I've realised how much I rely on my pc for day to day stuff and when it goes away, I am in crisis.
Sometime on Saturday whilst I was out, we had a thunderstorm over my house, when I got back in and turned on my main comp, it wouldn't :sad: I swapped parts and it still wouldn't get past bios so it's dead. Never mind, I'll use my old comp which was still connected and although it would boot into windows, the graphics card was very ill and the screen unreadable :grr: . Never mind, I'll use my EEE900 netbook which worked fine but slow which is where using portable apps saved the day as I had a backup on a usb mem stick from a week ago so I could at least have access to forums, etc.
But, all may data was on the main comps SATA drives and all I had was IDE drive caddys for backups which I hadn't done for a while :doh: so I bought a refurbed HP small form factor desktop pc and a SATA caddy to get me going again and spent all yesterday backing up over a terabyte of music, pictures and data, initially over USB as the HP only had two hard drive power connectors but slowness made me hack the power wiring to be able plug in another drive into the HP to speed things up a lot. I finished late last night and this morning started installing apps and copying files over to the HP. I now have all my finances back on screen so I can relax again :D
The point to this is to remind you all to GO AND DO A BACKUP NOW and make sure you can access this backup should your comp die suddenly, plus despite my one man campaign to promote portable apps falling on deaf ears, I had access to forums, email, etc but most importantly access to my banks to shift some money around from any pc, otherwise I would have gone overdrawn first thing Monday morning.
I use Liberkey installed in a folder on my pc for speed and sync it onto a USB mem stick when I need to use it on another pc. It manages the apps and keeps them all up to date, sorts all the directories out so the data stays with the app and swaps all the windows file associations to work with the portable apps, then swaps them back when you close Liberkey leaving no trace on the host pc.
http://www.liberkey.com/en/
This isn't for you clever guys with your smart gear, it's for us low tech duffers with old phones and a pc.