I have come to realise over the past few days of work that I truly have a love/hate relationship with computers. At times they can be the best thing in the world to use for basically anything from word processing, the internet and email, to playing games.

But at other times they can be the most infuriatingly frustrating things on the face of the Earth. And that can be just using them. At work having to attend to some of the computer problems of the office is doubly frustrating.

I guess it's mainly because that most of the problems are so hard to try to diagnose. A million-and-a-half things could be wrong with anything to do with the software, hardware, or network. For instance, on Monday I was setting up a computer that I had personally prepared and tested for a new person that was starting. For some reason when it was put in it's new position it kept throwing errors on startup. Not having any idea why, i eventually gave up and removed the computer to wipe it and start again. However when i took it back to the computer build room i decided to test it one more time and low-and-behold, it worked. The problem eventually turned out to be a faulty network cable at the position that the computer was going to, and replacing the cable fixed everything. grrr

Over the weekend I also streamlined my process for backing up the important data on my computer. I used to have a schedule of regularly copying my data to my iPod for frequent backups, and once every six months burning it to CD for a more permanent version. Backing-up to the iPod basically involved copying everything each time, which was a slow and mostly unnecessary process because a lot of the data, such as my uni stuff, is mostly static and now that I've finished uni, never changing.

So I went on the internet and found a cool free backup program called SyncBack (look for the freeware version). The way I use this program is that it automatically scans both the original and the iPod version of the data and only copies across files that are new or have been updated, a process which only takes a few minutes, not like 1/2 hour plus.

The SyncBack program is highly configurable, and can be used as synchronisation or backup software. It comes with Lucas' recommendation
*insert pic here of me with my thumbs up*

I was going (to use Andrew's term) to 'life-blog' but i'm much too tired now