I have a work puter and a home puter; many important files are on both. An easy trick for archiving and backing up: email files to yourself, using a web-based account like yahoo.
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer]
Yeah, well, my doomsday device rolls time back to 0.00000000000000000000000000001 second after the big bang and changes the matter-antimatter ratio to 1:1, thus not merely destroying the universe but preventing it from ever evolving.
[/QUOTE]
That only works if no one else does it first. That’s why my plans are backed up to two mirror universes (just in case).
[QUOTE=BrotherCadfael]
In my experience, every single user* who takes backup seriously has a story to tell. Once you’ve lost something significant through lack of backup, you tend to become fanatical about it.
In my case, it was a 2300-line assembly language program due at 8:00 am the next morning. I lost it about 7:00 pm, and had only a three-day old hard copy - and I had been working on it steadily for those three days. Did I mention this was the semester project, worth 50% of my grade?
I recreated the program, tightening up the code as I went, debugged it, verified that it worked, printed it out (1700 lines!) – and then walked to my 8:00 am class.
- as opposed to systems guys, for whom backup is part of the job.
[/QUOTE]
I bought a external drive twice the size of my desktop one, and made a disk image on it. The backup died first. :dubious:
[QUOTE=Silver Tyger Girl]
That only works if no one else does it first. That’s why my plans are backed up to two mirror universes (just in case).
[/QUOTE]
Mirrired or striped? Makes a difference, you know.
[QUOTE=MacTech]
I’ve lost count of the number of distraught customers I’ve had to “counsel” because they’ve never backed up and “my life is on that machine”, meh I have no pity for them, as I’m fond of saying, A lack of planning on YOUR part DOES NOT constitute an emergency on MY part
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=MacTech]
when I back up a customer’s machine (because they were too lazy/stupid/clueless to do so)
[/QUOTE]
Your real name wouldn’t happen to be Nick Burns , would it?
[QUOTE=Sunspace]
Mirrired or striped? Makes a difference, you know.
[/QUOTE]
If they were striped everyone would know they were mine, and then what kind of secret would that be?
[QUOTE=Silver Tyger Girl]
If they were striped everyone would know they were mine, and then what kind of secret would that be?
[/QUOTE]
At least you’re not using a separate parity universe…
I’ve never backed up my files because I don’t know how. Every now and then I’ll get a wild hair to make the attempt, and it inevitably churns to a halt in painful awkwardness, with some hapless electronics store clerk staring at me in perfectly justified perplexity because I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m even supposed to be asking about. I believe that some form of discs may be involved, or a drive, or possibly a stick. They have a surprising variety of discs at the electronics store, or at least they did when I was last there. There were -R discs and -RW discs and DVDs and CDs and pluses and minuses galore. They didn’t have one labeled, “Disc you need to back up your files,” though. Alas.
I’m endlessly delighted that my computer even continues to work on a daily basis. It’s magic. One time it stopped working, and I was forced to unplug the tall bit, put it onto a cart and take it over to the computer store, and they made it work again. If I’d thought about it at the time, I could have asked them, “While you’re at it, please assemble the necessary list of components that will enable me to ‘back up my files,’ and show me how to use them. Then I will buy them from you.” That would have been a good idea.
Someday I may do that thing, possibly the next time the machine breaks. It is unfortunately not very portable, which may have been an error. It would be so much easier if I could just hand the thing off to the technician whenever they ask me what type of Spling drive is in the K-Hoffer.
I just don’t get technology. Those brain parts are malformed or absent, I don’t know. I’m usually pretty good at reading, but technical instructions go ‘zip’ and ‘fleedly-dee’ and then go away entirely. I didn’t ask for the world to become all computers. I hate it.
Given the post above, maybe I can ask how to make a back-up disk for Windows. When I got my computer, I followed the directions on how to make a back-up disk, but somewhere along the way, I lost the disk. And I certainly don’t remember what I did.
Thanks for any help.
[QUOTE=Silver Tyger Girl]
That only works if no one else does it first. That’s why my plans are backed up to two mirror universes (just in case).
[/QUOTE]
Fool of a Thundercat! The first parallel reality split did not occur until 000000000000000000000000001 second after the Big Bang. Your mirror universes will not even hae existed yet.
I’m an IT guy and I’m paranoid about backups.
I have two external HDDs with backups on them, and there’s a Windows Home Server backup done every night.
Now that the data corruption bug has been fixed and there’s a 64-bit client, I can thoroughly recommend WHS.
I have a small network at home and back up each machine to the next one every week.
About a year ago a lightning strike took out one hard disk - and it took just a few hours to restore every single one of the thousands of files. 
So apart from backing up, add a ‘surge protector’ to your set-up. 
I only back up my photos and my Quicken. Everything else can be reinstalled, or downloaded again, or whatever.
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer]
Fool of a Thundercat! The first parallel reality split did not occur until 000000000000000000000000001 second after the Big Bang. Your mirror universes will not even have existed yet.
[/QUOTE]
:rolleyes: Silly boy. Don’t you know that a portion of those mirror universes then extended backwards in time* and thus were, for all intents and purposes, always there?
