First of all, this post is motivated by 2 separate events — a 9rules note on Backup Routine (I had no back-up routine before I read that particular note), and ColourfulWorld’s comment on my previous post.
I’ve mentioned in my previous post that I am beginning to start picking up where I left off in terms of writing my thesis. Hence, backing-up my half-, make that quarter-written thesis becomes the single most important thing that I must remember to do every night. I know, suddenly drinking milk or taking a shower before going to bed become less important. I still take a shower before going to bed, but that’s not important for now.
I know backing-up my Work folder into a CD especially on a daily basis isn’t the best solution though my Work folder contains 95% Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and I can burn more than a year’s worth of my Work folder into the same CD (hence I’m not really wasting resources). Heck, NOTHING is the BEST solution these days — hard disks crash, CDs go *kaput*, data in the CD go missing, servers crash and what-have-yous. And it seems that ColourfulWorld’s solution is by far the best — in that it’s FREE, it’s hassle-FREE, it’s not time consuming, as opposed to burning the whole Work folder into a CD or an external hard disk, it’s safe, and you have over, what? 2.8GB worth of storage space (for one account, and you can have fifty if you fancy). In ColoufulWorld’s own words:
I personally favour Gmail for it provides me handy office document tools online. You can find almost anything essential that you need by just logging into your Gmail account. Therefore i always upload my files into my email. It’s safe and fast and easy and furthermore it can be accessed virtually anywhere. If you have multiple mail accounts, do backup your files in all those accounts. This is by far the safest method for the odds for all mail servers to crash at the same time is 0%.
This young man does have some wisdom, huh? Or is it me?
So yea, back to the original question (remember the title?) — what is your back-up routine like?
If you think this post might benefit other bloggers:
I actually used to use email as well. GMail was a godsend for me cause I used to write all my assignments into one email and then continue from where I left off the next day.
That said, the most important thing for me to backup now are my writings, and with Google Docs, I don’t have to worry at all. Log into Gmail, open docs.google.com, and continue from where I left off, no downloading needed.
yup, i use gmail a lot…
Pat and Simon: Seriously, how do you “use GMail”? I just remembered I created an account for this purpose last year, but haven’t figured out a way to conveniently back-up my stuff. Do you send an email to yourself? Do you attach your files and save as draft (does this even work?)??
Teach me, please
Haha, so surprised that my opinion was featured in this post. Thank you very much! =)
Well, it’s fairly simple, just send an email to yourself or whatever address that you want, Gmail will store all sent material in “Sent Mail” at the side bar. Just attach and send, no need to save as draft. =)
ColourfulWorld:
(1) But that means that the “receiving email” will also have a copy of the backup?
(2) If I’m not mistaken, GMail doesn’t allow folders to be attached, right? So, if I made corrections to 10 documents, I’d have to attach and send 10 files?
yup, both receiver and sender will get the file.
i wouldn’t recommend to send multiple files. It would be easier if you could just zip or rar all the files into 1 piece with a file size
OK, thanks heaps for the tips
I prefer weekly full backups and daily incremental backups
Green: And this isn’t a bad suggestion too, saves time and effort backing-up documents that we didn’t modify, right?
Exactly, if you have very large storage area you should consider using full backups, which means backup process take long time, but restoring will be easy. (Because you will only need one file to restore)
Green: Yea, thanks again