Electronics – Tiwing.com

Home Backup: Putting It Together

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series A Home Data Backup Solution

So how does this all work? The Doing…

Now that you’ve planned your backups, bought a new drive and maybe a new router, it’s time to actually get the backups working.

Setting Up Your Hardware

The first thing to do is to connect the external hard drive to either your router or a designated always on computer. You will need to set this drive up as a shared drive so that all your other computers and devices can see it over the network. If you’re more adventurous and have a NAS device, you will connect via ethernet or wifi but the concepts are the same.

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Home Backup: Philosophy

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series A Home Data Backup Solution

What can possibly go wrong?

When you think about protecting your digital life there are a number of things that can wipe out everything electronic that you have if you’re not prepared.

The most likely thing to happen is that you or someone else will accidentally delete a file or folder from your computer. It has happened to me more than once and I’m sure will happen again.
The second most likely thing is that your hard drive will fail where all your information and media is stored. I have lived through one hard drive failure since 2001 and know a number of people at work so have had failures. It is more common than you think.

A Comprehensive Home Backup Solution: Intro

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series A Home Data Backup Solution

Introduction

We live in a digital world. Gone are the days of taking rolls of film to the photo store to get developed then storing them in photo album binders stashed away on some obscure basement shelf. We are taking many more photos than we used to, mostly because we now always have a camera with us, and because it’s really, really easy.

But then we leave them on our phones, on our digital cameras, on our computers. We are playing roulette with them, hoping that hard drives won’t fail and phones won’t get lost or dropped in the swimming pool.

In addition to these precious memories, most of our important documents are on the computer. Or at least easy to access copies are on the computer.

I used to worry about losing everything, but not anymore.
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Low Voltage Wiring

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series New Home Build Series

Introduction

This is yet another part of the Notes For A New Home Build series. This article will cover low voltage wiring in new construction homes and give you many things to think about as you plan your dream build.

You can future proof your home during the build by adding all sorts of wire to the house. Even if you don’t install all the devices right away, you can still run the wire and create a number of projects for the future. The idea is to prepare your new home for complete and comprehensive internet, TV, phone, alarm, and home automation.

You can apply many of the concepts to retrofit an existing home, but you’ll have to figure out running the wires on your own.

This article will deal specifically with Internet (ethernet), TV (RG6 coaxial cable), and phone. A future article will cover alarms and home automation.
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2015 Home Theater PC Build

There are a lot of excellent blogs and articles out there on how to build a Home Theatre PC (HTPC). There are very detailed articles written almost weekly about choosing the ultimate components, to long discussions about which is the best software to run and why.

This will be a little different. This is just a story about my build, how I chose my parts, and why I went about it the way I did. Maybe my experience will help you think about your build a touch differently.

Why build an HTPC in the first place? The story behind the story.

For a while we had satellite TV. Then we switched to cable. There were about five channels we regularly watched out of fifty or seventy channels. Amd there were a lot of shows on speciality channels I didn’t want to pay for. It was annoying.

As I learned more about online digital content I found that most of what we wanted to watch could be obtained online. Most. We’ll come back to that.

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