Well, I've got all of my software in, loaded my working data as well as my pictures, music..etc. I work on this machine daily and no matter how reliable I've come to experience Lenovo's hardware, a hard drive will crash sooner or later and it is not easy to predict when.
Anyway, as you know, a good backup habit is very important if you rely on a computer for many things. So here it goes.
First I have an off the shelf file backup software which I have automated to mirror my the files/folders to be backed up onto an external drive.
I used to have an Windows Home Server but the HP Server finally crashed and it was too much hassle to restore it as well as it did not support Windows 7 very well. There apparently is a new version of Windows Home Server (version 2011), however I hear that Microsoft is sunseting it. Besides, the 2011 version will require a 64 bit hardware, meaning I have to go out and spend a few hundred $$s to get it up and running, Which also required regular maintenance and some experience with networking. Instead I opted with "cloud" based backup.
My requirement for a cloud based backup was to have a service which supported "zero knowledge" type of cloud backup. Just in case you are not familiar with "zero knowledge" backup it is simple a backup solution whereas the vendor or it employees cannot access your information even if they have access to your account. The reason for that is that the files being backed up to the cloud are first encrypted on your PC prior to being sent over the internet to their vendor's servers for safekeeping.
After researching most of the major cloud based services, I settled with two vendors. the first one is Spideroak. They are a bit pricey but I sleep better knowing that my confidential files are both backed up as well as encrypted before they leave my PC. However, they have a defined space you can use for storage, and I have many pictures and family videos that take up more that 100 GB of space. On the flip side I like their backup application as it offers several features (I will try and write a separate post dedicated to Spideroak soon).
The second service I signed up with is Carbonite, which offers you unlimited storage and is about half the cost of Spideroak. Though, Carbonite does offer the "Zero Knowledge" feature it is a bit more complicated than Spideroak's (I will also dedicate a separate post later).
That is it on Backup for now. I think next I will cover my experience with the actual performance of the Lenovo X220T from various perspectives (hard drive read/writes, boot-up, screen display under different environments..etc). If not, I'll see what my brain has to offer :-)
Stay Tuned, your comments about your experience with the Lenovo X220T is always welcome.
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