The importance of backing up
Sometimes I am called to restore a faulty machine because the hard drive has failed or software has become corrupted. Generally I try to find out it there is anything in the
machine that ought to be saved. If so, I take an Iomega Zip drive which is really a glorified
floppy disc of 100Meg capacity that I can connect to the computer and hopefully retreive the required data.
Then the fun starts. Where is what you want to save? The answer is often 'I don't know'.
So literally an hour later we might have saved what through good administration would
have taken five minutes.
Due to scenarios like this I usually try to instil on customers and friends good procedures.
I would suggest that knowing how vulnerable your data can be, and the possibility that even
your HDD can go wrong you stick to a good procedure for back-ups.
Question is what is a good procedure?
I tend to back-up data files simply by dumping them onto another machine (I have a small
network), and an occassional copy to a CD.
Nowadays you could use a CD-burner or an external hard drive since the price of these has dropped considerably. An internal second hard drive is useful. However do bear in mind that if your machine develops a power supply problem, such faults often 'take out' other bits of your machine and the hard drives could be the ones. Other back-up possiblities include a variety of memory cards and sticks but these as really not suitable for long-term storage.
One thing is important - structure your data within the machine.
I have a folder called Alldata which means that it appears towards the top of the Windows
Explorer listing. I then have sub-folders for members of the family such as Ernest, Tom, Dick, Harry etc.. What Tom, Dick and Harry decide to do within their folders is up to them.
In fact I actually have a whole series of folders such as Allwork, Allzips etc., and one called AllTech.
The important thing is that other users of your computer understand that you will only back up the Allxxx folders and their contents - if they have not saved their work there, then it is likely to get lost should some catastrophe occur!
You should also create an extra folder (or sub-folder within Alldata) and call it say, AllTech. In it you can stick copies of lists that other programs tend to keep to themselves such as bookmarks, address books, digital certificates and possibly cookies. Most programs do have an export/import function for such things. With some web browsers such as Netscape/Mozilla is it easy to change the path used by the program. Thus your favourite list, addressbook, history etc., can exist within the AllTech folder. Since AllTech is copied regularly as part of your back-up strategy, you never have to remember to deliberately export such items from the programs themselves.
Unfortunately, I understand that Internet Explorer and Outlook - neither of which I use - do not seem to offer a simple means of changing the default folders. If I do find out how to do this and the procedure is relatively straight forward, I will incorporate it in this page.
To my mind it is important to keep file names to less than nine unspaced characters consisting of letters and numbers only. The reason is that should your machine croak, the only way to revive it might be by using a (very) old copy of DOS from the floppy drive. Old DOS does not like long names, spaces and various punctuation characters.
If you are the only machine user, why not use the existing My Documents folder? My Documents fails my test on two counts - it has a space and the folder name is too long. There are however certain programs that use My Documents as the default and this cannot be permanently changed. Just to be on the safe side I have moved the My Documents folder to within Alldata.
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Page last modified on 11th July 2006 - some updates