The picture here is my gorgeous Apple G5 iMac about to undergo radical surgery.
Not at my hands, of course.  But yesterday my primary writing machine succumbed
to the African dust and quickly degenerated from a crash to a failed boot to a
dead screen.  Kudos to Apple, who made the machine somewhat self-serviceable,
but in my case it looks like I'm in the queue for some Apple Service Desk help,
a bit of check-writing, and an unpleasant recovery.  The only thing that makes
this situation even vaguely bearable is that by serendipity, divine
intervention, or plain dumb luck, my G5 crashed only 4 days after I had
finished a complete back up - pictures, music, documents, everything.  So
hardware woes notwithstanding, I'm feeling pretty good: I'm not going to lose
anything except time and money, both infinitely more expendable than my work,
which is essentially irreplaceable.

I've been a backup nut for ages, twisting over the evanescence of digital
medium, agonizing over the forced incompatibilities of proprietary document
formats, and loathe to commit my more important stuff to heavy and burdensome
hard copy.  But writers take note - a backup strategy is essential, and when
your machine gives up the ghost it will be the sole factor that determines
whether you are put out or hung out to dry.  In an increasingly digital age,
being smart about our data and our media is essential.  Let's look at the
options.  Lesson One: Off Site I learned from a like-minded colleague who
taught me a lot about computing in the modern age that the only safe back up is
a complete duplication of all valuable material stored in an offsite location.
This was an engineer friend, whose office stored a complete set of weekly
backup tapes in another facility twenty miles down the road.  Think about where
you would be if a fire ravaged your home and your diligently-created backups
happened to be stored in the desk drawer underneath your computer: you would
lose both primary and secondary copies, which is to say you would lose
everything.  So lesson one is to not only get in the habit of backing up your
material but in storing your backups elsewhere.  Back up your home computer to
a disk you keep at the office and your office backup on a disk you keep at
home.  Mail a CD to a family member or keep one in your bank safe deposit box,
if you have one.  Be creative.  The same goes for travelers: put your computer
in one bag and the backups in your carry on, or vice versa.  If your luggage
gets lost you won't lose everything, but if your backups are in your laptop bag
you'll lose everything.  Keep them separate.  

Lesson Two: Regular Back up regularly.  The old adage no one ever pays any
attention is: back up no less frequently than the amount of work you would like
to avoid duplicating.  If you make your living from the written word and can't
afford to lose the chapter of the novel you wrote yesterday, your backups
should be daily, preferably at the end of a day's writing session.  If you keep
your email elsewhere (a Gmail account, an IMAP host, or similar) and you only
download the occasional family picture, you can probably afford to do a backup
once a month.  Only you know how much you can afford to lose.  Base your backup
strategy on that self evaluation and base your plan on that frequency of
repetition.

Lesson Three: Automate Hardly anyone has the foresight, will power, and
diligence to backup their files regularly, so finding a way to automate your
backups is essential.  Modern computers offer many ways to do this - some of
which you must pay for - and taking advantage of them is the key to your
success.  This article will look at several ways to automate your backups.

Backup Strategies for Macintosh Apple has diligently striven to make the
Macintosh a useful tool for those who live the digital lifestyle, and helping
Mac users back up has not been overlooked.  Start with .Mac, the online service
integrated into Macintosh computers.  It's possible - even painless - to
synchronize your files over a broadband connection to your .Mac account.  I
find .Mac a bit pricey for my taste considering most of what it offers I have
acquired through other service providers, but you can't beat the convenience:
using .Mac and Isync, you can synchronize at the press of a single button.
Apple's second innovative feature for backing up is the under-utilized but
tremendously innovative Search Folder concept.  Open up a search folder from
the Finder and use any criteria you like to search for documents, pictures, and
music.  The trick here is to make a search folder that displays any files
created or modified in the past seven days (for example).  You can see where
I'm going with this.  At a minimum, at the end of every week, zip up a copy of
all files you've worked on and email them to yourself or burn them to a CD.
You're better protected already.  But wait!  Now have a look at Automator, the
Mac OS X software with the little robot icon.  It's easy to build a little
automator script that backs things up for you, and taking advantage of a search
folder is a convenient first step.  Use a search folder to identify newly
created files and then make the second step in your automator script the CD
burning, emailing, or whatever you choose to move the backup offsite.

Backup Strategies for Linux Linux has as many backup tools as it does
networking options, all of which will require rolling up your sleeves once and
getting dirty.  For starters, have a look at the rsync program for
synchronizing two machines.  This is a command line version of what Chronosync
seems to do.  You are on your own for networking your Linux box to another
machine.  This is one of the little things that I enjoy so much about Mac OS X,
but that's another story.  Once you've linked the machines, have a look at Joe
'Zonker' Brockmeier's excellent article at Linux.com.  Rsync is complicated and
powerful, just what you'd expect.

You can just as easily burn CD backups though.  I did my backing up using K3B,
one of my favorite pieces of software for the KDE desktop.  Alternately, use a
shell script to identify your recent documents, tar and zip them up, and then
just burn the zipped files to a disk.  The following little bash shell script
will get the job done.


