So far, here’s what I know I’ve lost thanks to poorly planned and/or non-recent backups before the hard drive crashed:
Firefox - an oil tanker-sized boatload of bookmarks. Some important, many not. Also filled in forms info, etc. All add-ons.
Address book - not exactly huge, but most up-to-date info on friends and family members to include things like birthdays & anniversaries
Zotero database! - 100s of citations, notes about them, links to the pdfs on the computer, etc. Thanks to playing around with the export feature I have a MODS file of the stuff from my Representing & Organizing folder (my latest bibliography). It imported back in beautifully. I lost any explicit Relations I had made between things and all links to files, but I was very pleasantly surprised to see that it brought in all my Notes, along with Tags, and the citation info. So despite my pleasure, I still lost a massive amount of data and work for the several 100 other citations.
iChats - any (of substance) since mid-April.
iCal - ALL calendar data.
Lots of pdfs and other files that were downloaded in the last 4-5 weeks. Most of no real import and most can be found easy enough. Just not sure what all was there, though.
Software - lots of software. I have reinstalled much already. Some I have on CD/DVD (commercial) so was easy enough; except where in the heck is my Dreamweaver 8 disk? Lots of software has been purchased from the interweb and I was very, very pleasantly surprised to see how easy some small companies made it for me to get another copy and my license key(s). I still have to try and get oXygen, though. Not sure how easy it’ll be, but I haven’t tried. I wonder if they’ll happily give me the older version I have had or try and make me pony up for the (2nd) newer version.
Customizations - any and all customizations in OSX or individual software programs.
Delicious Library - where’s my data? Gone, no doubt.
Not sure what else. Most is probably of no real consequence, but undoubtedly a small percentage was.
I will research and institute a much better and regular policy of backups; one that includes all the data hidden away in places like iCal, Firefox, Zotero, Address Book, and so on.
“Remember kids, only you can prevent data loss!” [With all due respect to the beloved Smokey Bear.]
8 responses so far ↓
1 Karin Dalziel // May 25, 2007 at 8:48 am
2 words: portable applications
Get yourself a 4 gig USB drive, run portable firefox (here’s the mac version: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20395) and have Zotero on there. Or just run the portable version of Firefox and drag the whole folder over to a USB drive every once in a while to back it up. Portable firefox with Zotero has saved my butt several times.
Or, there’s this: http://lifehacker.com/software/backup/geek-to-live–complete-free-mac-backup-248943.php
One of my co-workers recently lost everything from their mac. Yet, I still haven’t started backing up properly. Bad me!
2 Mark // May 25, 2007 at 9:01 am
Yes, that’s the rub with these public service announcements, we (most of us) feel that this will never happen to us so we feel for the person writing (or telling us) these horror stories and we go about our normal routine.
It pretty much has to happen to you before you’ll change. And even then, some people….
The portable route would be one way to do it, of course. But then you’d also need to ensure that you are backing that up regularly given the extra hazards of such a small device–loss, theft, fragility, ….
3 jenny // May 25, 2007 at 10:35 am
yeah i never ever use bookmarks–i use furl.
also, you can subscribe a google calendar to your ical, and that way it’s all backed up!
4 nirak.net - Musings of an LIS Student » Weekend Goals // May 25, 2007 at 7:16 pm
[…] Work on automating my computer backup (thanks Mark). […]
5 Laura // May 25, 2007 at 11:40 pm
And here I am still storing copies of files on floppy disks. (Yes, I have a USB floppy drive. Yes. I am living in the previous millennium.)
Good luck with reassembling everything–it sounds like a royal pain.
6 Mark // May 26, 2007 at 3:38 pm
you people and your googles…
Solutions are hard to resist, though.
Laura, I still have a bunch of stuff on floppies that I started moving off and never finished. I also have a fair few Zip disks full of who knows what? And no drive anymore.
7 Andrew // Jun 22, 2007 at 5:54 am
Yeah, always the same with data backup
I have to admit that I only backuped seldom, and yes one time too late, cause all my data was lost.
@ Laura
and using Online Backup as a good alternative to optical media or flash drives.
I’m living in the current millenium
Here you can find interesting articles about Online Backup services:
http://www.consumersearch.com/www/internet/online-backup-services/review.html
http://www.onlinebackupguide.com/the-top-ten-online-backup-services
Greets,
Andrew
8 Mark // Jun 24, 2007 at 9:51 am
Welcome, Andrew and thanks for the links.