Mental Meanderings

The Virtue of Backing Up

Ok, how many of you are already going, What The? Well in this, the computer age, the trust Backup is one of the most vital tools a computer user can ever make use of. While 98% of the time you'll wonder why you bothered, 2% of the time you'll be offering your first child to the CD Rom Gods in thanks.

So, some of you are still wondering what I'm talking about aren't you? Hands up if you store some of your writing, work, favorites, email, etc. direct to your computer? Ok, pretty much everyone should have their hands up, because the fact is, saving email or favorites to disk every time would be a pain in the donkey (that's, um, ass btw, I have a five year old, have to keep things clean. )

Ok, hands up if you save your commonly used files to CD at least every week? Huh? One, two, zero? How about every month? Mmmm, not very many hands. How about every six months? *shakes head sadly* This doesn't look too good people.

Let's try another test. Hands up if you've owned a PC longer than a year and have for one reason or another had to have it repaired? *nods head* Yes, as I suspected, nearly everyone. Hands up if you've had to have the hard drive completely reformatted? I feel your pain people, I feel your pain.

So Backing Up. Basically creating a backup would be taking everything from one drive and storing it to another medium. Some people back up their hard drive to another external hard drive. (Or sometimes even an internal one) Of course storing the entire contents of your HD is rather tedious and bulky and for the most part, if you have original disks for your programs (ie. legal) and you save your downloads to a folder you shouldn't need to backup windows or all your installed games or programs.

Instead, you might have lots of files you've created in your My Documents. My Music. My Pictures. etc. Maybe you don't have a Windows Operating System but you probably have files you've created and stored in a folder on your computer. These are often fairly small. Note: Small these days can get to a few MB but most files tend to be less than 1MB.

Some of these files you could store to a good old 3.5 inch floppy disk. Of course, with so many electronic items in your home containing magnets and thus, magnetic fields, 3.5 inch floppys are a risky bet. Accidentally leave your floppy on your VCR, DVD player, Monitor etc. and it's by by backup. These days there are other options, flash drives, zip drives, memory cards, etc. These can be great too but you still must beware magnetic fields.

I find my most trusty medium for backing up is the CD Rom. They store a lot of information 750MB is an average I've found available and reasonably priced (so that you can buy lots of them). Most computers come with a CD player and many with a CD writer as standard.

Now to back up. Grab all the files you commonly use or have created (even your story that you wrote last year but haven't looked at again) and copy to disk. Label your disk, store away someplace safe. This is a backup and you can now weed some of your old files from your hard drive and know that you still have them.

Well, I've gone on and on about the virtue of backing up. But the interesting part of todays blog is still to come. Today, I found that 2% reason that backing up is so fantastic. I back up every month. My favorites, my websites (I program web sites), my writing, my music, my pictures, my downloads, my saved games, etc. I back it all up to a disk (usually all fits on one disk). My last backup was in August.

I was working on Ipseitys, anyone who's read back in my blog might remember that this is the new Role Playing web site I'm currently working on. Anyway, I'd loaded up a file and was making some changes because I needed another that was almost identical. Anyway, I'd cleared out the majority of the code I didn't need for this new page and put wrote the code I did need. I clicked save and was a very happy camper when the code loaded and worked perfectly.

OMG!!! I forgot to SAVE AS and just saved this new file over the top of my old one. The old one was some complex programming I did back in August. Fingers crossed, prayers to all the major deities and especially to the Sisters of Fate. Pulled out my archives (this is what I call my back ups) and plugged the disk in.

*sighs in relief* It was there, the file I had lost, safely backed up on disk and ready to restore to my current work. Hours of programming restored in seconds after a silly little mishap that can happen at any moment.

Thus is the virtue of backing up. And having waxed poetic about this rather insignificant topic, I go to create Septembers back up. G'night everyone, and if you haven't done so recently, please, make a backup of your vital files. You never know when a mishap might occur to destroy them forever.