Photo by Henrique Lopes

Just occasionally, I think I might have been writing this blog for too long. Only very occasionally, because it won’t be “too long” until everyone backs up, the technology to do so is completely mature, and no one needs to hear about the subject any more.

But the end of one year, and the beginning of another, is one of those times. How many ways are there to say “Okay, make a copy of all your project-related and financial data from the past year, copy it onto a couple of CDs or DVDs, and store it with your tax information”?

Well, let’s see.

I first addressed this subject in December 2004: “Year-End Backups.”

Why do you need a year-end backup? Primarily for tax purposes. Just in case you’re faced with the dreaded audit, you want all your financial information readily available. (The more organized you are, the faster the IRS will go away.)

In December 2005, the post was “Don’t Use CD-RWs for Year-End Backups.”

Strictly speaking, year-end backups aren’t really backups; they’re archives. You make copies of all your important computer files from the year in question to store with your paper files. You need to keep anything relevant to your taxes (like your Quicken or QuickBooks data, bank statements, invoices from vendors, invoices to clients, and so on) for seven years.

And in December 2006: “Is It Time for Year-End Backups Again?”

Most of what you need to archive at the end of the year is confidential or at least private. That makes it a good idea to password-protect any files or folders you are backing up. Outlook, Quicken, and QuickBooks have this function built-in. For other files and folders, you might want to use a compression tool like WinRAR which allows you to put a password on the archive file. You’ll also be able to fit more data on one disk this way.

Instead of a December 2007 article, I wrote the next post on this subject in January 2008: “It’s Time for the Annual Archive.” (I’d finally given up calling it a backup, since it isn’t, really.)

I’ve just made 4 DVDs to add to the tax box. […] The most time-consuming thing about making them was isolating 2007 data. In some cases I had already done this, but I haven’t been completely consistent. Once it was done, I removed all finished projects from 2007 from my C drive to make room for 2008 projects. I’m not that pressed for storage space on my machine, but it’s annoying to have to look through folders for clients I’m finished with, or previous versions of documents I’m working on, when I want to get to my current work. So I use making the annual archive as an opportunity to tidy up my hard drive.

Last year I appear to have skipped the annual archive article, though I dutifully went through and created my annual archives. They got as far as my Buffalo Quattro drive, and somehow never made it onto CD.

So here we are at the beginning of 2010, and it’s time to clear 2009 out of our computers. (Please!)

If you’ve been making annual archives all along, and only keeping your current projects on your C drive, then creating your 2009 archive should be a comparatively easy process. Just copy all your data onto appropriate storage media. What kind of media depends on the type of work you do. If you work mostly with text-based documents and spreadsheets, it shouldn’t be too difficult to fit your project files onto a few CDs or DVDs.

On the other hand, if you’re a photographer, create a lot of video, develop software, record uncompressed audio, or otherwise generate data in simply stupendous quantities, then you’ll probably need an external hard drive or some Blu-Ray discs. (The hard drive might be cheaper, honestly, but keep it in an airtight plastic box.)

And what if you haven’t been making annual archives all along, and your computer is full of years’ worth of undifferentiated data?

Well, don’t you have some fun in store for you?

Fortunately, it’s not as bad as all that, because you can use your computer’s search feature to find you all the files that were last changed in 2009. And then in 2008. And in 2007. And so on. Then you copy those files onto your storage media for archiving. Once you’re sure that the archive copies work (insert the CD or connect the XHD and try opening a few files), you can delete the old files from your computer’s hard drive.

Wow! Look at all that space you have for your 2010 files.

Do the same thing for your e-mail, making sure to create a new archive folder for Outlook. (You need to re-name the existing archive.pst folder to something like archive 2009.pst.)

Of course, if there are projects from 2009 that you’re still working on, you should continue to keep them on your computer. But if you’ve closed off the job and aren’t working for the client anymore, the files can go to a separate location.

Though you still might want to keep more than one copy. The annual archive is just something to keep with your tax documentation in case you (or the IRS) need to refer to it later. It’s not really a backup. So having a second copy of those 2009 files could be a good idea. You never know when a client from four years ago will call and say “Do you still have that…?”

After last week’s meditation on using external hard drives instead of DVDs to back up photos, Loyal Reader Mike Van Horn responded with the following e-mail:

My advice to you is, “Purge!”

I look at my own backups of photos, and what I see is lots of garbage (at 1 to 2 meg each). Many duplicates of the same photo. Gobs of photos of people or things I never need to view again. Photos of all the notes I’ve ever taken, including notes from people who have sold their businesses—or died.

If I would go through my photos and select only those that I could conceivably want to view again during my lifetime (or that my posthumous biographers would draw on!), I would reduce my photo storage by 90%.

