You've NEVER backed up your files? WHY THE HELL NOT?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A friend (and fellow freelance writer) of mine just came to me in a panic. She and I have the same model computer, and she was desperate to know whether I had a boot disc.

“Well, of course my computer didn’t come with a boot disc any more than yours did,” I said, “but I made the Windows installation discs, of course, and we can boot yours off those. What’s the problem?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I can’t get past the Safe Boot screen when I turn mine on; everything I try just takes me in an endless useless loop and my ENTIRE LIFE is on that computer and I am doomed doomed doomed DOOMED.”

“Okay, sweetie, just calm down, okay? My discs are right here, and we can see what we can retrieve. Besides, it’s not your ENTIRE life on the computer.”

“Well, maybe, but certainly my entire DISSERTATION. Everything I’ve written, all the research–it’s on the hard disc. And all my CLIENT FILES. Every open story I have and all the research is on the hard drive to. I can’t get to any of it and if I don’t figure out a way to get to it I’m utterly, utterly, utterly FUCKED.”

“Wait–you don’t have any backups of files you created?”

“No.”

“What about your thumb drives? Remember when we went to Office Max and a bought a couple back in June?”

“I never actually use them, except for ReadyBoost?”

“Didn’t you just borrow some recordable CDs from Kim the Rhymer? about a week ago?”

“I just have music on them.”

“Yahoo Briefcase? I know I showed you how to use that.”

“No, I just have pictures from my vacation on there.”

“So you’re saying that you’ve spent the last year working on your dissertation, the culmination of your academic career, and though you have at least three easy and obvious ways to back up the files necessary for that work to come to triumph, you didn’t use any of them?”

“I didn’t think the computer would stop working! I mean, it cost hundreds of dollars! It shouldn’t just stop working!”

:rolleyes:

Okay, everybody, repeat after me. It is not a question of IF a given hard drive will stop working. It is a question of WHEN it will. If you’re lucky and change computers every year, you may be able to dodge the issue. But really–thumb drives are CHEAP. Blank DVDs are CHEAPER. Blank CDs are ALL BUT FREE. Yahoo! Briefcase is ACTUALLY FREE. There is NO REASON NOT TO BACK UP YOUR DAMN FILES.

I feel better now.

2

Thank you.

I back up my Mac’s hard drive to a Time Capsule external drive, with a master backup done once, then incrementals every hour.

This came in very handy when I had a new 300-gig hard drive put in my laptop; I just booted off my OS install disc and restored everything to the new drive from the backup. Took all of three minutes to set up (and six hours to copy).

Excuse me… I need to go check on my work computer.

3

Amen.

And while we’re on the topic…

Who spends hours working on a file and doesn’t hit that convenient little Save icon once during all that time? One of my coworkers was having a royal hissy fit the other day because Excel crashed on her and she lost a whole day’s work at 4pm… work that she was supposed to have finished by 5pm.

The save button is your friend. Use it.

4

Autosave is also a good idea. I wish that more programs supported it, or that it could be made a system function somehow.

5

Oh, I do that, when I’m working in Word. Autosave is your friend. I wouldn’t try in any program lacking that feature, though.

6

Yep if you’re working on something, it should be second nature to just hit Alt, F, S once in a while to save your document. Then when something inevitably goes wrong you’ll only lose a few minutes of work instead of hours.

7

I keep an open spreadsheet that I have to continually update, and save it at the end of every column. Every time.

8

I have to admit, I don’t back up my files, much. But if my computer crashes one of these days, I’ll be annoyed but not crushed.

And I don’t have anything near as important as a dissertation on it–if I did, I’d save it to my hard drive, get a dedicated thumb drive to save it on, and send it to myself via gmail or something so that there was another copy not dependent on my laptop being physically present to access.

9

From which I infer you don’t have work or important education files on it. In that case you’re understandable; I only back up important files myself. And, of course, I have a windows disc.

Can anyone explain the thought process of people like my friend?

10

Skald, did she manage to get her files back?

If it’s just a problem with Windows booting, rather than a complete hard drive crash or total system corruption, then the files are most likely just sitting on the hard drive. Try downloading and burning a live Linux CD like Knoppix or Ubuntu, boot the computer from it, and she should be able to copy the important files to a USB key or external hard drive.

My wife had a minor scare a few weeks before she handed her dissertation in. She was working on it about 16 hours a day, and then on morning her laptop simply refused to turn on. Nothing. She was pretty freaked out.

I had set up a home wireless network which gave her access to my desktop’s hard drive, and had told her to back up her files to my computer, and to a USB key, each day. It would have taken all of 30 seconds each evening. Of course, she hadn’t backed anything up for well over a week, and she had done a LOT of work in that week.

Luckily, it turned out that the problem with her laptop was only power related. Her battery was so dead that it would not even pass a charge from the power cord to the computer. Her files were all fine, and while we waited a few days for the new battery to come in, we popped her laptop hard drive in an external enclosure and copied all her files to my desktop. But i think that scare taught her a good lesson in backing up.

11

No, I managed to get her files back. I’ve been ungoobering her hard disc while posting.

12

One word: Mozy.

Quick, simple and easy automatic backups. Free, up to 2 Gigs – which should be plenty for your data files (not counting music).

