Rich writes, <I try to keep sequential copies of important developing projects too and on seperate computers (work and home). Been burned often enough.>
Wow, and I thought I had gotten paranoid! And I've only been burned twice for not having external backups. The first time was about eight months ago when, by reformatting a HD I was going to have removed and give to my boyfriend, I accidentally deleted two folders (both of which would have fit easily on a Zip disk, if I'd had the drive then) of files which mostly were archives but which I still considered valuable, but also in one of those folders was very important material subject to immediate use at any time (it had my resume and reference list in it! Thank goodness I actually had a hardcopy printout of the resume and was able to retype it! Restoring the reference list was more difficult, but I managed that also). The second time was the more recent disaster I mentioned in my prior post about losing thirty-odd pages of the story I'm writing (2-3 weeks worth of work!). Had to rewrite all of that from scratch, after making a list of the "Missing Scenes." Though I succeeded (and some of the rewrites are actually better than the originals), that was really painful. Since getting the Zip drive up and backups made, I have only two such projects which would fall into the "sequential developing" category (the rest of my backups: applications and archival data mostly, can sit on the Zip disks and wait till I need them; hope I never do, but like you said, "good insurance"), but what I've been doing with them is just updating their backups on the Zip disk each time I add a new scene, in the case of the story I'm writing, and data, in the case of the Gene database when I add more info to that. This way, if anything happens to the "main" files I normally work on from the G3, the most up-to-date versions of these projects are right there on the Zip disk. But I do recall a time when -- hey, and it was with the first Mac I ever used, too, the Mac Plus in 1986-87 at a desktop publishing/word processor/copywriter job I had at the time -- when it was my self-imposed solemn task to spend the last half hour of every day making backups on floppy of ALL the work I'd done that day. Funny thing is, I never needed to resort to the backups. I made them anyway, but that Mac never wonked out on me, I never had a single problem with it of any kind, and I never lost any of my work. But I still backed up at the end of every day without fail. I was so meticulous about this, I don't know why I didn't make sure, from the time I bought my first Mac to use at home -- a Performa 475 in 1995 --that I didn't see to getting, creating and just as scrupulously using some sort of external backup system THEN. Maybe because I never had to actually use the backups I'd kept so religiously in the past? But I learned. The Zip disk which contains my two "sequentially developing projects" (being related, they're in subfolders of the same main folder, so therefore on the same Zip disk), now I insert it in the drive the instant my G3 is finished booting, so it's ready for me right away. And I don't even wait until I'm ready to shut down for the night to update my backups. ~Yersinia. -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
