Knee Deep Blog

Backing Up Your Computer and Owning Up to all The Crap You've Purchased and Stored On It

I'm into day three of backing up my computer so that I can ship it to the east coast and have my wonderful, and I mean wonderful (that's in case he actually reading this blog post) brother strip it to the bones, reconfigure it and reload a few of the many programs I currently own before he hands it back.

I thought it would be an easy task to do this feat and I'm realizing it's much bigger than I had ever thought.  Of course in the middle of this our printer died.  So it looks like I'm not reinstalling those drivers rather getting a new printer.

I've also re-discovered some things that I bought and forgot about.  Most are best left forgotten and have simply allowed me to be mildly distracted during this process.

How I'm managing the backup and restore to my computer:

1. I made a spread sheet in excel to manage the shift.  I highlighted each program / application once all of the data was in it so I knew I was complete.

2. These are the questions that I've needed to answer during the past few days so that I can comfortably have my brother wipe off my hard drive.

• do you know how many software programs you own?
  • not all programs are neatly stored under "program files" many create their own directory
• which programs and applications are not worth your time to re-install?
  • I have to admit over the past 7 years I have purchased some great stuff and a lot of crap that I will be glad to have a reason to get off my computer.

Growing Up With Eli: Eating Jelly Oto

Eli and I are packing up for our 2.5 week adventure to the east coast - specifically New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey where we will visit family and friends.  I'm multi-tasking as I'm sitting here jumping between the laptop an desktop -  mostly backing up the desk top computer.  I'm also getting together all of my software and passwords so that this pain in the butt desktop which is being shipped and stripped naked during the trip can hopefully coming back clean, error free and ready to go along with my post vacation adjusted computer attitude.  One of the things I've been thinking about is errands for the trips and what snacks will we take for the cross country flight?  Yes, multi-tasking at it's best.

Right now jelly oto is Eli's favorite but I don't see that as a viable option cause it liquid-ish and most likely won't make it through security in it's pure form. :)  Plus it's way too messy to eat on the flight.

What is jelly oto?  Well I tell you I was surprised when he "invented" it last week just prior to our July 4th dinner.  Eli was hungry and kept sneaking into the refrigerator to eat the raspberries which were part of our dessert.  After the third trip I told him to find some thing else to snack on like a piece of cheese.  I watched in disbelief as he continued to rummage through the refrigerator shelves finally pulling out peanut butter, jelly and another handful of raspberries.