Friday, March 21, 2008

Keeping Our Blog in a Safe Place

Dwight's comment about archiving our blog started me wondering what to do with this really valuable record we are developing. Here are a couple of thoughts that I am going to try. First, I have already subscribed to Carbonite - $49.95 for one year (www.carbonite.com). We did this in January, after our son, Greg, told about his experience. His computer totally crashed. However, because he had subscribed to something similar to Carbonite, every file on his computer had been backed up somewhere out in the universe. Greg set up his new computer, contacted his backup company, they downloaded all of his files and he was up and running within a very short time. Carbonite does not back up any program files, but it does back up anything the computer owner has created. So, all of my picture files, all of my word documents, etc. are backed up on my local hard drive, my external hard drive and somewhere out in computer heaven. Hopefully, if I get a virus on my computer, my backup files are safe and can be retrieved, once the virus is cleaned up. Also, if I accidentally delete a file, I can contact Carbonite and they will retrieve that file in my backup file. Now, to avoid misleading anyone reading this, I have not had to retrieve anything from Carbonite. Consumer Reports says it does what it is supposed to do, and everything I could find online supported their claims. There are other backup programs available, so do some searching to see what will work for you.

The next thing I have done is copied and pasted our whole blog into a Word Document. The main thing I can't figure out how to do is to make the documents that can be enlarged so nicely on the blog a little bigger in the Word document. I am still working on that. So, now, my blog record is backed up in all three places, as well as on the blog. Maybe this will help in our discussion about preserving what is being written. Please let me know if you have other thoughts.

1 comment:

lenpal said...

Great post and great backup strategy! One point about viruses: since Carbonite does not back up your operating system and program files, you have a bit of extra protection against the risk of recovering virus-infected files (since viruses work in executable files rather than data files). There's always the risk of macro viruses in Word documents, but as long as you don't open the documents until you've scanned for viruses after restoring from Carbonite, you won't risk re-infecting your system.

Sincerely,

Len Pallazola
Manager, Customer Service Systems
Carbonite, Inc.
www.carbonite.com