Don't Lose Your Work!
Time is precious, especially in an age where we don't bother to really appreciate it as it passes. Yet, many of us play fast and loose with both our work and personal time by neglecting one very simple but easily overlooked task: making backups.
The most vivid reminder to me of the need for backups is from the days when I worked a computer help desk whie in university. Many times a semester, someone would come in nearly in tears, holding the floppy disk that contained their one and only copy of, say, their Ph.D. or Masters' thesis. The disk had been damaged. The thesis was due next week. Could we get their data back.
At least these students had a help desk to bring their work to in person. And the help desk had tools for data recovery. Even so, file contents aren't stored nice and neatly on a disk. We could get chunks of their work here and there back for them and put into another file, but they were in what seemed like random order and the chances of getting their work back in a highly usable (and quickly salvageable) form were usually pretty low.
Given how demoralizing it was about a week ago when I was editing a difficult article in an online tool, and the tool subsequently ate my changes, I hate to think of what it felt like to lose a far larger work which was the culmination of so many years of school.
Protecting yourself from losing changes is relatively easy. Be a compulsive saver. I usually am but I suppose I got lazy that day while editing. Usually if I so much as pause for a thought I press Ctrl-S or Cmd-S (depending on what kind of computer I'm using) to save. Such habits protect all of us from those occasional "whoops the program crashed" or "whoops the power went out" moments. You only have to forget to save your work for a few hours before one of these happens to become a compulsive saver after that.
But backups are equally important. Especially to us freelancers, who are probably using a computer to do paying work. Once I was doing edits on a book and at some point in the process some of the files got so corrupted that they were completely useless. After fending off a potential panic attack, I looked through my backups and found a clean copy of the file that was actually missing just a bit of fresh work that I'd done between the last backup and when the files were toasted.
Mind you, even I drop the ball on this at times. I realized the other day that the regular backups I thought I'd set up ... well, I hadn't. Oops. At least I realized it before they became desperately needed!
So how do you do backups? There's a number of options. Some people like to burn files onto a CD or DVD. I do this when I'm about to do something big, like install a new OS on my computer. A lot of people get external hard drives for this purpose. You can get hard drives that plug into a USB port, for example. The nice thing about external drives is you can change their content over and over, with more flexibility than you have with even a re-writeable CD or DVD. There are also online sites that cater to people who want to save their backups far away, just in case, say, the house burns down.
Whatever method you choose, this is one area where it's worth spending a bit of money to protect yourself and your time. Having to scramble to redo work means you can't do new work, you risk your clients thinking you're not entirely professional, and in general is just plain depressing. So consider purchasing an external hard drive and some backup software, or an account on a site that lets you do online backups. You may actually have backup software without realizing it. If you have a Mac you probably have Time Machine. Windows users might want to check out this list of options. Linux users (and OS X users) can get a lot done with rsync.
How often you back up really depends on how little or much work you're willing to have to redo. Say that you back up every day at 7pm. This decision means that if something goes horribly wrong at 5:30pm, you can go grab the backups from nearly 24 hours ago. Hopefully you don't mind having to redo that much work. I tend to set mine for every 2 hours.
There's also how you manage the backups. Do you do them manually or is it automated? (I recommend the second.) Do you always have the backups sent to the same spot or do you alternate them so they're staggered some. Say that I didn't realize a file got corrupted 4 hours ago while I was making changes. I might not notice until I close the editor and open it back up. But if I'm making backups every 2 hours, then my closest backup would also have the corruption. So I might alternate where the backups go, having 3 different directories to put them in and using a rotation.
This description deserves an example. Say that I have the directories hourly, daily, and weekly. Once an hour, I would back up my files into the hourly directory. Once a day, I'd back up into the daily directory. And once a week, I'd back up into the weekly. This way I could at least go back to the daily backup and grab an uncorrupted version of the file.
To accomplish all of this fanciness, you basically need a program that you can configure to run at specific times and copy over the files you want to back up. Even better is if the program only copies changed files, that way your backups are faster.
As far as what to back up, that's entirely up to you. I tend to back up my entire home directory, just because not everything important is in my documents folder. As long as I have the space to do it, I figure it's better to back up more than to forget to back up something that I didn't realize I should.
