Backing up is hard to do
I just had the unfortunate happen: the dog pulled my laptop off the table by tripping across the power cord. Yeah. Anyhow, I lost a bunch of screenwriting materials because the fall damaged my harddrive beyond repair.
I’m learning the VERY hard way that backing up is not just a good “insurance policy” but a MUST. I thought it might be a subject you might shed some light on from your personal experience.
– Eric
Indiana
Like flossing, stretching, and updating your will, backing up your work is one of those unquestioned Good Ideas that’s pretty easy to ignore. It’s the law of delayed consequences: people tend to put off work that doesn’t have immediate gratification.
Honestly, I don’t back up nearly as much as I should. Or, “should.” If you read any computer magazine, they’re constantly harping on you to back up every night to a redundant RAID, then weekly to a tape drive, with off-site storage and whatnot.
Bah. My philosophy can be summarized in six words: What’s the worst that could happen?
It’s a revelation that came to me the last time I switched to a new computer. I dutifully dragged my files onto an external hard drive, ready to migrate them to their new home, when I realized that pretty much everything I needed on the new computer was either…
- already installed, or
- would need to be redownloaded for the most recent version.
The only item that needed to make the move was my “Projects” folder, a mere 500 megabytes. So why was I bothering with everything else? It was time to apply my new philosophy.
What’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t back up my applications and system software? Well, it would take a little more time to re-install them. But, I’d be saving a lot of time by not bothering to back them up every day/week/month.
What’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t back up my old projects? Well, I’d hate to lose them; they’re like old friends frozen in 12pt Courier. Beyond the emotional cost, I do occasionally need to refer back to them. So it’s worth the effort to periodically grab the folder off the server and copy it to my local hard drive. Likewise, every few months I burn a copy of the whole thing onto a CD-ROM and mail it to my mother in Colorado, figuring that if an asteroid wipes out California, at least future generations will be able to read what SCOOBY-DOO was like before they cut it down to a PG rating. (Answer: much funnier.)
What’s the worst that could happen if I lost the current version of the project I’m working on? This is probably the worst-case scenario, because I’m generally on deadline and working for people with very little patience for technical difficulties. If I’m using my Powerbook, I’ll often email the file to myself as a backup, and also save it to my keychain drive. When I’m at home, I’ll often do the email trick, or copy items to my .Mac iDisk.
And then there’s the backups you don’t even plan. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond makes a convincing argument that the best place for a tribal chief to store his surplus food is in his neighbor’s stomach. The same is true for data. (Go with me here.) Most of the scripts I work on these days travel around as .pdfs. One side benefit of this digitalization is that for any given script, some friend or assistant will invariably have a copy sitting in her mail. I sleep a little more soundly knowing that I could simply ask her to send it back.
In conclusion: Backing up is a waste of time, except for the few items for which it’s crucial. So worry about those, and not the rest.
Articles
September 14th, 2004 at 10:10 pm
Thanks John! It’s funny. The only thing I kept revisiting was the loss of writing scraps and false starts. And the more I think about it, the more I feel sort of “free” of those old documents.
.Mac has saved my butt on the “convenience” items and I DO have hardcopies of those which matter most. Regarding apps, prefs, and support files (fonts, plug-ins, etc.) that doesn’t bother me at all.
So, glad to hear it from a pro. Your references to the lengths that experts recommend we go to backup our data reminds me of one other overplanning situation back on the eve of 2000.
September 16th, 2004 at 2:37 pm
Backup is only a pain when you have to do it manually. (And I’m including keychain drives in this.) I do it automatically. As my Web hosting company provides me with 2.6GB of storage space (far more than I need for my Web sites), I’ve created a backup directory there.
Nightly, a scheduled task runs a wonderful utility (rsync) that only transfers changes in files, and not the whole thing. This makes for incredibly fast transfers: rather than that entire 2MB PDF, only the 30K that’s new goes over the wire. (In fact, since rsync is so quick it’s no big deal to run it even more frequently, perhaps every couple hours during the workday.)
Set your script so it e-mails you only when it fails, and bam, you have fast off-site backups without lifting a finger. All of the benefits, none of the pain.
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