I don’t know whether any of you put making regular backups on your list of New Year’s resolutions—or even whether you make them. I gave up on New Year’s resolutions years ago. They seem designed to be broken, though I can remember a few that I kept. I’ve learned that if it’s time to make an important change, I shouldn’t wait until January 1 to do it.
But the beginning of the year is a natural time to engage in certain activities, like clearing out the past year’s files to make room for the current ones. The holidays, and returned greeting cards (paper or electronic) prompt us to go through our contact databases and update or purge them.
And it seems that the New Year is prompting backup companies to go on link-share hunts. Two of them have contacted me in the past week, one to ask for a new link and one to ask where a previous link had gone. (The previous link, as far as I can tell, was in an Adsense result, so I have no idea where it went.)
As a courtesy to them, I’ll mention their sites here, though I have neither a relationship to nor any experience with their products: Remote Backup Systems has a short Flash video entitled “Bull Happens” about the importance of off-site backups. Salvage Data found the Backup Blog in a Google search. It’s possible that by using RBS, you won’t need Salvage Data or one of its competitors. (That’s certainly the idea.)
Returning to those New Year’s resolutions, though—if you’ve been saying “I need to start making regular backups,” stop saying it, and do it. Bulls may not come thundering through your office to spear your computer on their horns as they do in the RBS video, but where technology is concerned, it’s not whether something will go wrong, but when.
Tuesday afternoon my pointer started wandering across the screen all by itself. I would drag it back to try to click on something, and it would run away again. Rebooting didn’t help. Neither did unplugging my tablet. The problem repeated itself when I booted to the Bart-PE CD which I use for Ghost backups and outside-of-Windows diagnostics. Fortunately Ghost 8, being a DOS-based program, is easy to navigate with the keyboard alone. Not so much of what I need to do my work.
I made my Ghost backup yesterday instead of today because Dell was sending a repair person to replace the keyboard and trackpad on my laptop. Any time you open a computer up, there’s some risk of static damage—and there was no guarantee that the hardware replacement would fix the problem. I knew it was possible I’d have to reinstall the machine from scratch, or at least from the Ghost backup I made when I first bought it, and then mess about with drivers and the like. So I had to be sure that all my data was safe, not just the files which get backed up on startup and shutdown.
Fortunately, the hardware replacement did the trick and the computer is now functioning normally. (And I’ll give a mini plug here for Dell’s Gold Service plan, which came with my computer when I bought it used—everyone I dealt with was 1) a native speaker of English and 2) extremely helpful.) The machine is probably due for a “hygienic” reinstall soon anyway, but I’m very glad I didn’t have to do an emergency reformat when I’m already behind on client projects.
If it’s important, back it up today.
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