It does take some time to do this. But if you don’t, you’re backing up haystacks just because they may contain a needle. And in that case, the needle is already essentially lost.

Mike makes a very good point. I went through my old printed photos a few years ago, and was appalled to find out how many prints I’d saved that were out of focus, overexposed, grainy, badly composed, or whatever. In fact, there was no real reason for me to have held onto any of the shots that weren’t good enough to make it into the photo albums in the first place, apart from reflexive pack-rat-ism. And I had two copies of a lot of them, from the days when many discount film developers offered free double prints. Twice the trash! Out they went.

If you mess up a photo and you know it, you should delete it right away, before it even gets to your computer. Make room on your card for a better one. There’s certainly no point preserving junk in quadruplicate.

And with the end of the year coming up, it’s a good time to go through all your files anyway, to see what you need to keep and what you can pitch. Cheap storage shouldn’t lead you into sloppy habits.

In some cases, though, “Just throw it away” isn’t an option. Even small companies may be bound by data retention laws, depending on the kind of business you’re in. In that case, the best you can do is move the data off your computer into your archives, and practice what’s known as deduplication. The larger your company, the more space deduplication will save you, particularly when it comes to things like e-mail attachments that get sent to all 10,000 of your employees. You don’t need 10,000 copies of that file, only one.

Enterprise backup and archive systems all handle deduplication automatically. Some of the SOHO backup services are starting to offer it as well, the better to keep within your cloud storage limits. In most cases, however, the best judge of whether two files are identical (in spite of having different names or dates) is going to be you.

And no matter what system you use for storing photos—or anything else—make sure you organize and label them to better help you find what you’re looking for a few years from now when you’ve forgotten everything you think you’re going to remember about them.

My in-flight reading for last week’s trip to Cleveland was Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. (Yes, oh FTC inspectors, that’s an Amazon Affiliate Link.) I don’t buy hardcover books by just anyone, but I’m a big fan of Chris Brogan’s, and increasingly impressed by what I hear of Julien Smith on the Media Hacks podcast, f-bombs notwithstanding.

The subheading on page 169 on this guidebook for “how to be human at a distance” is “You Live or Die by Your Database.” I’ve talked about backing up your WordPress database on this blog, but the database Chris and Julien mean is the one you store contact information in.

There are several online applications that people use for contact management. Some use their Gmail account. Others use Plaxo. Still others consider LinkedIn a great place to store professional information. Software built specifically for contact management includes Highrise from 37 Signals, BatchBook from BatchBlue Software, and beyond that, there are several other applications. (p. 171)

It’s no surprise that authors who co-wrote their book on Google Docs should mention online contact management tools. In the next breath (or at least the next paragraph), however, they remind readers of the importance of keeping a local copy of that online database—in other words, a backup. “If, as we say, you live or die by your database, why would you trust a third party with its ultimate integrity?”

Amen, brothers.

Exporting to CSV

Of the tools they mention, the only one I use is LinkedIn. (I have a Gmail account, but I almost never use it, so I don’t have any useful contact information stored there, and Plaxo developed such a reputation for spamming everyone in your address book back at the turn of the millennium that I still won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.) It’s quite easy to back up your LinkedIn contacts as a group. In the bottom right corner of your Connections page, there’s a link that says “Export Connections.” When you click it, you go to the export page:

If you would like to back up your LinkedIn connections to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Address Book, or Mac OS Address Book, please select your application and file type from the menu below, then click “Export.”

The file type for Outlook, Outlook Express, and Yahoo! is CSV, which stands for “Comma-Separated Values.” That’s a very old format for storing data in a plain text file, and while it looks like gibberish to the human eye, you can import it into almost any kind of contact manager, from Outlook or Entourage to Excel. You can even upload it into another LinkedIn profile if you’ve made the mistake of creating two of them, or into an e-mail service provider. (Don’t even think of doing that without permission.) Sometimes you’ll have to manually match up the names of the data fields in one program with the field names in another, but a CSV file is an almost universally usable form of backup.

In fact, if you want to back up your Outlook contacts, go to File|Import and Export and select “Export to a File.” Comma Separated Values is your first choice—and also your second, since you get both DOS and Windows flavors. This is what you do if you want to move your Outlook contacts to LinkedIn, instead of the other way around.

I’ve just produced CSV files from both sources and put them into my Dropbox. CSV files are quite small, since they’re “flat” files: just text, nothing else.

The only problem with creating CSV files from these programs is that you can’t automate the process. If I want a backup of my LinkedIn connections, I have to remember to go in and make one; likewise if I want my Outlook contacts in CSV rather than PST format.

Where Else Are Your Contacts?

Once upon a time, there was a thing called a Rolodex. You filled it with cards on which you had written people’s contact information. Maybe you pasted in their business cards.

