Data, data, data.

Retention of information is everything in computing business.

This has been brought home to me by my desire to transfer my working ‘life’ from one machine to another: a result of my 6 year old business laptop becoming slow and unreliable. Over the years I’ve collected data that, whilst not indispensable, would be ‘inconvenient’ to lose. And why should I ever lose it, when storage costs around 30p or less per Mb?

At present our IT future, and therefore the availability of my data is uncertain. Not that the company is doing badly – far from it – but IT has been firmly removed from our control, and as someone with data going back around 15 years that I still consider useful, I’m a little twitchy that all my stored files might become unavailable to me.

For some time we’ve had a ‘spare’ laptop floating around. It was bought as an upgrade for the MD, when his own began causing trouble, only for the trouble to be migrated straight across along with all his system settings (Palm software is ‘interesting’ if you don’t mind whiling away happy hours trying to synchronise). After fighting along for about a 18 months he threw in the towel and moved AGAIN to a nice little IBM/Lenovo X series machine. The fact that he flies quite a lot and the new computer weighed literally half the old one, yet the batteries lasted long might have been a *slight* incentive).

So we had a 2 ½ year old T30 laying around.

It had been set up by someone (now departed) from IT in the original parent company for someone else to use. Unfortunately they’d never sorted email (outlook) or printing properly and I no longer had the printer drivers etc. So this week it’s been resurrected from storage, re-formatted with a virgin XP install plus a cheeky little Fedora 6 partition and dual booting added. Mid-week I ran a full C:\ backup on my old R32 laptop using the windows backup util and yesterday restored that backup to this – the T30.

The results have been better than I’d expected, and a little different too.

There have been plenty of horror stories about how useless windows backup was, and on rebooting after the restore they were all echoing in my head. Well, it successfully transferred all ‘My Documents’ but put them in a folder called ‘Toni’s Documents’. Fine, I found them OK. Better yet, *some* of the apps made it across in working form, including the network monitor for our printer system but not the anti-virus software. The biggest failure was Outlook. The new machine has outlook XP and the old one 2003. There was no transfer of outlook data, and that is a Bad Thing. Outlook also won’t export its entire file structure in one go, and even worse, there’s no backward-compatibility between versions. So no working outlook for me just yet, except through a web-based exchange server. A solution will be found, however.

So what’s it like on the new machine?

The hard drive is WAY noisier (:-`) and I have around 5Gb free space instead of 1Gb. The real difference is in what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t glitch, hang, pause or make me wonder if it’s completely frozen. It does occasionally pop up odd dialogue boxes unexpectedly, but I’ve a feeling it’s due to an excessively sensitive touch-pad, and on this (dee lucks) model, sensitivity and noise filtering can be adjusted. Battery life is just like the other one used to be (about 2 hours) and the speakers are better (great for when I’m alone somewhere and have a DVD handy).

We’ll see. What’s the betting all our PCs etc will be replaced in the next 3 months, and that this was wasted? You just never know, and that keeps me on my toes.