CJB,

You are entitled to your opinion about Lenovo, but other computer 
manufacturers have done equally stupid things. When the right people at 
Lenovo found out about the mistake, they took quick action to post 
removal instructions.

Over the last decade plus, I've bought or caused to be bought directly 
close to 20 computers -- more laptops than towers -- and the laptops 
have been a mix of Dell, Lenovo, and HP. The towers have all beed Dell 
with the exception of one "custom built" bu a local PC store which was a 
great case but left other things wanting. I've only bought one HP and it 
was in an emergency in Newfoundland when my Dell's HD died in Gros Morne 
National Park.

I'm all in favour of SSDs in laptops. A laptop HDD is a higher risk 
device. While in the middle of a 40-day driving trip to the Maritimes, 
having the laptop die was an inconvenience and my son was without Skype 
for a few days, but we didn't lose anything as I had four alternate 
backup HDDs of the photos and I had enough memory cards that I didn't 
need to dump every day.

I think the best of all possible worlds is a good cloud backup/storage 
system with a local tower computer interfacing (unidirectionally) from 
the cloud to the storage unit. I do not propagate updates or deletes 
into the storage unit, so if I'm writing and writing, I just version the 
files (v01 v02 etc) whenever I've done enough to warrant backup. The 
reason for that is if the files get corrupted on the cloud, they won't 
overwrite good copies on the local NAS. I would not connect a NAS 
directly to the cloud, either. I find it too risky. Putting the filter 
of ViceVersa Pro between the cloud and the NAS gives me much more 
control (no overwrites, no deletes).

I have had wonderful reliability with Dropbox, once I learned some of 
its propagation idiosyncrasies. Be careful, make sure you have backups 
that Dropbox (or whatever) cannot delete. When in the field, I carry at 
least one additional laptop drive (USB3) that I back up data to. Long 
trips with lots of photography, multiple drives are in order as their 
positioning protects against different things (car accident, vandalism, 
theft, hotel fire...).

Cheers,

Richard

-- 
Richard L. Hess                   email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada                             647 479 2800
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
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