#!/bin/bash
# Backup script to backup files and folders 
# Randall Wood
# Create the variable bkupdate, which will be appended the
# name of the file

bkupdate="$(date +%F)"

# Begin the backup: recursive, 
# all files newer than 2005-09-01, save to Desktop

tar -cvf /home/randymon/Desktop/backup-$bkupdate.tar.bz2 
         --bzip2 --newer-mtime 2005-09-01 /home/randymon/Documents 

# Badda boom, badda bing. We're done.
echo "Documents directory is backed up."
echo "Current date is" $bkupdate



Storage Media
The next question is, what to do with your backup?  You've got several options.
For small backups you can transfer the files to your ipod, if you've got one.
I've got a decent but not huge music collection, which leaves several free
gigabytes of space on my 40G ipod.  Apple makes it easy to activate your ipod
as a storage device, to which you can transfer your latest back ups.  This is
the strategy I used when updating my last book.  At the end of every writing or
editing session I zipped up the complete set of manuscript files and put the
latest copy on my ipod.  Non ipod users can just as simply take advantage of a
USB flashdrive, which are sold these days with capacities in the gigabytes.
That will hold a lot of text if you are a writer although it won't help you
much with pictures or music.

For the bigger stuff you need to back up to CD or DVD depending on what media
your computer is equipped to handle.  My Powerbook can only write CDs but the
iMac came with a DVD writer.  I don't produce any video so at the time the
capability seemed wasted on me, but if you save files to DVD you've got a heck
of a lot more space on one disk to fill, which is useful.  I currently use one
DVD for written work, one for pictures, and one for music.  At about $1 per
disk, that's a low cost back up strategy I can live with, and I store the DVDs
off site.

For more capacity still it's possibly worth looking at an external hard drive,
the cheapest of which you can find these days for about $100.  But you can just
as easily use a separate Mac if you happen to have more than one in the family.
Here's the trick: using Mac's Bonjour service Macs can "discover"
each other over a local network.  That is a highly underutilized feature that
goes almost top on my list of why Macs are so convenient for home users.  If
you have two Macs, turn them both on and then from one finder window, browse
the network.  You'll probably see the other computer listed there (if you
don't, you need to turn on the file sharing service from the other Mac so that
it broadcasts its presence on the network - see the Sharing menu in the System
Configuration).  You'll be prompted for your name and password on that machine,
and once you've provided it you will be logged in remotely on the other
machine.  Now transfer across to the other machine whatever you'd like.

Mass file transfer can be a complicated business if you aren't mentally
diligent as you work about keeping your stuff organized.  For example, if you
happen to have different versions of the same document saved on both computers
you are in for a whole world of pain.  Being careful is the first way to make
your life easier - do all your primary development on one machine and use the
second as a repository for your backups, or use a flashdrive with two folders -
"to machine A" and "to machine B" to keep track of what is
going where.  But you might find yourself in a situation rather more complex
than that, in which case you might need some dedicated backup or
synchronization software.  Fortunately, several are available.  I am a big fan
of Chronosync, which you must pay for but will not regret investing in.
Chronosync uses a complicated algorithm to compare and contrast the file
structure on the two machines, and then allows you to decide what to do with
them.  The options are endless but as you can well imagine you can blind copy
your entire file structure from one machine to the other, merge and contrast
the two machines so both have the latest copy of everything, and many things
more complicated than that.  My personal backup strategy involves synching two
Macs on a weekly or semi-monthly basis, and then burning a complete DVD backup
of all my files about once a month.  That's an investment in storage media over
time, but when disaster strikes, the money will seem like nothing: how much do
you spend per month on coffee, anyway?

Final Notes Two final notes about backing up: First, take good care of your
back ups.  I once scanned a slew of photos onto CD, and then managed to damage
the CD (I scratched the opaque side, and the disk was useless), losing
everything.  Lesson learned!  Keep your CDs and DVDs in plastic or paper
sleeves (paper is better, since disks occasionally stick to plastic envelopes)
and keep them cool, dry, and safe from extremes of temperature and humidity.
Second, keep them away from others.  In the age of identity theft you can never
be too cautious, and the more you can do to prevent some stranger from lifting
a complete set of all your electronic work, the better, particularly in the
case of documents like tax records, bank statements, and so on.  The really
sensitive stuff - the contents of your browser cache, for example - are
probably things you won't be manually backing up, but you will sleep better
knowing loss of a back up CD won't compromise your finances, your family, or
worse.  Postscript The irony is sickening: the powerbook's hard drive crashed
as well, just two one week after the iMac crashed, and only 4 days after
writing this snarky article.  Thanks to the CD backups I'm still protected
(though I'm wondering if I'm going to lose my addressbook? Not sure I backed
that up).  Still it could have been worse.  For the next few weeks I'll be
handling the backup CDs with velvet gloves.  This qualifies as
"catastrophic failure" and I am feeling very grateful it wasn't more
catastrophic in terms of data loss than it will be to my wallet.  What are you
doing still screwing around on the Internet?  Close your browser and go backup
your stuff!