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Awww.. Mom... Do I have to?

May 18, 2008

Growing up I remember dreading house cleaning day. I would get my list of assigned chores and drag my feet. (I'm sure that I was not the only one doing this.) As an adult, it is not only the household chores that can get us down, but the new digital chores that have crept into our lives as well. We have to make sure our firewall, spyware blocker, antivirus software, etc. is all up-to-date. In order to ensure we have up-to-date security, most programs automatically take care of this for us, ensuring we don't forget or (even worse) ignore it. We have to check that we occasionally clean out all the garbage that collects in our temporary files and we even have to "empty the recycle bin" every-so-often. We're probably pretty good about that because it takes little time and effort on our part.

However, along with these other chores, we must also remember to back up our files to protect them. This can be a tedious process, but we talked with a company this week that hopes to have found a solution for our wanting to sneak away from this chore. ClickFree has a portable hard drive device that when plugged into a USB port automatically detects and copies all files to itself without the user doing anything. For an even lower tech model, they have DVDs specifically for photo and video files, data files, and music files that when placed in the DVD-R drive automatically detect that specific type file and copy it to the DVD. We kept looking for the part where this technology became hard to use, but didn't discover it. Hopefully with this we'll get better about following through on our digital chores without the whining.