They Will Never Have Eternal Life

I'm writing about computer hard drives. Seldom a week passes but I get a note from someone about loosing their mailing list or loosing all of their compositions. One person had spend a year translating scripture and lost it in 5 seconds. My heart goes out to each person for their loss, but there are solutions to the inevitable hard drive crash.

A drive seldom lasts more than five years. Some make it only two years. A member of the family works full time on the Microsoft campus installing replacement hard drives. He handles just one building. They go out all of the time.

A solution available to most everyone is to purchase - and use - an external backup drive. Software is widely available to do this on a daily basis. At least back up the laptop when working at home.

A more elegant solution is to use a free service like Mozy.com. It is only necessary to have a DSL or cable connection. Mine backs up during lunch each day - and takes about 5 minutes to do it. The first backup is time consuming, but after that, it can even be done when the operator is doing other computer tasks.

A further advantage is that the backups are off of our premises in case of a major disaster.

Our church office computer quit without warning. A new drive was installed and the Mozy backup brought the computer up to the condition it was in just a few hours before the crash.

If we want the advantages of this modern technology, we must face the limited drive life and plan so our lives are not disrupted when the inevitable finally happens.