Step One

Last time, I wrote a fanciful account of how the mystery dog destroyed my data by chewing on the power cord of my computer. Fortunately, our cat hasn't learned to read, so that particular scenario isn't likely to happen.

The consequence of such an occurrence, however, is all too real. Data loss from any number of causes happens all the time. Because our data is truly the most valuable thing we have on our computers, it's worth protecting. And because it's of a different order than paper records, the protection method has to be appropriate to the task.

Protection of data can be thought of as an attempt to prevent corruption or deletion of the data. If the bits that make up my manuscript get scrambled because of, say, the power surge I mentioned earlier, the data is no longer in a useful form. It may be possible to retrieve parts of it, but as an entirety, it's not so useful anymore. If the medium which holds those bits of my manuscript data, gets damaged or destroyed, I'm in a far worse situation. My data, though made of bits and bytes, resides on some physical medium. Destroy the physical, and you've destroyed the virtual.

Let's address that second type of damage to my data first.

Too Long Away

OK, so I've been away longer, far longer, than expected. I really have no excuse. Well, no excuse except for the dog that chewed on my computer's power cable. That's particularly annoying, because I don't even have a dog.

Anyway, the dog chewed on the power cord to my laptop. The computer screen flashed and then went dark, even as the dog lit up like a 50-pound furry sparkler. I hadn't realized that my laptop drew that much current.

So, to make a long story short enough to be interesting, the computer was DOA. Doggy electrical trauma was not something it could have survived, I guess. The dog was singed around his muzzle and, oddly enough, his hind end, but otherwise all right. Well, whenever he got near a floor lamp, it did tend to get really bright, but otherwise, he was OK.