When was the last time you backed up your computer? … No, that’s too long ago. Do your backup now! If you have a home business or an e-business, you probably have a heavy-duty backup system that runs at night to make a complete copy of your fileserver. (If not, get one.) But what about that personal computer and the grandkids’ photos? Here is how Tip Dude tries to do his backups -

• Do Your Backups Regularly - Yes, exactly as advertised. A weekly backup is to be done at the same time every week. A monthly backup is done on the same day every month. You might not need a backup every week, but then what you should do is call it a monthly backup and do it every month, instead of just doing it whenever you remember. How often you backup should be determined by your business requirements - i.e., how much problem it would be for you if you lost a week’s worth of data, versus a month or three months.
• Assume You Will Never See Your Backup Again - Most people put off doing backups because they want to organize their files before backing it up, or want the backups to be neatly labelled in proper volume order and by category. But then they end up having no backup at all while they are trying to get everything organized, which is a much worse situation. Backups are just that - backups. Most people never use their spare tire; most Swiss citizens never use their government-issued rifles to defend their homeland. So, it doesn’t matter if your backup is ugly or disorganized. You would be so distraught if your computer crashed that you wouldn’t mind sifting through many CD-ROMs just to find the file you need. If you can’t be bothered to sift through the CDs, then the file wasn’t that important to you anyway.
• Use Proper Media - When Tip Dude was younger, he used a whole bunch of cheap 5.25″ diskettes to do some backups. When the hard disk got full, he deleted some files without checking whether the backup was still valid. When he needed those files again, he discovered that his cheap diskettes were covered in mold and completely unreadable. Moral of the story is: if you are going to the trouble of doing backup, use proper media. (Oh, and do not keep them in the cellar, even though you hope never to see them again.)
• Store Your Backup Securely - Tony always backed up his work. When he finished working on his laptop every day, he copied it to a Sandisk USB flash drive for backup. One day, he fell asleep while working on his laptop. A thief came, took the laptop and the USB drive (still plugged in). Tony woke up to find his computer gone and his backup gone. The moral: store your backup someplace far away from your computer. If you backup onto CD-ROMs at home, store your backup CD-ROMs at work or in a different part of the house.
• Use Remote Storage For Backup - Many vendors provide free or paid remote storage space for securely storing your files. You can send your work to yourself at Gmail every day as a daily backup. You can upload the file to Apple’s iDisk as a daily backup. You can simply send it to a trusted friend or store it on a fileserver. This is a good way to do daily backups if you’re writing something important and you really need to do daily backup and you really don’t want to mess with CD-ROM discs all day long.
• Do Not Try To Backup The Whole System - Most computer systems nowadays has too much storage to be backed up in reasonable time without specialized equipment. In contrast, the content created by the average user in a week to a month could be backed up very quickly. So, learn to do an Incremental backup - that is, only the new files you created or modified since the last time you backed up. Tip Dude only works on a few active projects in any one week, even though many many project files are on Tip Dude’s hard disk. So, he only copies those projects that he worked on this week to CD-ROM at the end of the week - and not those project folders that hadn’t been touched. If you ever have to restore a system, you should always start with a new or reimaged computer, and then drag the most recent copy of the project folders back onto the hard disk.
• Organize CD-ROM Backups Simply - Most people have folders that are larger than a single CD-ROM (600 MB). To backup those folders, create subfolders within the folder and label them “001″ and “002″ etc. Drag enough files into “001″ until the 600MB limit is reached. Then drag other files into “002″, etc., until all files are done. Burn the CD-ROMs from these folders. When burning is finished, move the files back into one folder so that they aren’t completely disorganized. When you’re done burning, take a screen shot of the directory structure on the CD-ROM, print it out, and use that as the CD cover insert so that you can tell at a glance what files are on that CD-ROM. Label the CD-ROM itself with the folder or project name, date, the word ‘BACKUP’, and the sequence number of the disc (e.g. disk 2 of 3). Tip Dude usually write on CD-ROMs with a felt-tip permanent marker even though for long-term storage, a proper CD-ROM marker is recommended by marker manufacturers.
• Burn Only 600MB To A CD-ROM - In Tip Dude’s experience, CD-ROMs are most likely to have manufacturing defects in the region beyond 600MB, right at the edge of the disc. Discs are cheap, and data is valuable. If you want to be able to read the backup when your computer crashes, burn only the first 600MB on a CD-ROM, even though nominally, CD-ROMs can carry 650MB to 730MB.
• Don’t Forget The Paper - There are some things that are still done on paper, like traffic tickets, transcripts and birth certificates. When backing up your home office, don’t forget to scan these paper things to a PDF and then burn them to a CD-ROM for backup. To scan things to PDF, you could purchase a multi-function center (MFC) at an office supply store (like Staples or Office Depot) - or you can do the poor man’s version, which is to just use a digital camera to take a photograph of the paper document. To photograph a document, put it on the floor and stand up, use the flash and use the zoom function to fill the frame with the entire page. (By zooming in as far as possible while standing far away from the document, it minimizes the lens distortion and gives the flash enough distance not to create a huge reflection in the middle of the page.) To create the PDF file, you can use programs such as Ghostscript, the built-in PDF function on Mac OS X, PrimoPDF  or purchase Adobe Acrobat Professional, depending on your operating system and needs.
• Purge Your Backups As Needed - There are many reasons why you might want to purge your backups. After many, many incremental backups, it might get confusing with many CD-ROMs, so you might want to purge the oldest backup (but only if you’re absolutely sure you won’t need an earlier draft of a manuscript again in a future revision). You should always have at least three copies of recent backups on the shelf. Another reason you might want to purge the backup is to destroy evidence. This is harder because the evidence you want to destroy might be on multiple CD-ROMs, which also hold useful data you want to keep. In any case, you wouldn’t need to worry about this problem if you simply don’t engage in illegal activity to begin with.

What do you do to safeguard your computer’s files?

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