Sometimes people make simple things very complex. As long as he regularly backup his work he could be using an old machine with no issues. Why does he need to backup a vm image, why encrypt it? I imagine you think he should be uploading the encrypted vm image to the cloud... Writers been doing without for centuries. But then again, what do I know... I drive a car made in 1980, a motorcycle from 1962 and use a terminal (vt52 compatible) I made out of an MDA monitor and AT keyboard...
simondotau|4 years ago
Whereas a VM backup means you can rehabilitate a functioning computer for the author with all of their data and __all__ of their esoteric configuration nuances in a matter of minutes. They can effectively have their computer reappear in front of them using any commodity hardware available off-the-shelf from any large town in Western civilisation—no need to rummage around your local community to track down esoteric, period-correct hardware components.
I don't think cloud backups are strictly necessary but given the size of a DOS virtual machine in its entirty, why the hell not? What are we talking about here, one or two megabytes after compression? That's less than one JPEG from a smartphone.
> I drive a car made in 1980
Don't crash.
AndresNavarro|4 years ago
That's good advice in any vehicle :)
I think you are missing my point. I only say just because something is available doesn't meant you should use it. Life is not always about minimizing risk, or effort or maximizing productive output.
You can (should) do offsite backups, and even if you don't life doesn't end if you lose some of your work. Not everyone needs to rebuild their setup in milliseconds. If my house burned down my custom configuration would be the last of my worries don't know about you.
But, well. To each their own.
unknown|4 years ago
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