Computer Commandment #1: Thou Must Backup Thy Data

It’s been said many times, and I’m going to say it until my dying day: Backup your data. Back it up often and distribute it.

My brother just lost a professional paper that is due almost immediately because something or other happened to his file (I can’t be more specific…he deigned to let me look). As a result, he needs to rewrite it from scratch in one night. Apparently there was also a problem with the automatically made backup file, so that wasn’t available as a resource. At any rate, he committed an error that many of us have fallen prey to: he trusted the computer to keep his data safe.

Me? When I’m working on a project, I save early and I save often (power outages have killed me at times). I split up the work so that a file corruption doesn’t take away everything. Every rewrite is given a new version number. Beyond that, I automatically do data backups to an external drive every night. Once a week I do a mirror of my critical disk partitions. Data also gets distributed to other computers, gets encrypted onto thumb drives, and professional work gets stored off-site. I’ve lost too much data over the decades to not be a Nervous Nelly about it.

So, this is just a friendly reminder: Always assume your computer is going to go down and your data will be corrupted. Remember that the odds of this happening increase in direct proportion to the importance and timeliness of what you are working on. So backup, backup, and backup.

UPDATE: He managed to recover the file. I bet that a load of pressure off his sphincter.