Grab a slice of pizza, it’s Tech Wednesday in YatPundit’s Pub 29-May-2019.

yatpudit's pub

YatPundit’s Pub 29-May-2019

We cross-post Tech Wednesday from YatPundit.com to here and to seashell-software.

Two brews on tap today for geek night in YatPundit’s Pub 29-May-2019. First, we review personal continuity and backup. Then, we pour the first brew of a flight on Personal Virtualization.

Personal Continuity

yatpundit's pub 29-may-2019

Western Digital Passport USB Drive

Hurricane season starts Friday. We add our contribution to the media blitz with a discussion of backup. Backup strategy these days starts with a 128GB USB stick. From there, advance to a USB hard drive, 1-4TB in size. A thumb drive requires you to manually drag-and-drop files for backup. Many of the portable hard drives now include utilities for backup. Run the utility, copy your computer hard drive to the portable.

Portable hard drives start around $60 in price. Western Digital offers solid basic options. While that may be all you need, advanced possibilities include solid state drives.

Cloud backup offers scheduling and off-site protection. Services like Dropbox and Apple’s cloud service provide CDP – Continuous Data Protection. Install the cloud service’s utilities on your computer. When you save files to the designated folders, the utilities save it to the cloud simultaneously. Cloud storage also offers wider availability. While you can do what you need on your regular computer, files backed up to the cloud can be accessed from other systems. Use the utilities offered. Other computers maintain copies of your data.

Computer virtualization extends the availability possibilities. So, with your work computer as a virtual machine, it’s easy to get back up and running after a hardware failure.

Your Choice

Which strategy is right? Consider Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements. While you may not think these are important on a personal level, they really are!

Personal Virtualization

We begin a 4-part flight on computer virtualization. Before virtualizing, set your goals. So, what do you want to accomplish?

  • Windows on a Mac
  • Running Linux on a Windows PC (or vice versa)
  • Keeping older versions of Windows on a new system
  • Other needs

Examine your needs and consider your approach to virtualization. Other brews in this flight explore the resources required to virtualize, and the software options.