Back Up Before You Trip Up...
Melanie McDonald
Thanks to a suggestion by our good Fayetteville friend, photographer Cramer Galimore, I want to share some thoughts about backing up important data and documents. Among computer users, there is probably no more simple task whose neglect leads to more complicated misery than the failure to back up.
You might be amazed at the number of people who bring computers to us for warranty work or repair who have no backup of their data stashed in some safe place at home. Users of critically important accounting software tell us their only copy of records for the last ten years are on the machine that stands before us with hard drive problems. Writers have lost novels, designers have lost unique art and layouts worth thousands because the hard drive went bad and there are no backups. Even folks engaged in the more simple tasks of email correspondence, lodge and church minutes and records, or home inventories may have to recapitulate hours of work because no backups were made.
Visualize the contents of your own hard drive. What is there that is irreplaceable? Quickbooks data? Documents you have compiled? Bookmarks of your favorite net spots? Mail from the family or for business that you would hate to lose? Pictures of the grands?
You don’t have to leave all of this information up to luck and the accommodating behavior of your computer. You can back it up! Consider some of these backup methods and see which fits your situation best.
An external hard drive can be purchased for less than $100 and can be plugged into your computer’s USB or Firewire port (check the requirements of the drive you are considering) and you can swing over key documents and data at the end of each day’s computing. Those of you using Mac OSX would also be well advised to backup your entire home section of the computer (the little house with your name on it) so that you have mail, bookmarks, pictures, music, and so forth in one fell swoop.
If you have a superdrive, you can burn a CD or a DVD (note: CD-R or CD-RW and DVD-R) of whatever you wish to backup. The media is not expensive, so why not backup weekly or daily?
Or consider adding an external Zip drive if your CPU does not include such a drive. Investment in a 250 mg or greater Zip drive and some Zip disks can facilitate frequent and quick backups on disks that can be written to repeatedly.
I am not going to suggest you invest in an external floppy drive since such drives are pretty much among the dinosaurs of computer gear and because a floppy does not hold enough to make the investment of time and money worthwhile.
So now you have selected a medium or two for your backups, have reviewed your documents and data, and have a feeling for how often you should backup some of the items on your hard drive. If you follow through, will you be safe now?
Consider the backup process of my assistant at MacTutor: she makes three copies on two different types of media for every important item she backs up. Aside from being a little mad and incredibly anal, she does have some logic with her, for no media lasts forever or is impervious to matters of weather, accidents, and plain old fate.
The life of a CD or DVD that has been written to is said to be 50 to 100 years by many manufacturers. Users, however, tend to assume five to ten years barring catastrophe, scratches from lying about outside the jewel case, or being tossed into a humid car for days. (You can read all about it here at the Cornell University library site: http://www.library.cornell.edu/iris/tutorial/dpm/terminology/strategies.html.)
Although the archivist at the National Archives has a low opinion of Zip drives in terms of their longevity (check it out in PDF form here: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/ advice/pdf/selecting_storage_media.rtf), this type of drive can serve the casual user well if the material is not expected to last forever AND if the disks are taken care of carefully.
So why, you may ask, would my assistant make multiple backups on different media? She has learned from sad experience that CD’s can be scratched even when cared for lovingly. Zip disks can fail. Life is filled with nasty little accidents that can bring grown men to weep in frustration. But a set of accounting data saved on a couple of CD’s and one zip disk is always going to be there unless the angels of doom carry out a holocaust in your office OR you are incredibly careless with the media.
McDonald, president and CEO of MacTutor & Services in Southern Pines, is an apple authorized service provider whose business includes technical and networking services as well as system and software tutoring and design consulting. She can be reached at 910.246.2150 or mobbs@pinehurst.net.
