"The End," you type and click on the [Save] icon. There. The Great American Short Story is finally finished. Lights flash and your hard disk grinds...uh, oh. Hard disks are supposed to whir not grind. "Unable to Save 'Great American Short Story' Drive C: is unavailable," Windows ® informs you just before expiring into the Blue Screen of Death.
Backup to the rescue. You do have a backup, don't you? Well, you intended to make backups...sometime, but you've been so busy. We all know what good intentions are good for, and that particular road is very well paved in spite of the fact that nobody wants to use it.
If you aren't just a little bit scared by now, I'll have to return my Long Ridge diploma; but, hey, it really isn't all that bad. You're reading this right now, so your computer is still working. It's not too late to start making those dreaded but vitally important backups.
The basic idea is simple. A backup is just a copy. If you spill coffee on your newspaper, you can go buy another copy. If your five-year-old deletes everything on your hard drive, you can't just go buy another copy, and most states frown on buying and selling children as well.
The answer is to make copies, lots of copies; and make sure to keep some of them in safe places or at least different places, so you don't lose them all at once. If your house burns down, you can retrieve that copy from your sister's house, and you're back in business. There's a little more to it than that, but if you understand that, then you know what the basics are all about. They're about disaster recovery.
I've been using personal computers for almost 25 years, so I've had some experience with disaster. I've experienced all kinds of drive failures, OS meltdowns, and other types of catastrophic data loss. I've managed to avoid losing any great amount of my work, and I hope to give you the benefit here of some of that experience. I've used most of the hardware and software I'll be mentioning, so I have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't. I'm not claiming to be perfect though, so feel free to modify things to make them work for you. Just be sure to test your solutions to be sure they really work.
This is for those of you who want to keep things simple. It's also a good place to start for everyone else. Get your hands on two floppies. On odd numbered days copy your original work to one floppy, on even numbered days copy to the other floppy. Backing up once a day is probably enough since most people can remember what they did yesterday, but make copies more often if you feel like it. Once a month check to make sure that you can read the files from the floppies.
You can make this even more secure by having a floppy for each day of the week, and by having two sets where you keep one set at some safe place and exchange the sets periodically. Keep each project in its own folder on your hard disk. That keeps things organized as well as making it easy to make the copies. Here are some pretty pictures to show you how it works in Windows XP ®.
Here I have created a new folder on the desktop for my current project, and I also have a shortcut to my floppy drive. To the right you can see I have both locations open as well as an index file that I keep on the floppy to tell me what it contains. I'm in the process of selecting the Details view in the Explorer window for the floppy. That lets me see easily which files are new and need to be backed up.
When you click on the Date Modified button as I've done here the files will be sorted by that field. Clicking again will sort them in the opposite direction. The little triangle at the end shows you which way they are sorted, and the column that it's in tells you what field the files are sorted on.
Select the changed files and drag them down to the floppy drive. Windows will politely ask if you really want to overwrite old copies of the files. If you do want to keep old versions, rename them before this step. Here I'm working on two different verions of my New Text Document with different slants for different markets. They started out the same but I renamed one when I decided to look at a different slant, so now I have two documents. My Old Text Document and Notes didn't change, so I don't need to copy them.
Once you finish a story print some paper copies and/or save some copies of the printed articles or books and keep them in a safe place or places. You can make a couple of special copies of your files on floppies and put them away somewhere. You don't need to keep copying files that don't change. In fact that's a bad idea. Sooner or later you or the computer will make a mistake and the files will become corrupt or unreadable and thus useless.
Most programs have a Save As dialogue that allows you to save copies in different formats and different places. Here I'm working in Microsoft Word. I select Save As from the File menu, chose the file type from the drop down list, and choose the location from the Save In drop down list. Of course you can make changes to the name also as part of this process, and Word now is using this copy instead of the one you originally opened, so this save should be the last thing you do before quitting. You can always go back to your original using the file menu. Some friendly programs have a Save As Copy dialogue, which is more convenient for backup purposes.
The picture shows the three steps of the process with inserts on top of the original screen shot. Note that I have many choices of where to save my copy in the top insert.
Although it isn't strictly speaking a backup, you should also use your program's autosave feature to save the files that you are working on every fifteen minutes to an hour. This assures that any changes that you make to the file are actually written to disk.Word and many other programs also keep two copies of your files open to help with disaster recovery, and some create a backup file whenever you make changes to a file. All these features can be useful when you run into problems. Use your program's Help to get more details about the way that it implements these features.
There are many more details we could discuss, but the most important is how to decide exactly what to back up. The most critical things to copy are your own original works. You should always make copies of these. It's possible to replace your research without relying on personal copies, but if you have the space it will usually save you a lot of time to copy this material as well, particularly if you have made notes or organized it in some other way. In addition, if you have the space, keeping dated copies makes it easy to go back to a previous version whenever you decide that you need to do that.
