At the beginning of June, I got a new computer. It was high time: Enna is more than four years old now, and she’s pretty sluggish, and Windows XP is getting just a tiny bit outdated, though I preferred it to Vista.

The new machine is a thing of beauty: a 17.3” ASUS G72GX with 6 GB RAM and a bunch of other drool-inspiring specs, plus flash gamer details like a backlit keyboard (the Ur-Guru especially liked that one) and a glowing blue Republic of Games logo on the back. Seen in the sunlight (a rare occurrence), the paint reflects blue sparkles.

And, of course, it comes with a whole new operating system: Windows 7. So far I quite like it, but it’s a big jump from XP, and I’ve just checked Windows 7 Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Solutions (affiliate link) out of the library to help me find my way around.

The new OS isn’t the only reason to re-evaluate my existing backup system. Enna had two physical 80 GB drives, C and D. I used the C drive for both programs and data/documents, and backed up data and documents from the C drive to the D drive using SyncBack Freeware. I also backed the C drive up to both a USB drive (Ruby) using Karen’s Replicator and to a NAS drive (Teratides) using the built-in Maxtor backup software. I backed the D drive up to my Buffalo Quattro (Qualora) using SyncBack, and likewise backed Ruby up to my second NAS drive, Lachesis. (Confused yet? I posted a map in February 2009, when I was still using Freya instead of Ruby.)

The new machine, Auset (that’s how scholars think Egyptians pronounced the name of the goddess we know as Isis), has one drive of 500 GB. It’s partitioned into a recovery area (50 GB, no drive letter) , the C drive (116 GB) for the operating system and program files, and the D drive (334 GB) for my data.

There would be no point backing up from my C drive to my D drive on Auset, because they’re actually the same hardware. Backups all have to go somewhere else. On the other hand, the new folder structure has made my Replicator Jobs List very short. Instead of a dozen separate jobs backing up different folders, I only have to back up the “data” folder and the “docs” folder to appropriate places on Ruby, and all the subfolders will take care of themselves.

I’m going to have to add at least one more job, I think, unless I can persuade Microsoft that it really doesn’t want to keep any documents on the C drive. (I did figure out how to set the “Docs” folder on D:\ as the default location in the library, even though I’m not really sure what this library business is about.)

I won’t say any more about Replicator here because I’ve written about this handy free tool ad infinitum, starting in 2004.

I also decided to check out the new Windows 7 Backup and Restore program. It’s been a long time since I looked at Windows Backup—probably not since my first days with XP. It left rather a lot to be desired at that point. I figured it was worth checking out, even though the Ur-Guru had already set me up with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 for disk images. (I’ll talk about that in detail in a future post.)

You can find Windows Backup and Restore in the control panel—at least, you can if you switch to the icon view. If you view the control panel by category, you may be hunting around for a while.

As you can see (at least if you click through to the full-size version of this image), when I went  in to inspect, I found that my last backup hadn’t completed. This was probably because I’d elected to make a system image but not turned off all my programs when running the backup. (Oops.) I changed my settings to leave out the system image (it’s that checkbox down at the bottom.)

Then I shut down all my programs anyway, just to be safe. Some things, like your Outlook PST file and your Quicken data, can’t be backed up while the program is running. You can schedule automatic backups, but if they’re going to work, you have to remember to have those programs shut down at that time.

This time the backup completed successfully, and in a fairly short period of time. If I want to restore only some of the files, I can click the “browse for files” button after clicking the “restore my files” button.

Note: the “Recover system settings” option sends you to System Restore.

(Notice that it does versioning, since it offers you multiple dates to restore the files to.)

Once you pick a file to restore, you get a choice of destinations:

And then (if you’re just testing, and didn’t actually lose the file) you get the Win 7 file overwrite dialog:

What the heck, at least it’s prettier than the Windows XP version of the same message, as well as having one more option.

