Ken McGuire

Backup. Backup. Backup.

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Ken McGuire

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Seems like Yesterday (10 of 10)
Creative Commons License photo credit: √oхέƒx™

Save yourself the trouble in the future – back it up. Whatever is you’re working on at the moment, back it up. Keep one copy. Keep a second copy. Keep a copy far away. However small you might think the job you’re doing is at the moment (speaking from a design perspective here), it will come back to you at some stage.

A one off design I did only a few months ago came back to bite me this afternoon. Loads of JPGs knocking around but do you think I had a PSD or AI file to go along with the design, which it turns it isn’t exactly as one-off as I thought it might be? Nope. The result? Redo the design from scratch, based on the JPG.

Like my reading habits, my backup habits have changed of late as well. When I made the investment before Christmas in getting a new iMac into the office, I needed to pick up an external drive to store a lot of the good stuff (and junk) that had built up on my work laptop and the server here in the office. A few weeks on and it’s paying off – save a copy locally, sync it back to the server, sync it back to the hard drive. If (like the desktop bandit I am) I start clearing house on the laptop or desktop and accidentally blitz something, I know I’ve got a spare copy to hand.

Many moons ago I used to do this with floppy disks. The office I’m in at the moment has a desk full of 3.5″ disks with CAD drawings for various projects I tackled in my early teens. Once college hit it was onward towards CDs, USB keys and then towards my mp3 player, iPod, emailing to myself, copies on my phone… wherever you have the chance to back something up (look at PutPlace.com or Dropbox as online solutions), do just that – back it up.

If anything, it’ll save you tearing your hair out or punching your desk in the future.

Update – PutPlace.com Offer: Adding this as Joe‘s left a comment with a bonus code you can use for PutPlace.com. Sign up for a 30 day free trial, use the promo code ‘joe’ and you’ll have your trial extended for three months instead of thirty days – nice one Joe.

Comments

5 responses to “Backup. Backup. Backup.”

  1. Kentar Avatar
    Kentar

    Not to mention people using a Gmail account specifically for storage.

    Man those were the days, I had a special case for my floppies that when you opened it, it raised the disks at different heights so you could pick out which one you wanted.

    Its amazing how far technology has come and how far it continues to go when you think about it.

    Getting all nostalgic now 🙂

  2. Joe Drumgoole Avatar
    Joe Drumgoole

    Use the invitation code “joe” for PutPlace and get three months free trial instead of 30 days.

  3. Darren Avatar
    Darren

    Ouch! Sorry Dude!

    On a smaller scale, I learned the hard way too. I used to keep a lot of files on a USB key (and only on that USB key) and yes, it went AWOL. I use Dropbox a bit now. Must start using it to its fullest.

  4. Ken McGuire Avatar
    Ken McGuire

    Nice one Joe, added the comment into the post.

    @Ken I’m a victim of that as well – anything I think I’ll need on the road, if it’s of reasonable size I’ll email it to myself. I remember those cases too. Even had a lock on my one. Useful, until I lost the key and had to rip the lid off.

  5. Keith Shirley Avatar
    Keith Shirley

    For any backup software (online or local) that syncs automatically – make sure it can keep a history. Just syncing files is not good enough. If you delete something but don’t realise it in time then it gets deleted from the backup too.

    Also don’t forget to test it really works – set yourself a reminder to regularly try restoring a file.

    Disclaimer: Slight bias as I run a business doing online backups. 🙂

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