Saturday, November 03, 2007

The importance of backing up.

This is my public announcement for the month of November.

No I'm not referring to what you do in a vehicle or a new dance move.

I'm talking about backing up all of you digital things. How often do perform a back up of all your work. Knitter's you've recorded most of your work in digital picture form but have you taken a moment to burn it on a CD of DVD.

There are many ways to back up data. I mean all your pictures, patterns, letters, memos, emails that you just have to keep, recipes, artwork that you create, scrap booking ideas and yes even your bookmarks.

You can:
  • Burn a compiled Cd
  • Burn a compiled DVD
  • Use an external hard drive
  • You could use and online service that you pay and they store the info for you (I wouldn't go that far unless I had a business)
But basically the idea is to have your stuff copied at least once or twice and stored in a safe place. You are probably asking why all this concern about me backing up my stuff Enid. Well, I don't want you to learn the hard. One day you will come home to check your email. You will sit at your computer hit the power button and nothing or worst yet loud clicking noises arise from the box that should be booting up but isn't. I'd hate to see all these great ideas and pictures just disappear with no hopes of recovery because in case you dont' know this, but unless you know someone that knows someone that can hook you up and perform a very expensive procedure for free. Well you are pretty much SOL. Hard drive recovery is difficult sometimes and often times expensive.

So you know those blank CDs you purchase to rip music or movies well set a couple aside and burn yourself a back up.

I just finished cleaning house (moving files around and burning them to disc) so this is why I decided to blog about it.

I probably have copies of copies of copies but you know what, I'm okay with that. I've had 2 hard drives crap out on me and I've lost some really good stuff for being overly confident and taking for granted that computers don't always work when they are supposed to.

Backing up all these blog post wouldn't be such a bad idea either. I've lost a lot of blog posts because I didn't archive them.

Used to just create my post in Word, then cut and paste to my blog. So I would keep a copy on my hard drive as well. But the I got lazy and didn't do and well the rest is history.

Another thing I do is I burn two back ups and one I store and the other I use. Get it? Is stored scratch free and the other one is used when ever I need it.

CD and DVD don't last forever either so from time to time those back ups you made a year ago it's time to redo them or at least look and see if they are still readable. I don't remember why this happens but their shelf life is not eternity. (Does that sound bitchy, I don't mean it to be honestly.)

Well have a great weekend Y'all.


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3 comments:

Amysatx said...

Thanks for reminding me! And no, you didn't sound bitchy!

Enid said...

Thanks amy!

Michelle said...

I need the reminder! I lost my hard drive several months ago (thanks to an update from Kod@k) and was without a computer for a month! It sucked!

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