In which I am a little too law-abiding.

The Law of Unintended Consequences bit me a few weeks ago.

Some of you who friend me on Facebook already know about this – the day I lost all my writing.  All my plays, all my short stories, all the children’s stories, my not-so-good and never-to-be-seen-again novel.  The whole folder.  Gone.

The reason I am still here and haven’t jumped off a bridge is because of the miracle of redundancy.

But for a little while there, it didn’t look like redundancy was going to help me.  In fact, for a little while there, it seemed like redundancy was the cause of all my problems.

I try very hard to follow good computing practices.  I have an anti-virus program.  I have a malware program.  I don’t click on links in emails.

And I make backups.  In the plural.

One backup can fail.  Two is good.  Three is better, and four was the miracle.

Because I use a very useful program called Second Copy to make three of my backups.  It has the ability to synchronize data, so I can delete a file in one place, and the next time I run my backup, the file will be deleted from the backup set.  This is a feature which has worked well for me for a long time—because who wants to waste disk space on backing up files you’re actually throwing away?  I figured if I deleted a file by accident, I would realize it before I ran the next synchronization, and I could get it off the backup.

But that was before my hard drives booted up in a different order and Second Copy thought I had deleted my writing folder.  And before I then synchronized my other backups with the one where the folder was deleted.

There I was, thinking I had three good copies onsite, and I had none.  Miraculously, I have Carbonite, and my offsite backup was fine.  Twenty minutes, and everything was restored.

So, my Tuesday Tip is four-fold:

• Don’t let your Second Copy backups run without checking the box to let you preview it first.
• Don’t run Second Copy without checking that your drive letters are the same as they were when you set it up.
• Do consider unchecking the Second Copy option to synchronize deletions on at least one of your backups
• Do use Carbonite or some other offsite backup service.

And, always, always, always remember the Law of Unintended Consequences.