It's been 20 years since I first started using computers for work, and looking back I find it amazing how much these machines have infiltrated themselves into our lives. In 1990, my computer was a Mac Classic with a 10 MEGABYTE hard drive, 4 MEG of memory, and a floppy disc drive. I used it mostly for creating letters and simple, one-sheet flyers, minimal email, and playing archaic games. By 2000 that exploded into rich email, sophisticated graphics programs and web browsing. Today, I have five email accounts, three websites, write for three blogs, and have a 300 Gig hard drive that is almost full. All of my email, graphics, programs, etc. sit on this six-year-old hard drive. As computers go, this is an antique - and as such, can die at any second, for no apparent reason.
Luckily, I back everything up constantly. I've been around the block enough times to know that computers can and will destroy everything you have on a whim. But I've been careful, and have lost almost nothing over the years. The secret to my success is keeping everything backed up.
Most people don't even think of this. Most people seem to think, if the computer goes just call a computer guy, pay the $400 and have him restore all your files. Most people find out $400 later that this doesn't usually turn out very well.
With some simple, inexpensive systems in place, you can keep from losing everything. Here are a few:
1. Backup your email weekly. Especially the email you use for business. If your email database, your hard drive or your operating system becomes corrupt, you will lose everything, and it's not retrievable. Outlook, Entourage, Mac Mail - they all have a simple way to save a compressed copy of your entire email database. Save this file remotely...not on your computer...and you will be safe.
2. Use "Super Duper" or a similar program to copy the entire contents of your computer to a remote hard drive. This will save all of your files plus all of your programs, settings, passwords etc. Save it to an external Firewire or USB drive, and do this every time you have a major update to your system or add a new program. If your drive dies, you can give the external to the computer guy, and he can format your new drive exactly the way your old one was set up.
3. Save all your bookmarks from your web browser. This is easy to do, and will save you a lot of frustration if your browser fries. You can also save your bookmarks online at sites like Delicious.
4. Save files often as you work on them. I can't tell you how many times people have cried to me that they lost a half an hour or more of work because their program quit on them and they hadn't saved. My response is always the same: SAVE OFTEN. I hit the save button about once every three minutes, by habit.
5. Use a program such as Retrospect to auto-backup your files. There are several good programs that do this - you set it up once to automatically make a backup of all your computer's or server's files to an external drive, then let it run on its own. We have ours set up to backup every night at 10pm, and we switch out the external drive every other week. The drive not in use comes home with me - so that if there's ever a disaster or theft at the office, we still have a backup of our entire server.
6. Too much is never too much. I have one computer at home and one at work. Between the two, I have two Firewire drives, a USB drive, three USB flash drives, and a stack of CDs with backups on them. When my home computer died a few weeks ago, I didn't have to worry about a thing because I had a two-day old backup of the entire hard drive on my Firewire. I also save copies of the most important files to my ftp site - so if some catastrophe wipes out all my machines, I still have a backup on the Internet.
Remember to save often and backup frequently, and you'll save yourself a lot of time, money and heartaches in the long run.
Posted by Christopher Pinto, Creative Director
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