Surprisingly enough, after a recent hard disk failure I found that backing up files and projects wasn’t my problem. Ever since I began using computers as a little tike the elders warned that the day would come.
“Back up, Back up, Backup!” they said.
So I backed up.
Trying to get my computer to the exact state that it was at before it crashed was the problem, finding all my applications that I had installed and then discarded. The problem wasn’t lost files, it was running files.
The first thing an application does is invent it’s own extension. I learned this lesson on a small scale during one semester when I installed a dynamic text editor for note taking. Later my system was wiped for an OS upgrade and I couldn’t find the text editor! Those notes were gone.
They weren’t really gone. It was a text editor and data in those files could probably have been parsed. The point is that as the program becomes more sophisticated, the data, without the program, would be as good as gone.
Let’s consider a scenario. Let’s say that you type all of your notes in Microsoft Word. Your ideas are then dependent on that program. It is hard to consider Microsoft Word vanishing into thin air, considering it’s pervasiveness across every computer platform and business… but it could, right?
One Comment
dan
January 17th 2010 @ 10:00 AM #
Found a good tip on backing up from WordPress:
“Excellent question. Most people make a backup and then just replace it every time. It saves space and is less to worry about. But what if that backup file is corrupted or lost? Then what? The general rule of thumb is to keep at least three backups and keep them in three different places or forms, like floppies, CDs, different hard drives, web disk, your e-mail account, etc.”