Week 7: Troubleshooting, Hardware Reliability, and Backups

In general, backing up files, settings, and even installed programs is important and highly desirable.
There are all manner of backup solutions available.  If https://worldbackupday.com were operational at the time of writing, it would be possible to view their recommendations.  Unfortunately, it is not.  (https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/worldbackupday.com.html) For recent Mac users, Time Machine, which is built into current versions of the Macintosh operating system, and has been for quite a while, comes to mind, which is designed for ease of use.  CarbonCopyCloner is another popular backup utility for macOS, as is CrashPlan, which (thanks to being written in Java) runs on Windows and GNU/Linux as well, and even non-macOS BSD with a little work.  Backblaze is also available on both Microsoft Windows and macOS.  Ubuntu and Microsoft Windows also have built-in backup tools that can be used to help protect against accidental file deletion and drive failure.

There are a lot of diagnostic tools out there, from hardware monitors like Piriform Speccy and OpenHardwareMonitor, to testing tools like Memtest86 and Memtest86+, which boot directly and bypass other potential hardware and software issues such as bad drives, as well as other testing tools like Prime95 (for CPU testing), Unigine Heaven (Windows, macOS, and GNU/Linux), and Geeks3D Furmark (popularly known as the fuzzy doughnut; Windows/Wine); both of these latter tests are for GPUs.  It is quite common to leave a system on for several days with one these stress tests running to make sure that it is stable.  Hardware monitors can tell a user if their system is too hot or is having driver problems, as well as more mundane things like what their memory profile and CPU frequency are, or simply what USB devices are connected.

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