For a book length project you may need several folders for notes and research as well as folders for each chapter. You can keep the manuscript as one document if you like, but do copy the individual chapters as text files. There are two main reasons that I recommend using text files rather than the native files produced by your word processor. Text files are smaller since they don't contain all the formatting information, and plain text files can be read by any word processing program on any computer. That may be very important if your computer dies on you. Of course it's a good idea to keep backup copies in the format of the program you intend to use them with, but for writers it's probably also a good idea to keep them as plain text files to make it easier to use them on another system without installing a lot of software. This is all up to you. It will probably only take a few seconds each day once you have it set up and a few minutes now and then to make sure the copies are actually legible.
One other specific item that may be of interest to most writers is E-mail. With Outlook you can copy your folders once you locate them, but individual letters can only be saved as HTML or in Outlook's native format, so you may want to use cut and paste to create text documents instead. Other mail programs are a bit more friendly. It's a very good idea to save your Address Book also. Wouldn't you really hate to be unable to contact an editor just because you lost her address. Use the Windows ® help system along with the program Help command to help you locate and backup your files. The Windows ® Search command may be helpful also. One thing that I often do is put any E-mail related to a given project into a text file in the same directory with my other notes.
There is plenty of backup software to help automate the copying for you. Windows even comes with a backup program, but it's so well hidden these days that most people can't find it. It isn't installed by default, so you need to make a special effort to install it. It isn't a very good program, and it's difficult to use, so I'd recommend something else for most people. There isn't much need for these unless you need to copy more than documents, but they do sometimes make things more convenient.
In the old days, when I started in computing, it was common to backup your entire hard disk. Hardly anyone does that anymore. It's easier to reinstall the programs from their originals and then recover your personal files from backups. Hard disks and program files are just too large to make it feasible to copy everything. You'd be spending all your time doing backups.
There are two types of backup that you can make with most software, a full backup, which copies everything, and an incremental backup which only copies the files that have changed since the last full backup. Using incremental backups saves some time, but it makes restoring the backups more complicated since you need to restore the last full backup first and then the incremental backups in order. Too complicated for most people.
I have some personal favorites. They are all shareware, and you can download them and try them out before you buy them. There are also some free programs available. Just do a Google search on "backup software" or "free backup software." Be aware that whatever software you choose you will need to spend some time learning how to use it. It may simplify things in the long run, but it will complicate them in the short run.
CopyTo is a 32-bit file synchronization and backup utility for Windows. You can use it to safely synchronize files between a desktop PC and a notebook PC, move files between the home and office with removable media,like ZIP or JAZ, or update multiple computers on a network, with the multiple folder settings.
I use this a lot, primarily for backing up to CD-R and CD-RW because it shows me what I'm going to be doing before I do it. The documentation is a little difficult, but the program is quite powerful. I recommend a lot of experimentation to see how things work before you start relying on it. You also need to rely on the Windows ® scheduler to do scheduled backups and that isn't exactly intuitive either. As the name implies it syncronizes the files in two locations, and as such, it can be used to automate the entire process that I laid out above.
Second Copy® is a backup product designed for Windows 9x/Me/NT4/2000/XP. It makes a backup of your data files to another directory, disk or computer across the network. It then monitors the source files and keeps the backup updated with new or changed files. It runs in the background with no user interaction, so once it is working you always have a backup of your data somewhere else.
I use this program to keep copies of things that change a lot. You can create profiles to do all kinds of copies at various times with the built in scheduler, so you don't have to remember to do them yourself. It doesn't work so well with CD-R and CD-RW media, since you always lose the space when the old file is overwritten. I prefer to use CopyTo for that since it can show me what I'm going to copy before I commit.
Handy Backup™ is an easy-to-use program designed for an automatic backup of your critical data virtually to any type of storage media including CD-RW devices and remote FTP servers. You can use Handy Backup to make a reserve copy of any valuable data on your system. Restoring is as easy as clicking a button, but you can also use a number of advanced options. The program can be also used to synchronize files between two computers on a network.
Handy Backup is designed for MS Windows 9x/NT/2000/ME/XP. Strong file encryption and multi-choice zip compression on the fly, as well as many other useful features will protect your valuable data. All backup activities are recorded in a log file. Detailed online help is available.
This is more of a traditional backup program and is designed for complex backup jobs. If you have lots of other files, such as music or images, that you need to copy this might be a better choice.
Once you have an idea of what you're planning to backup you need to figure out where you're going to put it. There are lots of choices. A plain old floppy will hold 1.44 Meg, which in writer's terminology is about 300,000 words if the files are saved in a plain text format. That's plenty for most projects, but if you want to include some pictures or diagrams floppies tend to run out of space pretty fast, so people have come up with a number of other solutions. These vary in price from around $50 or so up to $500 for some high capacity external hard drive solutions. The best one stop shopping site is at: http://www.iomega.com They sell all of the more common types of drives and give away some free software with their units as well. I'm not saying that their stuff is the best solution for everyone, but it's a good place to see all the kinds of things that are available and get an idea of the prices. Once you have an idea of what will work best for you, do some comparison shopping to find the best prices and features for your own needs.
