Backing up the laptop

As many of you know, I'm a fanatic when it comes to backing up my laptop. My dad (a computer expert and retired electrical engineer) hammered that wisdom into my brain years ago, and I've never regretted following his advice. Indeed, backing up has saved my fanny any number of times.

The information contained on my laptop is probably the single most valuable thing I possess. It includes all my writing and all my photos (somewhere on the order of 110,000+ of them!). I would be devastated to lose these data, hence my fanaticism in backing up.

Needless to say, I never use "the cloud" for this purpose (which is not a celestial weather formation, but merely someone else's computer). I used to back up to an external hard drive, but a couple years ago Don bought me a thumb drive which holds a massive amount of data – on the order of 512 gigabytes.

This faithful little thumb drive has served me well. Every Saturday, when my work week is finished, I first back up this blog (a harsh lesson from Granny Miller many years ago), and then I do a full-scale backup of my computer, including any new photos I uploaded. Because this represents so much data, I usually budget about three hours for the whole shebang. My archive of photos is so massive that it took about fifteen hours – no exaggeration – to back up the entire thing the first time I used the thumb drive. For this reason, I don't re-back-up the full photo archive each week, but instead just add any new photos I take.

A few weeks ago, I turned to Don and said, "I'd like you to do some research and make a purchase for me. I'd like to get another thumb drive for an extra backup." Backups to backups are always wise. (Besides, such a purchase is a write-off on our taxes.)

Anyway, he did his research and purchased a larger thumb drive, one terabyte in size.

You can see the size comparison below with my old thumb drive.

But how well does it work? I plugged it into my USB port and sample-copied a file with a bunch of photos. It was done so quickly I hardly had time to blink. Whoa!

Encouraged, I spontaneously decided to back up my entire archive of photos (remember, in excess of 110,000 pix). It – took – fifteen – minutes. Remember, the old thumb drive took about fifteen hours!

So I settled in to back up all my documents, a process that took three hours with my old thumb drive. The new thumb drive took twelve minutes. Twelve minutes!

So I'm hooked. This is a marvelous little bit of technology, and it offers me great peace of mind.

While you may not have 110,000+ photos to preserve, I strongly urge everyone to heed my father's advice and back up your computer. You won't regret it.

UPDATE: To those concerned about faulty thumb drives: No worries, I've tested this thumb drive and verified the contents, and it works perfectly. We did purchase another (cheaper) terabyte thumb drive and it didn't work at all, so I understand the concerns. Also, since we have another terabyte thumb drive ordered and on the way, and since the backup times are now so much shorter, I'll do two full-scale backups each week, and the second thumb drive will be stored in our fireproof safe where we also keep our vital documents.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Comical historical note: Here's a one megabyte hard drive being shipped by by IBM in 1956.

BIG mistake

This sobering headline was on Drudge this morning:

Ouch. Big. Major. OUCH.

According to the article:

A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code.

By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers.

Mr Marsala wrote on a forum for server experts that he was now stuck after having accidentally run destructive code on his own computers. But far from advising them how to fix it, most experts informed him that he had just accidentally deleted the data of his company and its clients, and in so doing had probably destroyed his entire company with just one line of code.

The problem command was "rm -rf": a basic piece of code that will delete everything it is told to. The “rm” tells the computer to remove; the r deletes everything within a given directory; and the f stands for “force”, telling the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files.

Together, the code deleted everything on the computer, including Mr Masarla’s customers websites, he wrote. That piece of code is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles.

Normally, that code would wipe out all of the specific parts of the computer that it was pointed at. But because of an error in the way it was written, the code didn’t actually specify anywhere – and so removed everything on the computer.

I can't even imagine. It's bad enough to lose data on a computer -- but to erase a whole company?

Speaking of which, time to back up both the blog and my laptop....

Backup backup backup backup.....

A dear friend had a financial blow over the weekend. Her husband, a finish carpenter, had all his tools stolen from his vehicle. It seems some thieves -- who apparently had been watching for the opportunity -- backed into their driveway around 2:30 a.m., wrenched off the tailgate of the truck, emptied the contents within two minutes, and ran.

