Backup! Backup! Backup!

Here’s a little tip that has nothing to do with biblical peacemaking but I hope blesses you nonetheless:

If you use computers for any projects, BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!

I shared this advice with a new friend this week and found out yesterday that she had a big ol’ computer crash on Thursday and would have lost ALL of her work for the week if she hadn’t … HOORAY! … listened to my advice and backed-up like a crazy gal as she worked.

Here is how I backup/save my work on big projects:

1. I save EVERY SINGLE TIME I type. Every. Even if it’s just a word or two. I type as fast as a person can speak and it takes NO TIME to click “alt-F-S.” (I use that rather than “ctrl-S” because “alt-F-S” does not require you to shift your hands off of your type-by-touch hand position but “ctrl-S” makes you shift AND puts stress on your pinkie too.)

2. The first thing I do when I start work again on a new day is save a backup copy to an “archive” directory AND email a copy to someone/somewhere OFF of my hard drive. This protects me and I always know that JUST IN CASE something goes very, very wrong (like my house burns down), I know that I’ll never lose more than that current day’s work.

3. If I am in “crunch mode” and I HAVE to make a hard deadline, I save additional copies as I work throughout the day (i.e., every hour or two hours or whatever). I ask myself: Have I made so many improvements/changes that it would REALLY be hard to recover if I lost the work? If so … BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! 🙂

So why am I so crazily-committed to backing up?

I think it goes WAY back to the 1980’s. (Yes, yes … my dear friends who weren’t even ALIVE or OUT OF DIAPERS in the ’80’s … yes, we did have computers. They had teeny-tiny little screens with GREEN text and one line of text at a time via an old-fashioned DOS prompt, but we had computers.)

ANYWAY … I distinctly remember our computer teacher telling us all the time how important it was to backup our work. (Of course we know-it-all teenagers ignored him.)

But during one class toward the end of the semester when we were all working furiously on a HUGE project that was a MAJOR part of our grade … the teacher CUT OFF THE POWER TO THE ROOM. We lost everything. EVERYTHING. Because we hadn’t backed-up.

I remember being SOOOOOOO MAD.
SOOOOOOOO ANGRY!
I couldn’t BELIEVE he did that!

But he just said to us all:

And he was right.

Hope this saves you from a project loss one day!

Sending you love,
Tara B.