As backup programs go, this one has come a long way since the first time I looked at the built-in Windows Backup tool. I haven’t tested the system image against other imaging tools (perhaps I’ll include that in the Acronis writeup next issue), but as file backup programs go, it’s perfectly adequate. It doesn’t have the flexibility of a SyncBack, where I can create several jobs and schedule them to run on system idle, but an initial examination suggests it’s the equal of several products I’ve covered here.

And just to make me glad I had backups, less than a month after I’d bought her, Auset experienced the Black Screen of Death. When I turned her on, nothing happened. No drive light. No drive sounds. Nothing on the screen. I mean, nothing. Naturally I panicked and called the Ur-Guru, while digging out the info I’d need for a warranty return. (We—he—found the solution, which was to unplug the machine, remove the battery, and press the power button for 45 seconds.) Throughout the whole harrowing scenario, there was one comforting thought: at least I had backups.

Last week I got a call from someone whose name I won’t reveal but whose story should be a lesson to everyone reading this. The person in question is someone who uses her laptop continually, but doesn’t know that much about it.

“My computer went black,” she said.

“Totally black?” I asked.

“No, it has white letters on it. It says ‘Operating system not found.’”

“Oh,” I said intelligently. “That’s not good. Have you been using the backup drive?” (I knew this person had a supposedly foolproof, plug-it-in-and-it-backs-you-up Rebit SaveMe drive.)

“No—it doesn’t fit on the desk.”

Beat. Head. On. Wall.

As with exercise, the best backup system is the one you’re going to use. This one had seemed just about foolproof, but you do have to actually connect the drive to the computer. And while online backup might be more foolproof, particularly for someone who’s usually connected, it’s not that practical for RAW photos in the thousands.

A simple reboot actually brought the operating system back, but only temporarily. The machine continued to crash, and the “check hardware” message made my client suspect (incorrectly) that the backup drive might be the cause of the problem, so she disconnected it before it could complete its backup cycle. (Though there really did seem to be something wrong there, as transfer speeds to that drive were insanely slow when I later tried to copy some photos to it directly. I had, however, tested the drive myself, and it performed normally with my own older and slower machine.)

A few days later, the Ur-Guru and I actually got to see the machine bluescreen. By this time I’d already looked through the Event Log without finding any explanations for the problems and checked the health of the hard drive with the Computer Management tool. We’d even cleared off about 100 GB of old photos so the drive wasn’t red-lining in the space department. Everything seemed normal, but obviously wasn’t—especially when the machine crashed again. This time it reported memory errors, so we tried running the Vista memory diagnostics tool. (I never use Vista, so didn’t know about this.)

The test reported no problems, but the machine was obviously having problems. The Ur-Guru downloaded Memtest86 to give the RAM a further workout.

Still no problems found. But the machine kept acting up. I hate problems I can’t understand, especially serious ones like that. At this point, voodoo starts to seem like a viable option.

The only remaining thing to try to see whether the problem was with the hardware or the software was to reinstall the machine—preferably with Windows 7 instead of Vista. But that would reformat the entire drive, erasing all the data. And there was no guarantee the drive (or other hardware) was really stable enough for that to work.

Or, of course, you could just replace the computer, in which case it might be possible to salvage the data by taking the drive out of the machine, putting it into a 2.5” drive case, and connecting it to the new machine by USB. But that’s a somewhat iffy proposition with a drive whose soundness is in question, and not something a novice computer user can do anyway.

This mysteriously failing laptop is less than two years old. There’s no real reason (well, apart from the Vista operating system) to expect it to have serious problems so soon. But you never know what’s going to happen to your computer, and that’s especially true for laptops, which are much more at risk of being dropped, spilled on, or stolen. That’s why you need to start backing your machine up as soon as you get it—or at least as soon as you start putting data on it.

In this case, it looks as if installing Windows 7 (and reformatting the hard drive) has restored the laptop to a functioning state, though it’s too soon to be sure. But everything that was stored on that 320 GB hard drive is gone now.

Don’t let it happen to you.

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.