These are also known as thumb drives, USB drives or Mini drives. I've included some pictures and information from the Iomega site. These are available from a number of other sources as well.
With high speed USB 2.0 transfer rates, the mobile, easy-to-use and secure Iomega® Micro Mini™ USB 2.0 drive makes transporting and sharing data easier than ever. Simply plug it into any computer's USB port and take your files anywhere you go. Plus Active Disk™ technology allows applications to conveniently launch and run directly from your Iomega Micro Mini or Mini USB 2.0 drive.
These are about the size and shape of disposable cigarette lighter. Extremely easy to carry, but also extremely easy to lose. They will work with USB 1.1 ports as well. The transfers will just be slower.
The ability to run programs directly from these drives makes them very versatile. You can keep your data files as well as some small editors on the drive itself. Notepad or Wordpad will work great for this. Since almost every computer has USB ports, these are one of the best solutions, although you may want to get an extension USB cable if all your computer's ports are on the back instead of out in the front where you can plug in the drive easily.
These would be my first recommendation for keeping day to day backups, since they are very simple to use and install. They are probably not the best solution for permanent archiving though, and you really only have one copy.
Optical drives allow you to make many copies inexpensively. Writable CD drives are quite inexpensive these days, so even relatively inexpensive computers are likely to come with one. Writable CDs designated as CD-R or rewriteable called CD-RW are both relatively inexpensive, less than a dollar for even the best quality, so this is probably the best option for most people. The drives themselves are quite inexpensive as well, and many computers come with CD-RW drives these days instead of floppies.
There are a couple of issues. First, you do need special CD burning software, but this usually comes with the drive and will be pre installed if you buy your computer with one. They still aren't completely sure how long the media will last, so you will need to check it periodically to see if the copies that it contains are still good.
One CD is probably plenty to keep all your writings for your entire life unless you include an extreme amount of pictures or other files that take up a lot more space than text. You can make up a new archive copy of your life's work each year, and while you're doing that check the previous copies to see if they are still readable.
Most CD-RW drives come with some kind Packet Writing or UDF software that allows Windows to treat the CD as if it were a big floppy disk. If you use CDs for your daily backups this makes the job more convenient. Roxio calls theirs Direct Disk, Pinnacle calls it Instant Disk, and Nero calls it InCD. The good thing is that they are compatible. Whichever of these you use will allow you to treat the CD drive pretty much the same as a normal disk drive using drag and drop in Explorer windows or adding files to the drive by saving directly from other programs. You do need to finalize the disk to make it readable on a system without the special software for UDF CDs, and this operation usually takes a rather long time.
One important point to remember about CD-RW disks is that when you delete or overwrite a file, you don't get that space back. You can erase the whole disk but not individual files. The file is just marked as deleted, and the space it takes up is not reused. Generally you wouldn't want to do that with backups anyway; just save all the old copies in case you ever want something from one of them. This does make CD-RW a good choice for day to day backups. You can keep files for a certain amount of time, make permanent backups of the files you really want to keep, then erase the CD-RW disk and reuse it. The disks are cheap though. They are about the same price as floppies, (Typically less than a dollar.) but they hold hundreds of times as much.
DVD recordable disks have many of the same advantages and disadvantages. They are just much larger in capacity. There is the additional problem that they come in two flavors, DVD-R and DVD+R as well as different rewritable formats and a new blue laser higher density format that holds four times as much. I can't recommend them just for backup, but if you need one for making copies of your videos, you can use it to back up other files as well. It will be more difficult to find another computer that can read your files.
Optical drives do come in external versions that connect through USB, or other types of connections. These are somewhat more expensive, but you don't have to worry about opening your computer's case, and you have the advantage of portability. You can use one drive to backup several computers.
Iomega’s data storage products include the popular 750M, 250M and 100M Zip drives. These are also available with various options including, internal ATAPI, external USB, Firewire, and Parallel connections. The external options have the benefit of being able to move from one computer to another easily, so you can backup more than one. These are somewhat slower than hard drives but faster than most other media. The media is relatively expensive compared to CDs or floppies. You generally don't need any extra software though, so you can treat it pretty much like a giant floppy drive and keep extra disks around so you can rotate your backups and have extra copies. The media is more expensive than blank CD-R or CD-RW disks, so these are becoming less popular. The drives are about the same price as other solutions for a given capacity.
