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I've been helping an acquaintance of mine with her Mac, in trade for
pieces of her lovely art glass. I've helped her set up printers and
organize her email and find someone to maintain her website. I've
helped her put images into Flickr so she can point to them in the glass
artist forum (which allows links but no pasted images).
We were talking about backup, and it became clear that she is the one
user in a zillion who genuinely doesn't need to back up her computer.
She doesn't write documents. In two years she's written three or four
documents on her computer. She prints them out when done. She only
found the Save command in her word processor a couple of months ago.
She has lots of email, but she prints out the few important ones she
needs to keep.
There are photos of her glass work on her computer, but the photographer
gives her backup CDs and has additional backups at his office.
When I asked her if she would mind losing all her email, she said no.
The important ones were printed out and she would soon get lots more
email.
This is an intelligent, functioning artist and musician who uses her
computer primarily for the web and email. She doesn't need to learn how
to use iPhoto to put images on the web. Flickr does just fine for her.
It was a good reminder to me that my assumptions about what every
computer user needs (whether she knows it or not) are wrong. Edge cases
are real. We don't ALWAYS know better.
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