Back Up Strategy x 2
Matthew Jadud at Sub Ubi Blog has responded to my query regarding writers and their computing habits with an in-depth discussion of back-up strategies for writers.
It’s a shame we did not get into this discussion a few weeks earlier. I learned early this week that a good friend, a published writer with two books out on the market, lost all of his data when his computer crashed. Confidently, he turned to his external hard drive — and, gosh!, he discovered that it had gone bad as well. Three years of work gone, even with a back-up strategy in place. That kinda underscores the importance of this discussion we’ve embarked upon.
Matt in his blog post walks through a series of steps, from simple to more elaborate, one might follow in backing up a career of writing data. He starts with CD and DVD discs and works through external hard drives right on up to online data storage. My own evaluation has followed these same steps exactly — with a few minor differences, which I’ll describe here. [First, however, you may wish to read Matt’s post — it’s long, detailed and somewhat technical, but it is extremely important to any serious writer.]
Over the last 10 years, my own computers have crashed often enough to justify my gray hair. The first time or two, computer specialists were able to chisel their way into my dying hard disk to recover the most essential data. Those experiences led me to make periodic backups to CD discs, and later on to DVD’s. Thank goodness for that! I’ve rescued my work several times from such discs. And even just last week, I went back to a five-year-old disc to recover a software installation program that is no longer available online.
Somewhere along the line, I began to develop a strategy, rather like Matt’s, of clustering my essential data in my folder hierarchy. I have labelled my critical data folders beginning with a number — such as “1-writing,” “1-data” and “1-backup.” The numeral forces the folders to the very top of my folder structure, which I view in Windows Explorer. I have about 6-7 folders so numbered, clustering all the files that most urgently require back-up. [At some point, I’ll do a separate post to help writers less familiar with Windows to perform this task.]
Then with every program that handles critical data, I assure that either the program will automatically make a back up copy to one of these top-level folders. OR, if the program lacks such a back up mechanism, I will instruct the program to save its one copy of data to such a top-level folder. With this strategy, all of my critical data is bunched together, making it much easier to handle.
With the data thus bunched together, I follow several back up steps.
FIRST, I periodically make back up copies onto DVD’s, usually two of them, one for my principal residence, another for my other residence — thus two copies in different locations. Other writers might keep separate copies at work and at home.
SECOND, I have bought a portable hard disk with double the memory capacity as my laptop — 120 gigs for the external disk, 60 for my laptop. I set up the free back up program SyncBack to back up my cluster of back-up folders every 30 minutes. The program first backed up all of the data, and subsequently, it backs up only new and changed files.
THIRD, maybe twice a month and certainly whenever I travel with my laptop, I manually back up the most critical data files onto a 2-gig USB memory stick by just dragging the data folders from my C:\ drive onto the USB stick. These devices are becoming quite inexpensive, especially if you keep an eye open for sale prices. I bought two of them for less than $40 each. I also have a little protective carrier that hangs around my neck, which I use whenever I’m travelling. If the computer is stolen, lost or crashes, I still have my data with me to use in internet cafes and business centers.
FOURTH, I have set up two online back up facilities.
Mozy offers free online back up for up to 2 gigs. My critical data currently is less than that. This facility requires download of a program to handle the back up; I have it set to back up files “incrementally,” meaning only new and changed files. After several months of usage, I like the way this program works, backing up several times a day and notifying me about the process. Sometimes, the program has difficulty making connection with the remote server, maybe because of heavy traffic. Consequently, I sometimes manually call up the program and instruct it to make an immediate back up. Mozy nags me if 7 days have passed without a successful back up — that’s a comforting feature. Mostly, I’m very satisfied with this free service. The Mozy website also provides an informative table comparing it to its competitors [guess who wins] At some point, I’ll probably pay for upgraded storage space, which is reasonably priced at $4.95 a month.
I also use Carbonite, which also offers online back up. As it was the first such service I found that received good endorsements, I paid for unlimited space. I uploaded lots of my files, including mp3’s and years of professional photography. It took about 3 days to upload it all, a rather unnerving experience. Now it only updates new and changed files. Carbonite has a habit of being at work when I shut down, causing some extra shut-down steps when I’m in a hurry.
I must admit that I have not yet had to call on either of the online services to recover data. I have faith that the files are there to retrieve, but can’t prove it from experience.
There are many of these services coming online. Someday, I’m sure PC Magazine will do a full, comparative review. I’m eager to read such a review.
Putting such back up routines into practice is bothersome at first, but fortunately, over the past couple of years, costs of hardware and programs have become quite reasonable. I took my time, setting up one type of back up routine a month. But with my friend’s loss of three-years of work, I’m certain that the effort is worth it. All serious writers truly must do the same.
A FINAL COMMENT: There are many back up programs out there, some free, some quite expensive. Many of them back up into some archival format, such as .zip files or even a proprietory format exclusive to the back up software. I don’t like this type of back up, as it prevents pulling out single files — one must unzip the entire lot to retrieve just a single file. Instead, I look for back up programs that maintain the original, “native” format, which allow retrieval of individual files.
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Comments
[…] PageFour, as a default, saves its files in a rather obscure place. One must use Windows Explorer, or a similar program, to drill down through several layers of the “Documents and Settings†folder to find the files. Fortunately, the program allows for files to be placed in a user-defined location. As you will guess, if you’ve read earlier posts, I recommend that PageFour files be saved in a PageFour folder within a 1-BackUp folder [the numeral forces the folder to the top of Windows Explorer], along with other files essential to back up on a regular basis. […]
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[…] Tom responded to my post on keeping backups; between the two posts, I think there’s a nice combination of information. As he points out, my comments are quite technical. I do my best not to get caught in the details, but it sometimes comes with the profession. It is also interesting to compare the posts: Tom’s is more discursive, while mine was more analytical—focusing on the details and mechanisms by which you could backup your work, and very little on how those mechanisms might fit into a writer’s workflow. […]