I used Zip drives for my backup needs for a long time, but I have an extra hard drive in my current computer instead along with a CD-RW drive. That way I can create permanent backups on CD and keep current backups on the second hard drive. If my C: drive fails for any reason, I can just replace it with the identical D: drive and go from there. All my data is already copied onto the D: drive.
These also come in external units that plug in via USB or Firewire (IEEE 1394) ports which does give you a higher degree of portability, but such units are much more expensive.
Of course if your computer has one, you can just use plain old floppies. It's simple and cheap as I've explained. Floppies are not too reliable though, so you need to make more copies and check them frequently to make sure you can actually read the information you hope they contain.
Old fashioned paper is a bit bulky, but it does have one great advantage. You don't need any specialized equipment to read it, and storage is pretty simple too. It is flammable and water damage can be a problem, so you might want to get some kind of fireproof and waterproof container or rent a safe deposit box at your bank. You do have a bank don't you? Where you've been depositing all those payments for your articles. Another thing to remember is that paper and ink may degrade as well as magnetic media. If you want paper copies to last for a long time you should print them on acid free paper.
Kinkos as well as other document service companies can use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert your writing back to digital format for you if necessary, or you can purchase your own scanner and OCR software and do it yourself. This will be either expensive or time consuming, but it can be done. Having a scanner also allows you to get other text including research articles into electronic format. I have used my scanner extensively for research.
Online storage is the ultimate in safety, since your files are stored in a remote location safe from anything that happens to your computer. Your ISP may even have some free storage that you can use to set up your own webpage, but you can just upload the files that you want to save. You should probably encrypt them or save them as password protected compressed files. Typically this will involve a certain amount of work and the space is usually pretty small, so this in not generally a good solution. (Note: This also works much better if you have high speed access.)
Another easy solution along these lines is to just E-mail copies of your stories to your friends and ask them to keep them for you. You need to do a little more work to get them back when you need them, but if you know other writers, this is a good way to share some work and protect it at the same time.
There are a couple of companies offering solutions that are competitively priced with buying new hardware. I've used both of these in the past, and they are fairly simple to set up and use.
If you have access to the Internet, online storage is the most convenient way to take care of your file storage headaches. Simply save your data online for anytime, anywhere access, data recovery and archiving! By using WhaleMail® with your online storage, you'll see just how easy it is to send and share huge files anywhere, anytime. You can also archive data to your online storage account, or download files from iStorage to your laptop, desktop, wireless Palm™ or BlackBerry handheld.
1. Anywhere, anytime access to your critical data.
2. Ultra-Secure (SSL), 128 bit encryption
3. Backup or download files from your laptop, desktop, wireless Palm™ or BlackBerry handheld.
4. Drag and drop access for Active X-enabled PCs.
5. iStorage desktop software automatically backs up your critical files.
6. WhaleMail, bigger and better file sharing.
iStorage Pricing offers a one month free trial at 50 MB. The annual price is $24.95 per year. Other capacities are available at higher prices.
Xdrive has helped millions of individuals and businesses store, access, share and backup files on the Internet. Customers can access files from the office, at home, or on the road; collaborate online with colleagues; and share, backup, and archive files through an easy-to-use interface.
Xdrive offers two access options, the Xdrive Web Interface and the Xdrive Desktop Software (http://www.xdrive.com/downloads/). The sophisticated Web Interface allows you to access your Xdrive anytime, anywhere through your web browser. Download and install Xdrive Desktop to access your Xdrive from your Windows PC just like one of your local drives.
Tape drives used to be popular for backups, but they are rarely found in personal computers these days. Other solutions are better suited to anyone who isn't using their computer as a web server. If you happen to have one in your computer, by all means use it, but I wouldn't order one for a new computer.
Whatever solution you use to save your backup copies, you also need to be somewhat organized about it, so you can find them when you need them. Use labels and printouts of disk directories or lists of files to keep track of things. Losing a copy is almost the same as not making it in the first place.
The important thing to remember is that you are trying to avoid a disaster where you can't use the files on your computer. Plan ahead to decide what you are going to do. You might have access to a computer belonging to a friend or relative, or you might plan on using the computers at your local library. Whatever your plan, you need to test things to see if they work, and you need to keep up to date. Having a friend who will let you use her computer is great, but what if she moves away? You need to be a little bit paranoid when planning for disaster. Murphy said it first, "Anything that can go wrong will," but it's still true, and it's what you need to keep in mind when planning for disaster recovery. No solution can be perfect, so you need to decide what amount of protection is right for you. Don't be afraid to change your procedures if something isn't working.
Remember to call your editor as soon as possible if you are going to have any problems meeting a deadline. They won't be happy, but they may be more likely to give you assignments in the future if they know that you are taking all possible precautions to help you recover from problems that all of us have sooner or later.
I hope none of you ever need to use your backups, but I'm sure that most of you will someday be thankful that you have them.Return to Getting Started
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