Death to POP/IMAP clients
January 17, 2005If you’ve been using personal computers long enough — say, five years — you’re likely to already have lost a hard drive to a crash. To make matters worse, electronic devices have this critical-moment detector that triggers a failure in that device just when you need it most. In my case, the triggers went off just at deadline time. I was lucky the first time because I was able to borrow my brother’s Mac and dash off the article. But I digress.
Any other device that dies — your monitor, modem, printer, even your system board — you can easily replace and the only downtime is the time it takes to replace that device. Not so with the hard drive. You have to restore your OS, your applications, and your data from backup. And if you’re like most users, you have a backup, if at all, only of your data, so you have to reinstall your system and applications software, then set your preferences.
