Ask Leo! #631 – Un-Ringing a Bell, Booting Cortana, Recovering another Wi-Fi password, and more…

I was frequently getting BSOD when starting my HP desktop (Win 10 with "anniversary" update). The hard drive light would flicker briefly then stay off. I'd eventually hold down the power button to force shutdown, after which it booted up normally. Thought it was possibly a flaky boot sector. Tried CHKDSK but it did not help. Considered getting SpinRite but with drives so cheap I ordered a 1TB "gamer" HD...and made sure my full image backup stayed up to date! Before the HD arrived I read this article and unchecked Fast Startup. End of problem! Oh, well. Plan to go ahead and install the new HD anyway, as it has better specs than the factory drive, now 4 years old.

Have a friend who recently lost a couple of thousand songs due to failure to backup. He had all these things stored on an external hard drive, and only on that one external hard drive. He dropped it, and the hard drive died. I kept asking him why he hadn't backed up and he kept saying he HAD backed up. He had stored them on an external hard drive. Apparently he'd gotten the idea that "backing up" meant storing your files on an external hard drive rather than on your computer, not that "backing up" meant having your data in at least two places. Funny thing is, I've talked to other people who have gotten the idea that an external hard drive is permanent and will last forever, so it's fine to store your data only on that one single hard drive.

For a long time I couldn't understand what Leo meant by 'if it's only in one place, it's not backed up'. I thought it would be obvious. Turns out, it's not.

Yeah. That phrase came to me when I'd heard that "I moved it to my backup drive" one too many times. :-(

I left Hungary with my parents in December 1956 to save our lives from retaliation by the restored communist government. As we dragged ourselves across the Hungarian-Austrian border all we were able to take with us were some change of clothes and family photographs. Later in the USA these photos were in albums that we could view on the coffee table. Still they deteriorated in storage and mishandling. A few years ago I bought a scanner by Epson "Perfection V370 Photo". This machine is now ancient, but it still does an excellent job of scanning photographs, slides, and negatives in addition to documents. I began to scan the old photos, and later the 35 millimeter slides, and still later color photos. Using "FastStone" I was able to repair many of the old Daguerrotype and later black and white prints that were damaged by humidity and silverfish. Of the color slides, they also suffered over the years accumulating fingerprints, liquids splashed, dust, and lint. all of that I was able to repair once I had the photos digitized.

As for backup, the photos are not unique. I have all of my data in a Dropbox folder. As such, any changes I make are instantly backed up. I also do daily, weekly, an monthly system backup on external drives that stay off line until I use them. The daily is on an internal secondary drive, so it is automatic. I do not rely on preserving data on any portable device such as CD or DVD. As one said, if the device becomes passe, we have no way to read them. Digital data maintained on the hard drive is different. My photos are all JPG format, and videos for now are MP4. If the formats begin to pass for a better version, I will simply do the conversion and have the new ones saved.