The Importance of Backups
One of the more important things I learned in the dark ages of computing was the importance of backing up my work. About twenty-five years ago when I taught at Los Angeles Baptist College—which subsequently became The Master’s College—my office was located on the second floor of an old two story stone building in the middle of the campus. It was one of the most ancient structures there. According to legend, in the distant mists of antiquity, it had been used as the cafeteria. Given how small it was, I found that difficult to imagine.
In any case, my office was located up a narrow flight of stairs, one of but two rooms on that second floor—the two rooms being separated by a closet that housed a tiny sink and toilet. It had a window air conditioner and was lined with bookcases. Its two windows overlooked a courtyard that was filled with stone benches and scattered oak trees.
At the time—this being the dark ages—I was one of only two faculty members on campus who had a computer in his office. It wasn’t much, even back then: I had a Commodore 128—an upgrade from my previous machine, a Commodore 64. The Commodore 128 could run CP/M, an operating system that predated both MS-DOS and Windows. As a result, I could use WordStar (an ancient word processing program) and I saved my files to a 3 ½ inch floppy disk. There was no hard drive. Hard drives were rare and expensive back in these primitive times.
In any case, I was happily working in my office writing up my notes for a lecture; it was September and a warm day in southern California and the office became a bit stuffy. I decided to turn on the air conditioner.
It came to life, I returned to my seat, sat down, and was just starting to type when suddenly the power in my office died. Running the air conditioner at the same time I was using a computer was more than the circuits in that old building could handle. With the loss of power, I lost nearly two hours’ worth of typing: I hadn’t bothered to hit “save.”
Losing but a relatively small amount of work, however, affected me profoundly. First, and most obviously: I never again tried using the A/C when I was on my computer in that office. But secondly, and most importantly, I vowed never to lose my work like that again. I became a fanatic about saving my work. And not only did I save it to one floppy, I would make multiple copies on multiple floppies. And I would keep one floppy at work in my office, and another one at home.
As technology and my finances improved I moved from Commodore to MS-DOS and ultimately to Windows-based machines—machines that came with a hard drive. But I rely exclusively on my hard drive. I still regularly back up my work to floppy disks. When it became possible to burn data to CDs, I started using those at backups—on a monthly basis. And my paranoia and fear knew no bounds. Not only would I keep copies of the backup CDs in both my home office and the one at the small seminary where I teach now, I would stick copies in an envelope and mail them off to a friend in Colorado: what if my house burned down? What if California was devastated by an earthquake?
When my wife and children got computers and I connected them together on my home network, I started backing up my files to their machines on a regular basis. Adding an external hard drive as a backup was not long in coming after that—though I soon learned that such drives are fickle beasts and can die just like any other bit of hardware.
Today, I feel almost comfortable about my backup situation: not only do I have two external hard drives and the hard drives of my family members, I also have what are called “cloud” drives. These are spaces on the computer servers of large corporations dedicated to backing-up one’s data. There are several of these available that are completely free. I use four of them. And thanks to a little free program Microsoft has called SyncToy, I can automatically back up all my files to all four cloud drives and my external hard drives every night while I sleep. The cloud drives I use are DropBox, GoogleDrive, Amazon’s CloudDrive, and Microsoft’s Skydrive.
Besides the obvious advantage of now having multiple backups keeping my data safe and my fearful mind at ease, I have the incredible convenience, thanks to how cloud drives work, of being able to access my documents on any computer, tablet or smartphone anywhere I happen to be, despite only having saved them to my home computer.
This past Sunday I once again had to preach at my church—our pastor was out of town. I saved my sermon and the accompanying PowerPoint presentation on my computer on Saturday afternoon. When I got to church the next morning, all I took with me was my iPad. Thanks to the cloud drives—I specifically made use of Skydrive at church—I was able to bring up my sermon text on my iPad, and my wife could bring up the PowerPoint presentation on her laptop—despite the fact that I had never saved or transferred those documents to either device. Had I wanted to, I could have accessed my sermon on my cellphone. Or I could have looked at them on one of the computers in our church library and then printed off hard copies on the printer. Thanks to cloud drives, my stuff is not only stored securely—I can access it from anywhere! I never again have to worry about losing my data and I never have to worry about forgetting some important paper or presentation; I now always have everything with me no matter where I am.
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