Unintended Consequences

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.

That’s redundant

And a good thing, too.

Yesterday, I was talking about how I got lucky with a computer crash and how that luck was based on preparation. So, today, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about what those preparations were—and are.

First, hang on to all installation disks. If you download a program from the internet, copy the installation file to a CD or a DVD. And don’t forget the operating system. My laptop has a built-in system recovery feature. A portion of the hard drive is set aside to store the installation files. That wasn’t anything I did. That’s how it came. It’s not my preferred method, though, because who is to say the drive itself won’t crash. Often, a disabled hard drive can be resuscitated by a complete reformat. At that point, you’d need the installation disks. In my case, there are no disks for the operating system. I won’t make that mistake with any future purchase. A recovery partition is great. I won’t turn it down. But I want the installation disks for the operating system, too.

Second, backup all your data. All your word processing documents, all your videos, all your photos, all your databases, spreadsheets, everything. Back it up twice. Keep one backup offsite, if possible. Sure, a set in your desk drawer is great if your hard drive crashes. What if your house burns down?

I used to leave a backup at my mom’s house. Hard drives got bigger, and it became impractical, both in terms of time spent and DVDs used. Now, I use Carbonite. For a low yearly fee, Carbonite backs up a single local hard drive to their remote servers. If you change a file, a new version gets backed up. It happens in the background. After the initial backup, it happens quickly, quietly and without slowing down your computer. I highly recommend it. (Just remember it’s not an archive service. What Carbonite is doing is synchronizing your hard drive with files on their server. If you delete something, they will too—after a specified period, of course, because what good’s a backup if you can’t restore things you’ve accidentally erased?)

I also use Second Copy. It works in much the same way as Carbonite, except that it’s making a local copy—to an internal or external drive or to another PC on your network. There’s no yearly fee. You buy the software, install it, and that’s it (unless you decide to upgrade to a newer version at some point). I use it to synchronize the files on my laptop with those on my desktop machine as well as to make a backup to an external USB drive.

At any given moment, I’ve got three copies of my data in my office and one in the cloud. Could I still lose it all? Sure. But, at that point, I think we’re all gonna have bigger problems.

My point—and my tip for this Tuesday—is that bits and bytes are fragile. Do you know where your backups are?

Luck

Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.*

Or, sometimes, necessity.

My laptop crashed last week. Just refused to boot up. “Missing or corrupt system file.”

Dead. Dead. Door nail dead.

Today, I am writing this blog post on that same laptop.

I got lucky. But I planned to be lucky.

Today’s Monday Miracle is two-fold. It wasn’t a total hardware failure, and I was able to recover from the crash because I had the sense to be prepared for it when it came.

First, I had all of my installation disks for all of my software. Second, I had a record of all the product keys and serial numbers that so many of them insist you enter when you try to reinstall. Third, I had two complete and current backups of all my data. Fourth, this happened once before—a number of years ago.

I can’t even remember whether the prior crash was this laptop or the previous one. The point is I have experience. And I took notes. So, I knew what to do.

I lost some time, but nothing else.

My question to you today is are you going to plan to be lucky? Or are you going to cross your fingers and hope everything always works out okay? (There’s a guy named Murphy that will give you good odds on that one.)

It’s not just about computers.

Do you get the oil changed in your car? Do you know how to change a flat tire? Does somebody have an extra key to your living space? Have you thought about making and filing a copy of everything in your wallet? Is your resumé up to date? Do you have an emergency fund? Insurance policies?

Are you reading something every day about the industry that you’re in or that you want to join? Have you stretched yourself lately? Learned a new skill? Added some new people to your network? Re-connected with some old acquaintances?

If something unforeseen happened—good or bad—are you equipped to leverage the good and minimize the bad?

Luck doesn’t just happen. Unless you’ve got a winning lottery ticket—and even then, you had to buy it.

* Seneca

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Tag Archives: Backups

Unintended Consequences

That’s redundant

Luck