How To Back Up Your Work
One of the fundamentals of life is that if you are not planning to succeed, you have already planned to fail. This is revealed very starkly in the world of computers: Failure tends to be sudden and total. There is no such thing as perfect software or a perfect computer. Failures will happen. When they do, you do not usually lose "some" of your text – you lose it all. Everything.
However, if you adopt professional working practices, data on a computer is actually safer than data on paper. Hard to believe, but it's true; that's why banks use computers. Professionals use some or all of the techniques below to ensure that when failures occur, they simply frown, click a button, and carry on without loss or pain.
The Basics
- Enable “Always make backup” (Preferences> Save). This ensures that each time you save a file, the previous version is saved alongside it in the same folder as "Backup of...". Each time you save the open document, Word updates the backup copy to the version before the most recent save. If you delete the wrong thing by mistake and realize it a little later, you simply close the current file, open the “Backup of...” and save it over the top of the current file. Voila! No data loss!
- Get into the habit of hitting Save (Command> s) every time you pause to think, in order to save the current state of the document. There are macros you can run that will do this automatically for you, but most people find that they are too irritating to be worth it. You cannot be too rich, too healthy, or do too many saves...
- Do not rely on Word's Versions feature for backup. While it may appear to be useful, the problem is that Versions stores all versions of a document in the same file. If anything damages the file, you would lose the current and all prior versions at the same time. Elsewhere on this site, we recommend that you should not use Versions anyway, because our experience is that they greatly increase the probability of corruption in complex documents. And remember that a computer document is not like a paper document. If it becomes “unreadable” you are sometimes left with nothing. Nothing at all.
When to Back Up
- Each time you open a document for editing, immediately save it as a new file with today's date in ISO 8601 format at the front of the file name: 20040827 for August 27, 2004. This makes the files sort in date order in the folder so you can instantly find the latest one, and it means that whatever you had yesterday remains undamaged by today's disasters.
- Keep at least week's worth of "Dailies". If disk space is not a major consideration, don't discard any of your daily versions until the end of the project because some document corruptions can take a while to reveal themselves. The most damaging data-loss problems, however, tend to be human-caused: You weren't watching when you deleted a large section of text that is called in elsewhere in the document by a reference; you know you don't need it here, but it's not until you are proofing Chapter 14 that you find that this text was indeed essential there!
How to Back Up
- Avoid ever putting a Word document on a floppy disk. Floppy disks have almost disappeared from the industry. If you still have one, don't use it for Word documents. Floppies are too small and too unreliable. The problem with complex files such as Word documents is that you can't read just "some" of the file. The computer must be able to read the whole of the file or it can't read any of it.
- Write a backup out to removable media. CD-ROM or DVD media is good. Tape is no longer the medium of choice; these days it is expensive (both for the drive and the media) slow and unreliable compared to optical storage. USB Flash Drives (variously called "Thumb Drives" or "Data Keys") are an excellent choice for just a few documents. They are mechanically very robust and quite cheap.
- Never overwrite the most recent backup. Remember we said a disk drive is highly-stressed? One of the times of greatest stress is when your backup is running and it has to access every file on the drive. Guess when it's most likely to fail?
- Make sure your removable backup is not in the same room as the computer. If your computer gets stolen or the house burns down, you can always go and buy a new computer. Your data is gone forever – unless you’ve stored it somewhere else. People who do not work at home often take their home computer’s backup to work with them and pop it in their desk drawer. People who work at home often arrange a dry cool place in the garage or garden shed for the backups.
- Always have your data on two disk drives. A disk drive is a small, highly-stressed mechanical component. It is made very cheaply with all possible cost-cutting employed in the manufacturing process. It operates continuously, at high speed, and gets very hot internally. Eventually (about every three years... longer if you never turn them off) that drive is going to fail. When it does, you have all of your data from last night on the other drive. Don't you? Most professionals buy an additional disk for their computer after about 12 months. They simply put it in and arrange for a backup program to copy the whole of their Documents folder to it in the middle of the night. If the main drive fails (when the main drive fails...), they simply install an operating system on the other drive and off they go again to buy a new drive the next day.
How Many Backups To Keep
- For home use: As a minimum, have two backup media, "Current" and "Previous".
- For working at home, you need seven disks: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Weekly Full and Last Week Full. On Monday, you run an incremental backup (small and fast). Same Tuesday through Thursday night. Friday night, you run a full backup. Next week, you overwrite the daily disks and roll the full backup onto "Last Week". If you ever have to restore, you restore the most recent Full backup, then each of the dailies in order.
- For running a business you need eight additional disks. You have the same as above plus four "weekly" disks, three "Monthly" disks, and a "Spare". Each week, you retain the weekly disk and substitute a new weekly disk next week. Each month you keep the current weekly disk as the "Monthly" disk and substitute a new disk. This gives you the ability to restore back for three months in order to handle customer queries.
- For anything to do with accounting records, tax purposes, etc, you need to add 12 Monthly disks and Seven Yearly disks. An easy way to do this is to use Write-Once CD Media. They are about one fifth the price of re-writeables; they last a long time; they write at least twice the speed (usually 48 times versus 12 or five times); they are much more reliable (“write” failures on your backups are not good); and to implement your backup rotation, all you need to do is correctly label the burnt disk and put it in the correct drawer of your filing cabinet.
Useful Links
Déjà Vu – Backup software for the Mac.
Data Backup [Lene Fredborg, 13-Jan-2020: Removed outdated link to http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_backup_info.php] – Backup software for the Mac.
Backup Strategies for Small Businesses [Lene Fredborg, 08-Aug-2021: Removed outdated link to http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/webmaster/article.php/2219461] Backup Strategies for Small Businesses – Backing up workstations and servers.
