Back it on up!

Aaaannnnddd.... I'm back! Sorry for the long delay, but here we go!

So over the weekend my mother's laptop went down. (It was a Dell, and despite my many comments on the quality of Dell systems over the years, she has still purchased them because of their price... And has to get new ones every couple years.) Luckily she has a geek in the family (namely me!), and I got to work on it. Unfortunately the hard drive was bad, data unrecoverable by any of the means at my disposal. My sister had been using this laptop for work, and... Wait for it... She hadn't backed up her data. There is a saying I used to use when I worked in St. George as a computer technician at PC Innovation. "If you didn't back it up, then it wasn't important." Many people have their entire lives on their computers, but never consider the very good possibility that something will break, and all will be lost. I have known people who have lost all their wedding photos, years worth of financial records, and on a more personal note, I have had to rewrite the beginning of my novel 3 times, due to not backing up properly. (See how I tied that into being an aspiring author?)

With today's technology it is so easy to backup the important things, everybody should be doing it. There are many options available as far as backup suites and automated software, but in truth, the best way I have found is to simply copy the data you need to an external source. Whether that is an extra hard drive, thumb drive, or even to the internet. Thumb drives are cheap, and will fit most people's need for backup space. Those that need more room can go for an external hard drive. My preferred method is call Dropbox. What it does is create a folder on your computer. Anything saved to that folder is automatically backed up to the web. Better yet, because it gets backed up to the web, you can set it up on multiple computers, and access (or update) the files from anywhere. The next best part is that you can get almost 3 gigs (gigabytes) of storage for free! (Full disclosure: I am in no way financially tied/linked to Dropbox. I have a free account with 2.75GB of available storage. If you choose to use the above link to create an account with them, I will get credit for it. I recommend you do your own research, and choose for yourself how to go about storing your backups.)

"Well, that's all fine and dandy," you might be saying, "but that doesn't really help me back up, just tells me where to put it." I used to have a hard time with my wife. She would do a lot of photo editing, then browse the internet, get a virus, and loose her work. Naturally I was to blame, because I hadn't backed up her work for her, and she didn't know how. (Yeah, I know... I didn't marry a geek, but she makes up for it in other areas.) I created a batch file (more on that later) that would backup all of her data for her. 3 months later I checked... and she hadn't done a backup in 3 months, go fig. The moral here is, BACK UP your data!

Now I will help you create a batch file to help you backup your data:
1. Right-click on a blank spot on your desktop, and select "New" -> "Text Document"
2. Name the file "Backup.txt" without the quotes.
3. Open the file, and copy and paste the following text into it.

@echo off
@echo WARNING!
@echo This will overwrite anything
@echo in the destination folder.
@echo Press CTRL-C to cancel, or
pause
@echo Backing up files
xcopy /e /v /y *.* c:\Dropbox\
@echo Backup complete
pause

4. Save the files as "Backup.bat" (Again, without the quotes)
5. Place this batch file in any folder you want backed up.
6. Run the file whenever you want to backup.

The batch file is pretty simple, and can easily be modified to fit your needs. Say you only need your pictures backed up? In that case, change *.* to *.jpg (or *.mp3, or *.(whatever extension the file(s) have)) The batch was written assuming you have a Dropbox account, and created the folder on the "C:\" drive. If you want to backup somewhere else, just change the last of that line to the destination. C:\ is the drive letter. If you are using another drive, change C to that drive letter (i.e. D:\ or G:\)

For a walkthru on making this automated, visit here.

Questions, comments, or better ideas? PLEASE lemme know!