Back up software
I’ve been looking for decent back up software forever. They always seem to want to compress all of my files into a single huge file that can only be used to restore the hard drive, or keep dozens of revisions, or other nonsense. All I want is a program that automatically, quietly, three times a day, updates a mirror of my documents and settings on my external hard drive, and I finally found it earlier this week: Backup4all. It has all of those “advanced” features that I don’t want, but it also does just what I do want. I highly recommend it. (And I didn’t find it a moment too soon – I had a computer scare on Wednesday. It turned out to just be a loose component in the CPU, but for a while there I thought the motherboard was shot.)
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just a suggestion — get a 2nd
external drive so that you can keep it in another place. The way I look at it, backups are
for 2 reasons. First, to protect myself against me. Second, to protect me against everything
else.
The first category is for things like accidentally erasing a file I need,
corrupting a file or erasing its contents by doing something stupid while running a program,
etc. For errors like these I’m going to realize what I did pretty much immediately, and
having a backup right at hand gets me going again (although most programs these days can be
configured to create a backup copy automatically; you just rename the backup to the original
and restart).
The 2nd category is all other hazards. Hard drive crash is the most
obvious. But there are plenty of other dangers worth protecting against. Two biggies would be
theft and fire. If your backup drive is in the same room (or building) as the computer, it can
be lost too. The loss of *everything* would be so catastrophic that I’m willing to lose 2-4
weeks worth of my most recent work in order to guarantee that I haven’t lost it *all*. So I
keep my external drive in a different location than my computer and back up to it every few
weeks.