The BareGeek 2.0

Back and better than ever!  I started BareGeek.com as a project that I was extremely excited about.  I had material, I had ideas and I had the drive to make it happen.  Unfortunately, I got very busy with work and completely lost my drive to keep writing.  On top of that, I was disappointed with the overall design of the site and was not getting much in the way of readership.  In all honesty, the information I presented was helpful and occasionally interesting, but overall rather dull.  Don't get me wrong, some of the topics were fun, but it felt too much like a computer self help column.  This not what being a Geek is, nor is it what I set out to do.

Starting today, you will notice a whole new look and feel to the site, but even more than that, you will notice a whole new take on the content.  The fact that my most widely discussed article was on a slow cooker should have sent off warning bells in my head.  Yes I am a computer geek, but I am also a food geek, a gamer geek, a movie geek, a camera geek and a nature geek.  My interests are not restricted to computers, so why should my writing.  I set out with the idea that geeks come in all different flavors and then proceeded to pigeonhole myself into being a computer geek.  Don't get me wrong, I still want to provide tips and tricks like I always did, but I also want to broaden my scope.  With that, I hope some of my other partitions of Geekiness will interest you if the computers did not do the trick.  After all, we all are geeks about something.

As always, please make BareGeek.com a regular stop on your internet journey, take a break to comment and share the love!

The Network Backup

A network backup is not exactly different from the previously mentioned file or system backups, but rather it is a different method for doing either type.  Both the file and system backups require you to plug in some sort of storage device to the computer that you would like to backup.  With the network backup, you use another computer on your home network or a network attached hard drive to hold all of your backup data.  The hardest part of this type of backup is getting the proper equipment and setting it up.  One advantage is that your backup is always physically separated from your main computer, but the biggest advantage to this method is that you can backup multiple computers to one location.  This is great for those households or small businesses that have multiple computers that all hold important information on them.

The System Backup

 A few days ago I wrote about how to back up just your files.  While that is a good start, a full system backup is a better option for most people.  With a system backup, you can have a new hard drive installed in your computer and get everything back the way it was with a few clicks of your mouse.  With this method, not only are your personal files backed up, but your entire operating system, installed programs and any other files are duplicated.

The Most Basic Backup

A file backup is the absolute most basic type of computer backup that you can do.  The idea behind a file backup is to make sure that your most important files are located at least one place outside of your computer.  In fact, if you copy your files onto a website, portable device or another computer, you are already doing a file backup.  None of your programs are backed up by this method, so you need to make sure you have all of the disks or downloads saved to reinstall your programs.

Do you Back Up?

The estimated annual failure rate of hard drives is typically believed to be around 3%.  This means that if you put 33 people in a room, with computers of any age, at least one of them will loose all of the data and programs saved on their computer this year.  The truth is, the part that stores your data, your hard drive, is one of the most likely components in your computer to fail.  Because they spin at such a high speed and are extremely sensitive to shock, your hard drive will often give out long before the remainder of you computer does.