The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Bad Things Karol Doktor |
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Karol Doktor offers some important advice to all computer users |
Would you like to know when
bad things happen to good
people? For a philosophical discussion you'll have to read the
book by Harold S. Kushner with the
same title. In this article I'll touch on a few aspects relating to
computers.
Recently, on two separate occasions, I have been asked to recover lost documents. In one case, a small commercial
organisation has lost many of its business forms because of a hard disk crash.
In the other case, a few days of work on a newspaper article was lost because the author replied "Yes" to "Do you want to revert to the
saved ...?". The article was brought to the office on a diskette from home
and "Word" popped the above question (as if frequently does). The author replied
"Yes" and then seeing a blank document, panicked.
Unfortunately, he must have
answered "Yes" also to the question "Do you want to save?" before he ejected the
floppy and hurried with it to my computer. Well, on my computer the document was
blank too, the update date in the label was just recent (ie. the document has
been updated in the office), the data was gone. I recommended that the author
should drive back home and make another copy on the home computer where all the
original work was done. I could not believe it when it surfaced that there was
no copy of the file on the home computer because all updates were done directly to the floppy! The floppy contained the
only copy of the file in existence! To cut a long story short, I was able to
recover the file using one of the utilities available on the Internet. The
search, testing and the actual recovery took me a total of 6 hours over two
days, as I had my own work to do too.
One Basket
Did your mother teach you "never put all your eggs into one basket"? This is
easier said than done. Most laptops have no option to run a second hard drive
and, I suspect most desktop computers come with one drive too.
At least, in an office environment there usually is a network-connected server
on which each user has an allocated partition. This server is also, at least
theoretically, periodically backed up and should be protected from a
catastrophic data loss.
But... what about your home computer? If you have only one basket then you'll
have to get a shoe box or an ice-cream container. The easiest would be to use
floppy diskettes. There are a few problems with that. They are slow and
unreliable, have only a small capacity and these days the majority of new
computers don't even come with a floppy drive!
The next best alternative is to use a USB-key. These are small, thumb-sized
devices with no moving parts that you plug directly to your computer's USB port.
They are inexpensive (about $100 for a 1GB device), fast and highly portable.
You only need to master a complex procedure of unplugging the device (to ensure
that the device directory is properly updated). This is the best method to carry
data between your home and the office. A variation of this method is to use an
iPod or some other MP3 player for that purpose. These devices usually have a
USB-key type memory and some electronics to read the data and drive headphones.
There is certain "coolness" factor to consider too. Imagine the envy of your
teenage children if you had an iPod to which they would have no access!
Another alternative is to backup your data to a CD-ROM. With any luck you may
even have a DVD burner in your computer. This method is very good for
"permanent" storage, eg. your digital pictures or MP3 tracks but not good to
save "work in progress".
Yet another alternative is to have an external hard drive. These come in their
own cases and are connected to your computer externally via a USB or FireWire
cable. There are also portable versions with their own battery and memory card
interfaces. These are invaluable if you are going to take your digital camera on
an overseas holiday for a few weeks. Even my camera shy lady-friend took over
500 pictures in 4 days in China. At a few megabytes each picture, even a large
memory card is going to fill-up in a day or two.
Survival rules
Personally, I use most of the above methods. I have two networked computers with
several hard drives in each. Before doing any significant update and at the end
of the day, I copy the entire working directory to another drive and give it a
two-digit sequence number. Once a month I back up all my personal files to a CD.
To carry data around, I use a USB-key and I also have an 80 GB portable hard
drive to dump pictures from my camera's memory card. I only delete files after
they have been copied to backup CDs at least twice. When burning CDs
I use 4x speed and for DVDs 2x speed multiplier. Every second backup I store
off-site.
Computers are complex devices and will not last forever. They will fail. Respect
your own work and protect it from accidental loss. The following few rules will
help you to minimize chances of a disastrous loss of your data.
- Save your current work frequently, at least several times a day.
- Save your work under different file names. Use 2-digit version number at the
end of the file name and increment it with every save.
- At the end of the day make a backup copy on another device, preferably on a
different computer.
- When transporting important data to a customer or another city make two copies
on different media, eg. take your laptop but also burn a CR-ROM and keep it
separate.
- Never use maximum speed when burning CDs or DVDs.
- If it is your data then you keep it, not Yahoo, Google or Microsoft (Hotmail).
- For very important data, keep a separate backup copy offsite, eg. with a
friend living close by but not in the same building.
- For sensitive data use encryption.
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