaps once a month. Hopefully, if disaster strikes, all will not now be lost. I do advise, dear reader, you do the same.