It's a shattering loss, financially as well as impacting his livelihood. Additionally, there are psychological ramifications -- besides the sense of violation, he had a certain emotional connection to the tools he had been collecting for over 25 years and which he used to provide for his family.

Anyway, yesterday this friend and I were chatting via instant message and we started speculating what things we would be devastated to lose to thieves or disasters. The first thing that popped into my head: my laptop.

The trouble with a laptop, you see, is all the valuable data that tends to accumulate on it. In my case, it's not just my writing; it's all the photos I take, all the articles I collect, all the links I record...

This is why I'm a huge huge HUGE advocate of backing up computers, something my dad always hammered into my head as critical. He's right, too, since backups have saved my fanny any number of times.

But a year ago I had to migrate to a new laptop, and for a variety of reasons never got around to backing it up. It came with a built-in backup program from Dell which wanted me to back my data up to the Cloud (NOT!!!!!), and knowing that my valuable data were vulnerable always nagged at me.

So, in light of my friend's reminder, yesterday Don installed a backup program to my computer and we did a full-scale backup to an external hard drive.

Then, as extra protection, I also backed up specific files (photos, my writing, etc.) to another external hard drive.

Also -- and I'll thank Granny Miller for this -- I backed up my blog (Granny lost her entire blog a few years ago, a devastating blow).

I can't begin to describe the feeling of security all this backing up data gave me, so I'm passing on the reminder to all you dear readers. Backing up files, photos, etc. is critical in today's high-tech world, where data loss can come from any number of directions.

Please, do it today!

Welcome back, Granny!

Some comments on my last blog post reminded me -- we all need to join together and welcome back Granny Miller!

Granny Miller's blog, if you recall, disappeared a couple of years ago (July 2010) -- a catastrophic loss for her faithful followers. Apparently it was an error on Granny's part. As she wrote, "At the time I accidently destroyed my website, I was caring for a very ill family member. I was planning to retire GRANNY MILLER at the end of the 2010 anyway. Believe me, the loss of my website in those days was the least of my worries."

Granny said it took her over sixteen months to face up to the data disaster, but from the looks of her new website, she's recovered beautifully.

Welcome back, Granny Miller -- we've missed your warm, cheerful, useful, informational, spiffy-snazzy posts!

_____________________________

On a related note, Granny's accidental destruction of her blog underscores the need for regular backups of everything computer-related. I do a full-scale backup of my computer's hard drive about once a week (and use a thumb drive to back up any important files on a day-to-day basis), but Granny's experience taught me I need to back up my blog on a regular basis as well.

Blogger changed to a new format a couple months ago (ug!), but I found some instructions for backing up Blogger blogs on this site, Living Prepared.

Here are the directions:

In your Blog's control panel, if you click and open the Settings Tab you will see a Blog Tools section, click on that tab. It will open another window and you will see an option to Import Blog, Export Blog and Delete Blog. Clicking on the ‘Export Blog’ will allow you to save a copy of the entire contents of your Blog to your computer. A drop down window will allow you to pick where you want to save the file. It’s very simple to use this feature.

(Import Blog will allow you to restore your Blog should it become corrupted or lost by simply using your saved back-up copy)

Remember folks, as Granny Miller can testify -- a stitch in time saves nine. Backing up your computer/blog/whatever can save an enormous amount of headache, heartache, and work.

Now excuse me, I'm going to back up my blog. Again.

SurvivalBlog down

WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE

Several readers have emailed and asked why they've been unable to get on SurvivalBlog.com lately. We haven't been able to either. This is the official announcement:

This weekend, our server in Sweden was put under a "ping flood" Denial of Service (DOS) attack that resulted in 65% packet loss for a few hours.

This attack was most likely orchestrated by the man in Texas who last week anonymously sent me a racist rant and threats against both my blog site and my books. (His e-mail began: "You ni**er lover you have five days to take all links and any [sic] metion for [sic] links below off your site. If you [sic] dont [sic] do it I will post [sic] everyone [sic] of [sic] you [sic] cr***y books on [sic] prirate [sic] sites and kiss your ni**er loving income from them good [sic] by [sic] .")