And just because I’m Thunderian, doesn’t mean I’m no Thundercat. Those smarmy do-gooders will get theirs!**
*I really wish I was better at techno-babble. I’m sure there’s some principle I could’ve thrown in there…
**And by get theirs, I mean Tygra will be the star of my harem. Oh yes… Lion-o on the other hand… Well, I haven’t come up with the appropriate torture yet. It rather depends on whether or not I can revive Jaga.
[QUOTE=Terrifel]
I’ve never backed up my files because I don’t know how.
[/QUOTE]
I recommend that you look into Mozy, as suggested by others in this thread. Backups of up to two gigabytes are free (more than that costs five bucks a month). But the free quota ought to be enough for your irreplaceable personal documents, photos and email. The program will automatically back up to an offsite store and it will even suggest what you want to back up. So once you install the program, you really don’t need to think about it too much.
But if you’re truly paranoid, you want to go through an exercise where you attempt to rebuild your system using the OS and program discs and the backups you’ve been doing. That way, you’ll discover what you’re not backing up but should. Every time I move to a new computer, it always takes me a few days to get everything set the way I like it. There are a bunch of little tweaks I need to make and these don’t get backed up. (So I try to make notes of all of these things.)
[QUOTE=mhendo]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Couldn’t agree more with this, having a CD version of Linux around saved me one time when my work laptop upped and died on me. I do back up often but it happened that it was close to the regular backup point and there was a file I really needed off of the laptop…that CD saved the day.
As far as backing up when writing your thesis goes, I was utterly paranoid when writing mine. Not only was I backing up to disks (using one of the earlier high capacity - at the time - Iomega drives) I was also making a separate copy of those backup disks to store at a friends house and at the labs…in case of a house fire! It became a regular event, meet up friend during the week…handover copies of backup disks. I’m sure they thought I was quite mad, I’m also sure that writing a thesis should count as a temporary insanity plee for actions taken during that time 
I think I have too many backups, considering that what I backup isn’t really that important. A handful of documents are present on two laptops, a work computer, a separate hard disk, a USB stick, my email account and in Google Documents (yeah, that might be overkill there). Music files and photos are on one laptop and the separate hard disk. I’ve also toyed with opening a Mozy account.
[QUOTE=Hippy Hollow]
Personally I don’t understand why more programs don’t have autosave for all open files, and just keep those files in a folder for a week or so. Last week Word kept crashing on me and I would lose a paragraph or two on the open docs. Pretty freakin’ annoying.
[/QUOTE]
See, this and subsequent posts emphasize my complaint with so much of computing. Even tho I use a computer every day (mainly for word processing and e-mail) so much of what has been posted in this thread is complete gibberish to me. Sure, I could figure out all kinds of external devices and additional programs to backup my stuff. But wht can’t the products be designed to do that for me? I have absolutely no interest in becoming an expert so that I can reliably use this tool.
What could be more basic of a need to every computer user - that their work is not unintentionally lost. Far more important that the countless bells and whistles that are added on each new launch. But you talk to any techie and they go on about programs you can download and equipment you can buy. I don’t want to download and add to my system. I just want the damn thing to do the most basic thing I want it to do.
Same way I have no interest in becoming a mechanic just to ensure that my car will start each time I want it to. So long as I take it in for regular maintenance I can be pretty sure I won’t be stranded - and it won’t become obsolete in a couple of years.
So little technology is designed for the least sophgisticated user who is solely interested in using it as a tool. Instead, it seems skewed toward the high-level user, who desires to figure out all of the subtleties and possible enhancements.
[QUOTE=Dinsdale]
So little technology is designed for the least sophisticated user who is solely interested in using it as a tool.
[/QUOTE]
General-purpose computers are finicky devices and I’m not certain that there’s any real way to hide the complexity without hiding the power.
However, I think that Apple attempts to do this to some degree more than other manufacturers. The iPhone and iPod touch would seem to be a strong example of this: they hide all the underpinnings–the OS and filesystem–while still allowing the user to customise them. And iTunes also backs them up. However, you still need another computer to connect them to. If Apple had a wireless backup service for these devices, like the Time Capsule for their computers, this might be closer to the kind of transparent background backup service we need.
Computers today are comparable to cars a hundred years ago, when every motorist had to know how to repair a flat tire, it was often a good idea to have a mechanic on hand, and travelling more than fifty kilometres was an adventure.
[QUOTE=Sunspace]
The iPhone and iPod touch would seem to be a strong example of this: they hide all the underpinnings–the OS and filesystem–while still allowing the user to customise them.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah - that kinda gets to my complaint. With so much technology everything is on the surface right off the bat. Heck, how many icons are on screen when you first fire up a word processing program? I’ve word-processed for more than a decade, and had little use for more than maybe 10 icons - open doc, save, print, cut, paste, bold, ital, underline… So why don’t they hide the icons for drawing, columns, etc., and leave it to people who want to do those things to enable them?
And don’t get me started on computers providing only electronic documentation…
I like your comparison to cars back in the day.