Ask HN: Personal hardware backup?

1 points by danpat 12y ago ↗ HN

My laptop failed to wake up this morning, and it turns out it's a SSD failure. I take regular backups and do lots of server-side work, so nothing has been lost, but I'm now faced with a couple of days without my machine. This is slightly compounded by the fact that I live 60 miles from the nearest city.

Other than the obvious "have another computer on standby", what strategies do other HN-ers have for minimizing downtime when your personal hardware dies?

1 comment

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ilovemyherbz 12y ago ↗

I always use a snapshot backup (on my mac its the Time Machine software) to an external USB drive, and when I go out of town, I always carry an extra HDD with me. This only happened to me once when I went a few hours away for a weekend convention. Just popped the new drive in, started up recovery and told it to pull from backup drive, within an hour it was back up and running.