Planning to take our life on the road full-time ten years ago, my husband, a structural engineer, and I did massive research and analysis on how to protect our desktop computer from the banging and smashing of travel. Laptops were VERY expensive at the time, so this is what we had. We ended up setting the computer inside a custom made desk with special supports, fans, and sitting on shock absorbers used by airplane manufacturers (military and commercial) to absorb the shocks and vibrations.
It worked like a charm for the first six months on the road, banging back and forth across the states. I started doing frequent backups, but then got lazy with all of the stuff going on. One morning on the rim of the Grand Canyon, I flipped on the computer and it went BING BORK BONG and was dead. No warning. I was terrified that the banging of the hard drive had finally caught up with us.
I called Gateway, the manufacturer, to try to trouble shoot it, and they told me that they had put out a recall notice on that particular hard drive, and had mailed us a notice months ago. Maxtor had sent them a bad batch of drives. Living on the road, mail takes ages to catch up with us, so we’d not received the notice.
Whew! Lucky me. But it goes to show the different things that can go wrong that are beyond your control.
Living on the road, backups to websites or online stuff, or even getting the backups by email, just don’t work. Right now we have a stead Internet connection, but when we move, it’s hit and miss. I have to backup while connected, or now with Skippy’s new backup plugin, I can have the backup stored on the site and then while connected download it to my computer and then store it somewhere like on a CD.
Life on the road may sound fun, but it is hard work and comes with a LOT of complications.
