I’m working on a project that involves about 75 Word documents, which I keep in a single folder. My back-up system so far has been three floppies that hold 120mb. I keep two of them off-site. After each work session, I copy the entire folder onto one of the floppies, and then take it to the off-site and pick up one of the others. That way, I never would lose more than one session’s work if the hard drive crashed or the place burned down.
But floppies are pretty old technology now, and I’ve got a new MacBook that doesn’t have a floppy drive. Is there a simpler way to do back-ups - onto the internet somehow?
You could use a flash memory device or store them on SendSpace, YouSendIt, or something similar online. I’m not sure if giving URLs here woudl be appropriate, but you can easily guess them or do a google search.
These are free services (or at least have free options), but they don’t guarnatee permanent storage. You however, only seem to be needing it for a day or so.
A flash drive also a thumb drive. It is a small device that plugs directly into the USB port of a computer. It looks like another drive. They can store a lot more than a floppy. The linked one stroe 512 Mbyte or about 350 floppies for $10. I have seen 4 packs of 256 Mbyte for around $10 at costco.
You could also get a gmail account and mail your self a zipped copy of the directory every day and things would be backed up on google. I think yahoo and hot mail can also have attachments of around 10 Mbyte which is about 7 floppies so you should be OK with any of the free web mail options.
There are rewriteable CD-ROMs(CD-RW), but you only get a limited number of writes, and your CD burner must be compatible(I don’t believe that they’ve made burners that can’t handle CD-RWs for several years).
Your new MacBook has two USB ports on the side. Go to any office supply or electronics store, and buy yourself 3 $10 flash drive. They plug right into the port, and show up on your screen as small hard drives. Drag your folder over to the drive icon to copy it, pull the flash drive out of the port, and take it home.
Doing this is as easy as using a floppy.
If you go with CD’s, sooner or later you’ll have to contend with the inevitable drive burnout. My Mac is 2 years old, and just yesterday the damned CD drive refused to burn a disc and complained of a hardware error. Now I have to go and buy a new drive. A couple three years seems a typical lifetime for for these things. OTOH, I’ve never had a flash drive problem.
Yup, another vote for flash drive. I keep mine in the port on the front of my box. Every night after I finish working on files for the day, I copy the day’s active client folders to the flash drive. (This is in addition to my nightly full/incremental backup to an 80GB external drive.) Instant backup of hot work.
The advantage to CD’s (especially write once ones) is that you can date them and have many versions of your work saved in increments in a fairly reliable media. I am not sure what you consider expensive but CD-R 50 packs can be had for $12 or so (about $0.25 a CD-R).
If you are getting 120mb on a floppy then I’m impressed
A standard 3" PC floppy holds about 1mb
Personally I would go down the CD route, using write only CDs, take them home and leave them at home. Those thumb drives are pretty useful, mainly for getting stuff from one machine to another.
If I were you I would have at least two backup strategies, but the main advantage of a pile of CDs is that you have an incremental archive of your work, which can be useful.
Another thing, best to have another machine at home and restore your work onto it, and then check that it is all there.
Depending on the duration of the project, I agree with the suggestions for daily backups to one of five USB flash drives in rotation, and weekly backups to CD-R.
Presumedly the documents in question are company proprietary or similar. Talk to your IT department or legal department before you use any Internet service to hold your backups.
Since you mention a Macintosh, Apple has built-in backup with their mac.com (aka dotmac) website, which also includes other benefits (e.g. synching amongst multiple computers, publishing your iCal calendar and address book on the web, etc.) It’s expensive though. If you decide that the USB flash drive doesn’t do everything you need, you can look at the dotmac option - it’s well integrated with the Mac OS.
While I generally like Apple’s stuff, there are some problems with .Mac backups. I wouldn’t consider it to be a viable backup solution at this time, hopefully they’ll improve it to usual Apple standards sometime in the future. The iDisk access is pretty slow sometimes, and .Mac costs $99 a year. iDisk is pretty good for what the OP wants to do, you access it just like a regular disk. For the relatively low volume of info transferred, it’s probably okay. The sticking point is the cost. You do get other stuff besides just online disk space, though, as you pointed out.
It’s probably better to use flash drives for regular CYA backups. Burned CDs are good if you need access to incremental backups stretching back for a while. Just don’t trust them to last more than about 5 years. If you need offsite archiving over a network, the Google mail trick or dedicated file archive service would be good. Archive services can be expensive and may be overkill depending on how important the files are to you though.
Just a quick note about flash drives and Macs… My wife just bought an iBook and so I got her a 2 Gbyte flash for doing backups (along with burning to CD-R’s) The first time she tried to click and drag a folder to the drive, it got about 5% into the process, running verrrrry slowly, then stopped with an error that a file name was too long. It turns out that the flash drive was formated as a FAT-16 disk. After a bit of poking around I found that the built-in Disk Utility program can convert the drive to various flavours of MAC formats. I choose the most basic option (sorry, don’t have the iBook handy to look up what it’s called) and after about 30 seconds the flashdrive was converted. We tried to copy the files again, (about 55 Mbytes worth) and the transfer was so fast that at first neither of us realized that it had happened.
I’ve been using the Imation Super Disk, with a storage capacity of 120 mb. If I recall correctly, it was recommended to me by our own Arnold Winklereid lo these many years ago, when I asked a similar question here on the Dope.
They’ve worked well for the past 7 years (thanks, Arnold!), but as the link indicates, Imation has discontinued the technology and if my Imation drive ever fails, I likely won’t be able to read the data, so I’m looking for new options.
Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone - I’ve found it very helpful. I’m thinking the flash drive option works best for my work habits. (I don’t need the incremental record, just the most current, so flash may be better for me, with the occasional CD just in case of a real disaster, as Scuba_Ben suggests.)
Nope - a free lance project I’m doing on my own time, on my own computer, at home.