13

How old is your friend to never had a machine crash on her? Hell, my father in law, who is over 90, backs up religiously. He learned back when he had a DOS machine and wondered what format c: did. :smack:

My wife backs up over the net to some service because she didn’t trust herself to back up to my external drive often enough. I don’t do all that much vital on my home machine, anything that is important gets backed up 2 different ways. I usually mail work stuff back to work as soon as I do anything useful.

At work we have thin clients, so backups are not an issue. My computer dying is less of a nuisance than my cellphone dying.

14

I’ve got about 60 gigs on Mozy already (lots of RAW photo files, which are about 8MB apiece). It’s taking forever to upload everything.

15

What should one save when one makes a backup?

Are there any system files, or would a backup disc just be for pics, songs, saved games, writings in progress and suchlike? I’ve always wondered…

16

I have the pay version too and it takes a week or so to upload that much but it does it in the background which doesn’t seem to cause any problems for me. I needed an image of lots of files about a month ago and it worked just fine. Incremental uploads nightly or less should go quickly.

17

What a FUCKING MORON. I hope this has been a lesson to her.

I am a big believer in full backups rather than picking and choosing files. In the event of a major crash, there’s always something you forgot to grab; better to grab it all. Disk space is cheap.

Better yet, use Save As to save multiple versions at certain checkpoints. That way, if you make a major error or a file gets corrupt, you can always go back to an earlier version.

I’m a copyeditor and this is de rigueur for electronic files. Some people do it by date, and/or by timestamp throughout the day. Most files I work on take less than a day, so my system goes something like this:

3 folders:
Original: All original unedited files go here, unchanged, so I can always refer back to them.
Working: Files in progress, duh. Folders within for each chapter in the book.
Final: The final completed file for each chapter.

For each chapter, I have a folder in the Working folder. File management goes like this:

Open original file and save as “ch 01 ready to prep” in Working chapter folder. (I’ll omit “ch 01” from now on for brevity.)
Save “ready to prep” as “prepping.”
Work on “prepping”: run file cleanup macros, etc.
Save “prepping” as “ready to typemark.”
Save “ready to typemark” as “typemarking.”
Work on “typemarking”: insert formatting codes for the typesetter.
Save “typemarking” as “ready to read.”
Save “ready to read” as “first pass reading.”
Work on “first pass reading”: the main substantive editing pass.
Save “first pass reading” as “first pass done.”
Save “first pass done” as “second pass reading.”
Work on “second pass reading”: do cleanups noted during first pass, make second full edit pass.
Save “second pass reading” as “second pass done.”
Save “second pass done” as “cleaning up.”
Work on “cleaning up”: review edits and queries, strip out my tools/formats, format the file as the client wants to see it.
Save as final file in Final folder.

When I’m done, I delete all the versions ending in “-ing” (the “working” versions) in the Working folder, leaving only “ready to prep,” “ready to typemark,” “ready to read,” “first pass done,” and “second pass done.” Then the Working chapter folder goes into the project archive. If I need to go back, I know exactly what has been completed in each file.

18

It only matters what is important to you. You can Ghost your whole system which images everything. Some people don’t care about that. You might not care about your bookmark collection but know that your family photos, e-mails and Word docs are irreplacable. It depends one how much time you want to spend and the method you want to use.

A single DVD is often enough for some people. I do a full DVD backup, a double external hard drive backup, dual internal hard-drives, and a full web backup nightly (Mozy). The web backup is the most important because I can get the files from anywhere and it is risky to keep physical backups in the same place as your computer in case of theft, fire or other dangers. My computer is my life as well. I got a new one about 6 weeks ago and I am still restoring files daily. It was a very big deal for me.

19

I’m like Eureka. Very very little of my work is so critical that a complete failure would cost me more than a day’s time to recreate. If something it critically important (like a dissertation), hell’s yeah I’d have copies on disc, paper, etc.

But this is one thing that kinda bothers me about computers. I don’t know that Im not technophobic - just pretty techno-ignorant, and extremely techno- uninterested. But as someone who is terribly reliant upon computers but not terribly interested in knowing how they work or putting in the time and effort to learn about maintaining them, it sort of pisses me off that I have to assume the thing is unreliable. You talk of how easy it is to back-up. Well, it does require that you set up, organize, maintain, and perhaps occasionally purge a second system of files. Which is not something I’m dying to do. And then when you get everything saved on one storage device, the industry comes out with another. Hell, years back I remember wordperfect backed everysingle file up in a bk! file even a Luddite like I could easily find. Really happy they improved the product such that I now have no idea where backup files exist on my computer (or even if they exist). :rolleyes:

It just seems counter-intuitive that they warn that NOTHING is every truly deleted on your computer or the internet, yet OTOH a casual keystroke on my part or a hiccup in the system could erase my entire existence. If the damned things HAVE to be so unreliable, they should be able to construct them so they automatically provide their own insurance. Would be a hell of a lot more valuable to me than 99% of the bells and whistles they jam into every hardware/software “enhancement.”

20

I use Acronis Trueimage and two external USB drives. I just back up everything, why take the chance of forgetting something? I just leave one drive plugged into the computer and have scheduled daily incremental and weekly full backups. After the weekly backup I swap backup drives with an offsite location.