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by jpmitchell
64 days ago
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I do say in my post that I performed a backup. I should have clarified that that was not merely for my benefit while performing the work. My final conversation with him involved handing off a clearly labeled USB drive, and an explanation that all the data from his laptop was copied to that drive and that he should store it somewhere safe. > Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern". I have, and pretty much every time I've had that conversation with someone it ended with them buying a portable storage drive and having learned a valuable lesson regarding the need for a real backup strategy. Microsoft's design choices can be both a benefit and an abuse of its users. There's no excuse here for using important features and functionality of the software as an underhanded marketing exercise. |
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> not tech literate.
Yet you expect him to understand the need to backup his data, manually, to a local device?
You want to use a 3-2-1 backup strategy:
- 3 backups
- 2 different mediums
- 1 (at least) offsite
A local USB drive satisfies only part of that and doesn't account for the most important (IMHO) offsite requirement. And again, unless there is a some automated process you can assume whatever backup you took will probably be the only one ever done. Perhaps they will backup manually a handful of times but it's just not realistic to expect anyone, even a "computer nerd", to manually backup their files regularly.
I'm really not trying to be a jerk here but I fear you have a call in your future about how their computer died and they plugged that "thumb thing you gave us" into the new computer ("actually, do you have a dongle? The new computer only has round holes, not these square ones") but I have the pictures I took last week (/month/year/since you took the original backup).