These  days, not many people have one. Instead, they have cell phones. And the easiest place to store a phone number someone gives you when you’re away from your desk is inevitably your cell phone.

A cell phone leads a dangerous life, thanks to being carried around everywhere. And you don’t have to be in a high-tech business to depend on yours. My mother’s phone recently suffered an unfortunate encounter with a glass of water in the middle of the night, and Verizon couldn’t get her contacts back. (Verizon does offer a backup service for its users, but doesn’t make a big deal out of advertising it.)

If you have a smartphone, you probably sync it with your computer. If your iPhone or BlackBerry dies, you most likely have a copy of the phone numbers and e-mail addresses it contains right on your PC (or Mac). But those of us with “dumbphones” either need to sign up for programs like Verizon’s Backup Assistant, develop an unfailing habit of manually copying phone numbers from the phone into the computer or a paper address book—or find ourselves digging through scraps of paper and old appointment books in an attempt to reconstruct the information. (My mother actually ended up driving to a client’s house instead of returning his call because she couldn’t find his phone number and he had Caller ID blocked.)

Is Paper Best After All?

Personal productivity and brain style expert Eve Abbott used to print out all her ACT! contacts once a year just in case the computer crashed, but using paper to back up your contacts gets to be unwieldy when your contacts number in the thousands. (I haven’t seen one of those printouts since she switched to Outlook a few years ago.) And with so many people changing jobs these days, the information on those printouts can get to be obsolete pretty quickly.

So while the business cards in plastic sleeves or even the scribbled numbers in the appointment book might save you in the event of a drive failure or drowned phone,  they’re no substitute for regular electronic backups. Create a cell phone backup plan, automate any contact backups you can, and set yourself reminders to create CSV files from your online databases on a regular basis.

Because the important thing about your contact database isn’t where you store it, but being able to reach the people you keep in it.

About a week ago I was approached by a representative of Backup Technology, a leading British firm providing online backup and data recovery services with an offer to write a guest post for the blog. I explained that I was happy to publish guest posts if they were relevant to the audience of small and home-office computer users and as long as the author’s affiliation with the company in question was disclosed. Not only do I feel strongly about the principle of transparency even when I’m not actually being paid or offered any goods and services, but the FCC is apparently about to rule on what bloggers are allowed to publish on behalf of vendors, and I’d prefer not to run afoul of the law.

Apart from anticipated FCC rulings, however, it’s a good time to get a guest post, because I’ve spent most of the past week recovering from last week’s trip up to Eureka for my cousin’s LVN pinning ceremony. (That’s what they call graduation when you’re a nurse.) I’ve barely had time even to look at the bombardment of backup-related e-mail messages, much less formulate my own topic for a column.

I do want to acknowledge that two different people from SocialSafe wrote in to say thanks for last week’s (actually Monday’s) post from Michael North about Facebook backups. (Now if only someone would invent a comprehensive backup tool for LinkedIn, one that would back up all your group discussions, Answers, and recommendations along with your contacts…)

On to what our colleagues from across the pond have to say to us:

In the modern era, almost every company is dependent on their IT systems to function day-to-day and any kind of unforeseen circumstance could be potentially devastating. Anything from the smallest power cut or server failure to an all out natural disaster could bring business to a grinding halt, any interruption to a company’s IT is financially damaging. For SME’s the means to restore business functionality from anywhere at any time is paramount and many companies are integrating remote backup facilities into their plans.

In every aspect of digital life it is proving vital to introduce a fully integrated disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity is maintained and any downtime caused by unexpected circumstances is minimised.

It’s not only unexpected disasters that need planning for, companies and governments around are finding out more and more frequently cyber crime is on the rise. The recent attacks on Twitter and Facebook show a new level of cyber threat that are almost without motivation and have only malevolent intent.

The need for a disaster recovery plan is not limited to enterprises but with the increased threat of cyber crime and cyber warfare, governments worldwide are recognising the need for specialist defences against such attacks. NATO has set up a cyber defence facility in Estonia codenamed K5. The American government has launched a national cyber security strategy and the UK has responded by creating two organisations, the Office of Cyber Security and the Cyber Security Operations Centre.

In this increasingly cyber-driven world the key to protecting your assets is to get educated on the need for planning and incorporation of the necessary systems. No longer can anyone, whether you are an SME, major financial institution or major world government, put data storage, backup, disaster recovery or business continuity on the back burner.

While it usually takes a certain level of popularity to attract virus designers and DDoS attacks, there’s no denying that everyone needs to maintain some level of security and that an outage for any reason can cause serious problems for a business, as we mentioned a few weeks ago. If your backups are infected, you could re-introduce vulnerabilities into your system when you restore. That’s why you need to turn off system restore if you discover a virus on your system and have to use a special removal tool.

