fox | serious techie question(s):

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serious techie question(s):

so two things have happened recently:

1. a friend of mine lost almost an entire chapter of her dissertation in a freak reverting-overwriting incident. (fortunately, it was the most recent thing she's been working on and she's been able to reconstruct it, so it hasn't knocked her too far back.) she has now learned the virtue of Save As rather than simply Save, and is in good enough shape that this comic strip made her laugh rather than cry.

2. various networking things have changed here, meaning we're all required to go get our computers checked out, registered, examined, and installed with some additional software and whatnot by the end of the month or we won't be able to get online on the college network at all. my appointment is the day after tomorrow. this would concern me a lot less if i hadn't heard that the IT guys had managed to -- in another overwriting mishap, but you'd think they'd know better -- completely delete something like three years' worth of one guy's files, in addition of course to all his settings etc.

with these things in mind, i'm about to go out and buy an external hard drive, but i also wonder what everyone thinks about remote backup. recommendations, etc? thankee. :-)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

My preferred remote backup is just to email files to myself at one of the gmail accounts.

I just back everything up on my web-space. I should probably evolve a local copy, too, but I trust webspace more, having had a corrupt floppy (remember floppies) once nearly cost me 30 pages of a novel.

Thanks for reminding me to do another round of backing up, actually.

oh, i hear that -- i once lost a term paper to a corrupt floppy, only a night or so before it was due.

fortunately i had composed the thing at my own computer, so the previous draft was still on the hard drive; but i was a freshman in college, so you can imagine. i was on the phone with my father and then with the tech people in california and then with my father again, in tears, and in addition to the absolute terror that the paper was gone (and it was), there was the complete betrayal, because what were we always taught? don't rely on your hard drive! save everything to floppy disk! oy.

i'd only moved it to floppy to take it somewhere and print it, but i retrieved the previous draft, recreated the final touches and all the formatting, saved it to the HD and two separate floppies, and have never trusted a floppy disk since.

It depends on how many files there are. If it's just a few documents and the like, I'd email them to myself, but if there was a lot of stuff there, I'd probably either go for a portable hard drive [ you can buy flash drives now that hold a hell of a lot of data ] or, if I could get past the company firewall with an FTP client, I'd get some cheap yet extensive webspace [ such as dreamhost or canaca ] and upload everything I've worked on etc at the end of each working day.

You know the Word command in Tools -> Options -> Save that enables you to auto-save every minute, right?

I don't know if that would have helped in this situation, Shez. It sounds like her friend inadvertantly overwrote a file. Setting up auto-save would have ended up doing the same thing she wanted to avoid.

I'm not a fan of auto-save. Slows things down when working on either large documents or documents on a network.

There's a difference between the thing that does backup copies of everything (dunno the name) and which does slow down Word, and this feature, which enables you to get your stuff back when there has been a crash/power cut/whatever. The secret is that it keeps every version for a long time in the Windows -> Application Data -> Microsoft -> Word folder, as ~WR*.wbk and ~WR*.tmp files, so chances are one of the versions she wants IS there.

no, kenny is right -- what happened to my friend really was a completely freak accident, one in a zillion, where the thing somehow reverted to a previous version of what she was working on and she saved it before she realized it, so of course then it was too late. all these features are good things, but there's nothing that can prevent every single imaginable kind of disaster. fortunately she only lost the last chapter, and not the whole paper.

All the same, tell her to go look in that folder - I always find the most amazing number of versions of my old stuff in it.

well, she's redone it now, so the thing with her is more a lesson and less a matter of lost work at this point. :-) but, good to know.

Er... and it's Joe, not Kenny...

[looks]

why, so it is. my bad. (the 'k' threw me off.)

The secret is that it keeps every version for a long time in the Windows -> Application Data -> Microsoft -> Word folder, as ~WR*.wbk and ~WR*.tmp files, so chances are one of the versions she wants IS there.

What OS are you using? My Application Data > Microsoft > Word folder contains nada. And it is under my profile directory.

I tend to back-up to CD every now and then, with important things sitting on a flash drive or being emailed to myself.

Unless you're really paranoid about HD failure, I'd recommend a flash drive (provided your PC has USB ports) or physical media like CD, DVD, or ZIP.

If you're really paranoid, you could get a second HD (internal or external), and have it set up so that it is a redundant drive, automatically mirroring any saves or updates. That's a bit overkill, though.

Unless you own a Dell ;)

Aha! Do you dislike Dells? What makes do you like, then?

We have Dells here at work, and they have a habit of suffering critical disk failures. I like the PC we have at home - it's a Micron. Haven't bought a PC in a few years though.

i'm not going to suggest anything on hardware, as there are plenty of hardware geeks on you flist, i'm sure, but for accidental deletion of files during changed settings: any files you have under "Documents and Settings" are far more vulnerable than anything else, because roughly speaking those files are considered part of your user profile, which is considered a setting. "My Documents" is the easy and obvious place to documents, but a second copy in a folder off of the root directory is going to greatly increase non-hardware-failure-related safety (if you remember to save a copy there, of course, which is always my problem).

that's what it was! they recreated (?) his profile and used the same name, which reset the profile, which wiped everything clean. everyone felt terrible, of course, because it's a terrible mistake, but also the guy hadn't. backed. anything. up. before. letting. them. mess. with. his. machine.

yeah, that would do it. *wince*

My Documents == evil.

As is HKEY_CURRENT_USER, but most people don't know about that ;-)

a second copy in a folder off of the root directory is going to greatly increase non-hardware-failure-related safety (if you remember to save a copy there, of course, which is always my problem)

Can it be a subfolder in My Documents, or does it need to be somewhere else? And if yes, where would you advise to create it?

no no no, off the root directory. somewhere [wave] else.

i don't know where a good spot would be, but putting it in a subfolder in My Documents is like keeping an extra copy of your car keys in the glove compartment in case the car gets stolen. :-)

no, you need to get it out from under My Documents entirely. i'd suggest something like

C:\Backups\Documents

so that you don't forget where it is. :)

As everyone has already said, it would be someplace other than My Documents. If you want to get really technical, My Documents maps to c:\Documents and Settings\{login id}. Expand that directory and you will see all of the folders that are profile-specific. If you delete a profile, all of these directories (should) go bye-bye. Or if someone saves something to a profile-specific directory when they are logged in, you wouldn't be able to see it unless you were had admin privileges on the box.

Where you put it really doesn't matter. The odds of profile corruption are pretty rare (at least in my experience). And if you had a profile corruption on an office computer, your desktop team should first move the user data files before deleting and recreating the profile. Or, if it's your home computer, log in as Admin, copy the files to a different location, regen the profile, then copy them back.

What you really need to protect against is hard drive failure. Unless you're talking about sector failures, saving to a different location on the same HD wouldn't help.

External hard drive. Never save anything ANYWHERE else but in My Documents (or somewhere else, as long as you know where it is). Back up AT THE MOST once a month (once a week if you're doing a lot of stuff).

Maxtors make very, very good externals, that are USB enabled and can actually be attached to your computer all the time. They're not all that pricy, either (though I have no idea what the exchange rate would do to that).

And never trust a geek who says, "Oh, yeah, it'll just take a minute and we won't do anything to your files." Not even me!

Backups are our friend.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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