They say there’s a book in everyone. There certainly seem to be books in many of my clients. Or to be more accurate, part written books on their computers. Often their hard drive is littered with so many versions, stored in random places, that they struggle to know which version they are actually working on. I wonder that so many books ever reach a publisher!
The client I went to this morning was writing a book – it was more like a learned essay in truth – 20 A4 pages.
He’s been writing it for over a year and, putting it politely, his laptop is not in its first flush of youth. I think his wife is hoping Father Christmas might bring a new one. He has a memory stick – but being an older gentleman he’s afraid of it. His son has put some documents on it, but he’s struggling to work out how to transfer his photos as well.
He only has around 3 GB of data to back up, including his photos and that essay. Easily fitted on his 16GB memory stick. But what do you do if you struggle to remember how to transfer data to the memory stick, and are afraid of misplacing the stick?
I casually mentioned that I use an online backup service. I wasn’t immediately thinking it was the right choice for him as he has relatively little data to preserve. The instant I mentioned it both he and his wife leapt at the idea. We ordered Mozy and when I left it was doing its initial backup, which it said would take around a day. (To put that in context it took two weeks of leaving my laptop on 24/7 to do my initial backup)