I’m sure Backup Technology would appreciate it if you checked out their business continuity services while examining your own company’s disaster preparedness. If you’ve actually used their services, write in and tell us about it. And if you’ve had to deal with a cyber-attack, write in and tell us about that, too. You can post comments on the blog (allow some delay for moderation) or e-mail me: sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.

A couple of weeks ago, the Ur-Guru helped me reinstall my main computer, Enheduanna. (Alas, I can’t blame the hiatus in backup reminders on that, but I do have to admit that this tour-guide business leaves me a lot less time for blogging.) One of the things he pointed out in the course of installing software was that I could save myself time on the next reinstall if I backed up my complete Firefox environment and not just my bookmarks, and he introduced me to the Firefox Environment Backup Extension, or FEBE, by Chuck Baker. (The second link goes to the Firefox add-ons page.)

I don’t use Firefox to save passwords—or I didn’t, much, until recently—but I rely on several Firefox extensions, like the All in One Sidebar, NoScript, Video DownloadHelper, IE Tab, Screengrab, and ColorZilla—not to mention Delicious Bookmarks for Firefox.

FEBE lets you back up your add-ons an other extensions, your bookmarks, and a whole lot more. You can back up your themes, if you use custom themes for Firefox (I stopped bothering a while ago; keeping up with themes for WordPress is enough trouble), your preferences, usernames and passwords, search plugins, history, permissions, cookies…the list goes on. You can even opt to back up a copy of the FEBE extension in your backup directory.

FEBE backs up on a schedule—daily, weekly, or monthly—or at startup or shutdown of Firefox. The Ur-Guru’s recommendation is a weekly backup. For this initial phase where I’m rebuilding cookies and form-fill data, daily might be better, but I’m not likely to lose too much if I miss a week.

If you have a Box.net account, you can use FEBE to back up your Firefox environment online. The free account is plenty big enough to hold a Firefox backup.

Backing up with FEBE is very simple. Restoring is a little trickier. While it looks as though you can just select Tools | FEBE | Restore | Restore Profile from the Menu bar, you can’t restore the profile you’re using while using that profile in Firefox. (Well, it does make sense if you think about it.) Instead you have to go through a somewhat more complex process in order to either create a new profile or overwrite the existing profile from outside of Firefox.

1. Close Firefox if open.
2. Browse to your backup destination directory.
3. Rename your profile backup file to a zip file. Example: Rename “profile{default}.fbu” to “profile{default}.zip”.
4. Open the renamed file and extract it to your Firefox profile folder. In your profiles folder you will see one or more individual profile folders named something like “pqf85hp8.default” or “y3f5nnr4.Chuck”. The first part of the name is a random string of characters and the last part is the name of the profile you want to restore. You want to extract the zip file into the individual profile directory. If asked, you do want to replace existing files during the extraction.

This seems, at first glance, a bit like walking on water, but that’s really only because the paths and folder names are such gibberish. I followed the directions and it worked perfectly. When I restarted Firefox less than 5 minutes later, it even restored my last session.

If I wanted to, I could also use FEBE to replicate my Firefox setup on my other two computers, Mena and Star, and I may yet do that.

There’s a support forum for help with problems.

I definitely recommend this tool, but perhaps not for the completely non-technical.

For those people, there’s MozBackup by Pavel Cvrcek. (Don’t ask me how to pronounce that. I thought “Goetsch” was difficult.) It, too, backs up your extensions, bookmarks, cookies, form fill details, passwords, certificates, and settings—not just for Firefox, but also for Thunderbird and other Mozilla software. It will even back up files it doesn’t recognize, including those created by FEBE.

To run MozBackup, you need to shut down Firefox and all other Mozilla programs. Then run MozBackup, which will give you the choice to either back up or restore a profile, and list the programs whose profiles you can back up (or restore). My choices are Firefox and “portable applications,” whatever that means. I chose Firefox and the default (only) profile, backed it up to my F drive, and then restored it. Quick and easy. The only down side is that there’s no scheduler, so you have to remember to run the backups yourself. But if you use Thunderbird as well as Firefox, I’d definitely recommend it.

With more and more of our computing experiences taking place “in the cloud,” backups for our browsers are becoming more important. And even though I’ve started keeping most of my bookmarks on Delicious, I’ve also “pimped out” Firefox with extensions I didn’t use a few years ago. (Hope that doesn’t leave the e-mail version of this reminder stuck in the spam filters.)

FEBE works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. MozBackup is Windows only. Both are completely free.

What about the Safari, Opera, and MSIE users out there? Do you have a favorite browser backup tool? Leave a comment and let us know, or send me a guest post: sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.