randomwisdom.com

Repeat after me: MY DRIVE WILL CRASH TOMORROW. Think about that for a second: what would be running through your head if tomorrow you went to use your computer, only to find out your drive bit the big one? There go all your emails, your thesis work, your photos of your girlfriend, your SNES ROM collection, your accounting records. Gone. Could you think up curses in enough languages?

You NEED to back stuff up. It takes about 15 minutes once you have everything organized (and admittedly it's a LONG fifteen minutes) but WHEN one of your drives crashes-- and it WILL happen-- you'll be okay. Plus you have the added benefit of making a migration or a reformat easier.

Here's a list to make it easy. This has some details for a Windows backup, but most of it applies equally to a Mac or Linux install. Make your own list as you go along, so that when you do it again in a month or so it'll be easy.

EMAIL. If you use Thunderbird, get yourself a little tool called "MozBackup". (Don't rely on just copying the data files, it doesn't work. I've tried.) If you use Outlook Express you get to dig around in your Application Data hidden folder or some such bullshit.

DOCUMENTS. If you're organized, all of those, AND your source code for stuff, should be in your My Documents folder. If not, get your ass in gear and organize, at least to the point where all your important documents are in one place. Old tax programs in particular like to put their data files in the folder where they were installed. Ugh. Move those files somewhere they won't get lost-- with the rest of your documents. Also, get those old documents off your DESKTOP and into your DOCUMENTS folder. You can always make shortcuts on your desktop if you like to keep current projects at hand. Then zip that whole sucker up.

PHOTOS. In the same vein as the above, everything should be in the same place. Windows automatically creates a "My Photos" folder within "My Documents". Use it.

MUSIC. Ditto.

BOOKMARKS/FAVORITES. One of those things that you think would be slightly annoying but is actually insanely frustrating, as you struggle to google out all those sites which you visit often but don't know the address to. Save yourself the trouble, and back it up.

SAVEGAMES. Some games, like the Grand Theft Auto series, wisely place their savegames in the My Documents folder. Most don't. This is the most time-consuming part of my backup.

DOWNLOADS/PATCHES. I like to keep these on a separate CD because they don't tend to change that much. If you're a neat freak you might delete stuff as soon as you're done using it. Most people don't. So clean out that folder where you stick your downloads. It's amazing the crap you can find in there-- "Whoa, I still have the installer for last year's Firefox beta!" You might want to hold on to patches for older games, as they tend to be both large and pretty hard to find. If it's not important, clean it up, then start backin it up.

FINAL CHECK. Go through your list of programs, whether it's a list from the Start menu, Program Files, whatever. For each program, ask yourself, "If I had to reinstall this program from scratch, would I have everything?" For tax software that data includes all the tax data you put in manually. For games that data is your savegames. For SSH programs that data includes your private keys. Et cetera, ad nauseum.

OKAY. Now, take all that data that you've made a list of, and put it somewhere, off your hard drive. CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, hell I built myself a network server out of spare parts just for backup purposes. If you live in a floodplain or something idiotic like that, you probably want to use a waterproof storage medium.

Now you're done. Take comfort in the fact that WHEN things go sour, your stuff will be alright.