Parts of the UK have been having horrible weather for the last few days, with flooding and, in Aberdeen, a weird seafoam* invading the Footdee neighbourhood, while is well worth a visit, by the way (preferably without foam). Here in Bearsden, just north of Glasgow, however, it’s a beautiful day.
*(or “spume”, from the Latin spuma. This is a language blog, remember).
I’m still feeling in summer mood, even though it’ll soon be autumn (already is? I’m never sure when the seasons officially begin). Maybe it’s because I’ve had such an unusual summer. I spent much of June and July on training courses: all of the Legal Terminology for Translators workshops run in London by David Hutchins of Lexacom Legal, and the Université d’été for Financial Translators, organised by the Société française des traducteurs in Paris. Next, in August and into September, my longest ever vacation — three wonderful weeks in Turkey (Kalkan and Antalya). And then my daughter moved to Leeds to study music, making us empty-nesters, at least in term time.
Bye-bye hard drive
When I got back from Turkey, my iMac wouldn’t start up. It turned out the hard drive needed to be replaced. I’d backed up all of our computers before leaving — thank goodness. So I’ve still got all my files, photos, applications, emails and so on. I’ve decided to do some spring-cleaning (autumn-cleaning?) and weed out all the junk as I re-install.
I had files dating back to 2001 on that computer, so that’s a lot of junk. But it’s a great feeling to get rid of all those useless, space-hogging files. And an even greater feeling to know that, even with hard drive failure, all of the important files were safe. So the moral of this post is: back up, and back up frequently.
By Marian Dougan
2 Responses
Good advice and I shall take it. I’ve already copied all my photos (all 9GB of them) onto neatly labelled CDs – old school I know, but they’re a bit like albums – and what a lovely feeling that was to know so much of my hard drive was freed up. My files are all on USBs but I need to properly back up my computer – any advice on the best hardware/cloud?
That’s very organised of you!
I use a portable external hard-drive (My Passport) with the Mac’s Time Machine back-up. If I’m working on the go I use a USB drive for individual files, or email the files to myself so they’re available online. At the moment I don’t systematically use a cloud back-up service, although I should — it’s better to have everything stored in a different location from your computer and external drive. I use Dropbox now and again, but mainly for sharing things like photos.