The Importance of Backups

 February 2003

I know you've heard me ramble about this one quite a few times, but hey, this is one of those topics that I just can't wear out.

Case in point:

I just finished reformatting my system and doing a clean install. Before I did, I made a number of backups, then hesitated about formatting and made even more backups. I just kept feeling that there was something I was forgetting. I made a few more backups, copied things over to multiple disks, triple-checked and then finally gave in and got the job done.

Guess what? One very tiny file, but super-critical to my business, was not backed up! Even those of us who use the utmost of caution still fail.

A valuable lesson was learned. I did find this file on a very old backup, but it was of no use to me. Why? Because that backup was made with MSBackup - on a different version of Win98. Since I'm now on Win98 Second Edition, the restore failed to properly translate the file.

This was a painful lesson for me - costing me about two hours that would have been more productive shoveling snow. (We're up to 9" new snow today.)

So...if you are using the backup program that comes with Windows, please keep in mind that it may fail you if you upgrade your Windows version and then try to restore.

The best policy is to always use more than one type of backup system, in case one does fail. I did this, but on the other types of backups, I missed this one file.

And if you aren't backing up your files in some manner, please don't call me after you lose your files (for whatever reason) and ask me how you can get them back. Do feel free to call me now though, so we can secure your files for the future!

Another good lesson to take from my recent experience is to make detailed notes about what you are doing to your system, and about what it is doing to you. The whole reason behind my recent troubles came about from upgrading IE to version 5.5 and also upgrading Windows Media Player to version 7. Exactly what caused the problem I do not know - two weeks of testing failed to reveal the culprit. I've always believed in detailed notes - but in the past have been too lazy to keep them. This time I did, and it helped me to learn a lot about the problem. More importantly, when the time came to start fresh, I had notes about all of my hardware configurations, which made the restoration go very smoothly. So before you decide to run those restore CD's that came with your computer, or try a clean install, be sure to write down every setting you can find, in your email software, modem settings, dial-up configurations, device manager, etc. In fact, do it now while your computer is working just fine!

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