The attack was timed for a three-day holiday weekend, because the miscreants expected that the staff at our ISP would be unavailable to help up reconfigure.

OBTW, the attack did not initially include our dotted quad backup address: 95.143.193.148 (Which is explained here.)

At least this provided a good test for our Continuity of Web Services (COWS) defenses. Obviously, we are now going to need multiple mirror sites as well as an adaptive cloud server that can handle any future DOS onslaught.

The other lesson this teaches is the importance of having a backup. We provide an offline archive of the past six years of SurvivalBlog posts, available for a modest price.

~Jim Rawles~
Editor, www.SurvivalBlog.com

There is also an update posted on the excellent blog The Orange Jeep Dad, so go take a look at that. Please excuse the language, though Orange Jeep Dad did some admirable deleting.

I never fail to shake my head at the astounding depths of hatred which lurk in some people. Please pray that the SurvivalBlog folks can get things straightened out.

Backups to backups

I'm a little fanatical on the subject of backing up my computer. I do a full-scale backup every week, and if I'm working on something important I'll back up every night on my thumb drive as well. This habit -- ingrained into me by my engineer father -- has saved my bacon any number of times. One time a few years ago, my computer literally up and died, no hope of recovery. No worries -- my full-scale backup was from the week prior, and my important text had been backed up the night before. My losses were minimal.

So anyway... this morning I followed a reader's link to her blog (Oklahoma Transient) which led me to another blog called Living Prepared. This fellow had kindly taken the time to explain how to back up... a blog!

Honestly, it's something to which I never gave much thought. Blogs are always just... there, aren't they?

Apparently no. He references a lady named Granny Miller who used to keep a nifty blog (I believe I've been there, and it was indeed nifty). But something happened and her blog disappeared. As Living Prepared put it, "Years of priceless information gone forever!"

The thought made me shudder. I love my blog and would hate to lose it. So following the directions outlined on Living Prepared, I backed it up.

For those wanting to back up their own blog, here's the directions, which are quite simple.

First I went into my computer and cleaned out a lot of unnecessary stuff (you know how documents pile up). I emptied my computer's trash. The thousands of photos I took in 2011 were transferred to my external hard drive (something I'd been meaning to do anyway). In short, I made a lot of room on my computer.

Then I went to the "Settings" feature on my blog. At the top are three links: Import Blog, Export Blog, and Delete Blog. I clicked on Export Blog. From that page is a big orange button that says "Download Blog."

I clicked on it and then went out to feed the cows. My blog is huge and it took about half an hour to get it all backed up.

This download feature did not give me the option of where to put my blog, but at least I know what the file was called: blog-04-17-2012. So once the backup was created (42,047 KB in size), I transferred a copy to my external hard drive. So now, as of this morning, I have an exact copy of my blog filed in two separate locations. Whoo-hoo, what a nice feeling of security!

Not to be outdone by this excellent information, Living Prepared gave another nifty suggestion: to create a pdf version of my blog (which could ultimately be printed in book form if I so desired, but I won't bother). Nonetheless I considered this yet another handy backup feature, so I went ahead and did it.

I went to a link called Blogbooker, which is a free service that creates pdf's of three different types of blogs (Wordpress, Blogger, and LiveJournal).

This service can only utilize a backed up version of a blog, so I would have had to back up my blog first regardless. Since my blog is serviced through Blogger, I clicked on that button and saw this screen:

I filled in the required information and pressed "Create your BookBlog."

Well, this process took hours. Well, maybe two hours. My blog is huge, after all, and goes back several years and includes thousands of photos. Having this process take so long was no surprise.

...And then it failed. That is, I got a message saying:

Grunt. Well, as of this post I'm trying it again.

But regarding of whether I can manage to obtain a pdf of my blog or not, the fact remains it's now safely backed up. My sincere thanks to Living Prepared for posting this information.