I can understand keeping cartoons that might become worth looking back one day but Teddy Ruxpin? The toy with the Metallica t-shirt was cool but the cartoons....eh. There are some commercials I wish I had now but I can live without them.

Side note: speaking of TV, there used to be a newspaper columnist, sandwiched between Ann Landers and Art Buchwald that used to answer readers' questions about television shows. They would write in and ask about a show they vaguely remembered, describe a portion of it in hazy recollections and then ask for the title.

I back stuff up on an external drive, mostly pictures but some docs, I also have a couple SD cards with essential stuff on them. I don't save that much stuff. If I ever got ransomwared I would just flush out the hard drive and start over.


THE
FRESH BOOT
OF BEL AIR
AARDVARK

I RAID1 my disks, too lazy to externally back it up, I know this is wrong in case of theft or fire or ransomware.

I college I had a bad controller eat my 1 disk, which was everything, and then the disk I couldn't afford to replace it with. That was a shitty month.

This is all Aardvark's fault.

I recently wrote a script to crawl through my media library and find files I've never watched. Based on that list, I tagged about a terabyte of files and moved them to an external USB drive. I have acquired a lot of media over the years that I never plan on watching, which can be summed up by the question Aardvark asked me once: "You have every episode of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin?"

After moving the files off the media server to an external USB drive, I thought to myself -- hey, encrypting these external drives isn't a bad idea. You never know when an external drive is going to walk off. I used to use TrueCrypt to encrypt all my external media, but after all the drama surrounding that project, I decided to use Microsoft's BitLocker instead. Yes, being closed source, there's a possibility there's a backdoor key somewhere hidden inside BitLocker. I'm not trying to protect the drive from three-letter agencies; I just don't want co-workers going through it in case I leave it on my desk at work or something.

I started encrypting the drive and at around 43% completion, the USB drive went to sleep, causing BitLocker to crash and the drive to fail halfway encrypted. I was able to access some of the files, but not all. Through Google, I found a recovery method that used the original 256 bit key. decrypting the drive took about 12 hours, but it worked. Once it finished, I was able to backup the backup, format the drive, encrypt it while blank, and then backup the files to two different drives.

It's funny how important data becomes the minute you think you've lost it. I will never watch The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin or most of the other television and cartoon shows on this backed up drive, but the thought of losing them made me sick to my stomach.

I highly recommend everyone here come up with a backup system for your most valuable data -- pictures, mp3s, movies, data -- and made sure your backups are working.