Back ups are very important. Maybe that’s a bit of an understatement. I have over 100GB is critical data. Five years of digital photos, both raw and edited. A year’s worth of digital video in MPEG2 format. My MP3s from my archived CD collection.
I have a lot of critical crap.
Last night, as I had done hundreds of times before, I re-installed WinXP on my C: drive. I use a NLite disc that has been updated and patched for all the latest drivers, WinXP patches, most-used programs, etc…
Once I got to the part of the install where WinXP boots for the first time, it dropped to a recovery console and started spitting errors on the S: and M: drives. I use these drives for pagefile/temporary directories and mass storage, respectively.
Mass storage was divided into Media and Critical directories.
Media was a collection of RSS-downloaded BitTorrent files. Living overseas, we use BT to grab the latest episodes of TV shows we like. It’s nice to get TV in English for once.
Critical was all of our personal profiles, documents, photos, home movies, etc…
As I stared at the screen, I could see WinXP’s recovery console chewing through my files. Reporting them as corrupted.
So, what can we do to keep such a situation from becoming a major brick in our “reasons to commit suicide” wall?
First, you need a good, external drive. No matter how much internal stuff you have, you *have* to have an external drive. Firewire, USB, NAS; it does not matter. Go to the store today and get the biggest external drive you can afford.
Next, you need to organize your stuff. Always save your personall-created documents under “My Documents”. Keep your temporary-downloaded files on the Desktop until you have a chance to go through them. Then, either file them or delete them.
In your “mass storage”, create folders for apps, photos, videos, audio, drivers, and text.
In apps, I keep all the little freeware/shareware/payware tools I download. I keep a copy of my Steam cache in there too.
My photos directory has subdirectories with the “month-day-year” format. On the day I download the pics from my camera, I create a folder for that day-month-year.
Videos I use for stuff I created. This stuff is not available for download on the internet. Home movies of the kids. Recordings of my helis. FRAPS in-game footage I shot. Things like that.
I have audio subdivided into podcasts, books, and music. Pretty simple. I usually clear out podcasts after a few weeks.
Drivers speaks for itself. In a lot of cases, I just copy the entire driver CD that comes with whatever device to a subfolder here. In other cases, I download updated drivers and delete the old drivers.
My books directory contains mostly text files and PDFs. Stuff I get from the internet that I want to keep. I also have some physical manuals that I scanned to PDF stored here.
Once you have your file structure laid out, start putting things in their place. After that, figure out how big it all is. I came up at over 100GB. I just happen to have a 250GB external drive, so I’m good to go.
To set up the backups, you need to grab SyncBack. They have a free and a pay version. I use the free version. Set up a manual backup task and then run it weekly.
SyncBack and a good directory structure saved me last night. Hopefully, it’ll save you one day too…