Why you should always keep a backup
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
A short time back I bought a package of 50 blank DVDs on ebay. The package I bought happened to include a 128 megabyte USB drive (or jump drive or thumb drive or whatever they call it at your end of the internet). I really understand why my daughter complains that her 256 meg USB drive is too small. This 128 meg drive, however has been really handy for me though.
I keep a copy of firefox portable on it so that I can carry all my plugins and bookmarks with me when I have to move from the computer in my room to the one in my daughter’s room. I also keep an OpenOffice spreadsheet detailing what work I’ve done for whom and when I should be (or when I got) paid for it, as well as monthly and yearly earnings totals.
This morning, I went into the back room and stuck the portable drive into the USB port and was told by Windows Explorer that there were no files on the drive, but 110 megabytes of space was being used.
Oh, Crap.
I let Windows XP run scandisk on the drive and it found 1,440 file fragments that were actual files whose directory entries got screwed up.
That’s every file on the drive! Since there’s no way I’m even gonna try to guess what each of those files were and rebuild the disk structure by hand, I gritted my teeth and formatted the drive
Then I thought to myself, “How long since you’ve backed up these files? TOO LONG!” I spent a good part of this morning reconstructing the files that were on the drive and, at this point, the only thing I’m missing is the last 2 1/2 weeks worth of data in my spreadsheet.
I think I’m gonna do three things right away:
- Make a backup of the USB drive to keep on this computer.
- Make a backup of the USB drive to keep on the other computer
- Create a PGP-encrypted .ZIP file containing the entire contents of this USB drive and upload it to my webspace here.
That should make creating fresh backups into a real pain. 
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
