On Aug 13, 2004, at 7:28 AM, Wilton Shaw wrote:
Thanks David, Please explain the difference between "saving" and "backing up"? I am using Iomega Zip 250 disks for backing up.
One, be careful. Zip disks are poor backup media. they're better than nothing, but they have a distressing ability to fail at the worst possible moment.
Two. From your description, it sounds like you're either using Iomega's sync tool or some tool in Quicken to synch a copy of your quicken files. This will automatically keep a version of the file on your hard drive and the one on your zip *the same*. The flaw of such schemes is as you've seen, they're susceptible to GIGO; the utility happily overwrites an older good copy with a newer corrupt copy.
What David is suggesting is making a copy of your Quicken files at a point in time. Foex: today,put in a zip disk, make a folder called "Quicken 8-13-04" or something, and copy your quicken data files to it.
Next week, put in the same disk, make a new folder called "Quicken 8-20-04" and copy your quicken data files to there.
This way if something happens to your quicken data, you put in the zip drive, copy the files back to their correct folder on your hard drive and you're restored up to the point that you're backed up at.
This is how 'real', ie: professional IT systems are backed up.
We, for instance, have 4 rotating sets of backup tapes. One set holds a week's worth of backups, full and incremental, so we can back up to any time point in the last four weeks.
At any given time at least one set is somewhere off-site, so in a worst-case scenario, our data is safe.
Ours is a simple scheme. backup schemes can get very complicated, with 6-month and 1-year cycles, plus more frequent backups, over a variety of media. It largely depends on the recovery and auditing requirements of the situation.
This sort of backup scheme is done *very* easily with CDR's*, for example. You can just keep copying your important data to new CDR's. At some point you'll probably want to toss the old ones, but this gives you lots of backups to put in a number of places.
My iPhoto library, for example. Since we got a digital camera, I haven't taken a frame of film. So I regularly back up my iPhoto library, since these are irreplaceable pictures. (they're also amateur pictures, so many of them, while irreplaceable are also not *worth* replacing, but that's beside the point.)
So I have a copy of them at my Mom's house, and another copy of them at work. If something happens to my house, I've not lost everything, something I *can't* say for my film photographs.
*The anti-CD-R folks will jump right in here recounting anecdotes about how they curl up and die within months, to which I a) point out the plural of anecdote is not data, and b) point people to the NIST who've made a study of how to preserve CD-r data.
<http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/carefordisc/>
-- Bruce Johnson
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