A rant on laptop backup
Ok, so I am pretty anal about backup. I have had a laptop for about 10 years. I started with an Apple Powerbook I, and I now have an Inspiron 8000. During that time, I have never lost more than a couple of hours work due to computer problems. Once I had a hard disk die. There was some possibility of recovering data from the disk, but since I had a backup of the user data, there was no reason to do that.
Right now I work for UEN, and before that I was at QWEST. Neither place has a system set up for backing up laptops. When I ask my co-workers what would happen if their laptop disk failed right now, most either get a pained look on their face, or they have the look of the blissfully uninformed (that can’t happen to me). A few tell me their backup strategy. At QWEST, there were 80 people in my group. Over six years there were several hard disk failures and the typical loss of time was three to nine months of work.
At QWEST I used Laplink as my backup program. Since my copy of Laplink is pretty old and both my office and home computer are running XP, I decided to look for something different. My method for finding things is currently to type something like backup into Google. What I came up with is Handy Backup http://www.handybackup.com/ . This is the best backup program that I have used so far. I have it set up to move changed files over to the network drive. If the file is opened for writing it just fails and tries later. In practice I just work throughout the day, and a little while after I finish with a file it is automatically backed up. Backing up small files is not noticeable during the day. Backing up 100 or 200 MB files takes a few minutes and noticeable slows down the computer. The only large file I back up is my Outlook file. Anyway, I am planning to get a copy for my laptop.
I am also trying Handy Backup at home, but there are unresolved issues there. At home I back up to an RW CD. Handy Backup says it supports RW CD’s, but I have not gotten it to work right. This is complicated by me having three different pieces of Roxio software. A copy of Roxio CD Direct that came with my computer, Windows XP uses Roxio code, and Handy Backup recommends in their FAC downloading some other software for Roxio. The different pieces of code create different file systems on the CD’s. None of the file system seems to work. For now I am dragging my files to CD.
4:27:14 PM 
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