Setting up a PC for a tech-illiterate user

[Mateo Batkis]

Hello forum I have been tasked with building a new PC for my Mom, I lover dearly but she is the definition of an IT nightmare. On her last 3 PC's she has crashed them and downloaded malware on the daily but yet is always scared of using her PC because it might break the next time she uses it. She has no understanding of data management so this time i'm doing it right. On her New PC i'm building it from scratch so no cross contamination happens. Ultimately I want to know what your views on some of my disk management ideas are. Idea 1. Put the Os on a 120gb SSD and get her two 1tb HDD and set them up in raid 1. The benefit to this is that it will give her a fast OS and redundancy in her data storage (documents, pics, music Media gen, ect. will be on the R1 HHD's) but sadly doesn't protect the OS. My second plan is to get two 2tb HHDs and set them up in raid 1 (that way the Os is protected and the data is also secure, but sadly the OS load time wont be as fast). So what do you guys think, any suggestions on which rout i should take, or possibly a different one. So in shorthand (1SSD+2x1tbHHD in R1) VS. (2x2tb HHD in R1). Thanks in advance for all the help.

 

[BadAsAl]

How much data does she have? That will help determine the best course of action.
I personally would stay away from RAID, if things go wrong it can be really messy. And a good backup scenario negates the need for RAID1 anyway.

So assuming you have these:
120GB SSD
(1) 1TB drive installed internally to be used as primary data drive
(1) 1TB drive installed internally or via USB to be used as backup drive

If she has 750GB of data that needs to be protected for example, I would install only the SSD in the computer and install the OS and all the programs she will need. Then I would create a system image and store that on the 1TB backup drive. I prefer to have the backup drive attached as USB for this step but it should work if the drive is already installed. This way, if you need to rebuild you can do so from the image and have it back to how it was when first built. How you create the image depends on the OS, so you may need third party software to do it for you, I would Google for best imaging solution for your OS.

I would then install the 1TB primary data drive and the 1TB backup drive (either internal or make it an external USB drive) and move all her files and whatever data you want from the old computer to the 1TB primary data drive.

Finally I would either use Windows backup or a third party backup solution to continuously backup all her files from the SSD and 1TB primary data drive to the 1TB backup drive. Again, this depends on OS as some Windows versions do not have a suitable backup built in. There are several free backup software's out there that would work, or you can go with a paid one like Crashplan. Crashplan will also allow the added benefit of cloud storage so if there is a fire or flood or computer gets stolen, you will still have her data. Crashplan includes local backup as well, so you can set it up to backup all her data from the OS drive and the 1TB primary data drive to the 1TB backup drive continuously.

 

[hang-the-9]

Get a Chromebook for her to use. Simple, tough to infect, simple to wipe if anything breaks, storage can be mostly on the cloud.