BACK UP OR CRACK UP!
THE IMPORTANCE OF
BACKING UP FILES
By Anita Sands Hernandez ( astrology@earthlink.net )
My father came for dinner, was sitting in my living
room, a trapped audience, as he's too old to cook or shop, so he's dependent on
me at dinner hour. I now have this total TECHNO RUBE trying to watch a TV show
JUST AS I'm showing him (me all larky) how his brilliant daughter is sending
out a great primitive wood cut graphic of the 'GODDESS' cribbed from the
Atlantic Monthly E-zine, (Jan 1st, 2001 issue) and I'm sending it
out with a late Xmas card greeting to my pals on my lists.
STARLADY FORGETS
CALENDAR!
AGAIN! Happy Xmas/Ditto New Year!
Don’t you just hate those e-mail
Xmas cards people send where we
have to go to some SITE, and push buttons and remember CODES to get this
cartoon of a card? HELLO? There are graphics everywhere, go pick one up and
stick it in your PICTURE DIRECTORY! AND JUST SEND your pals a SIMPLE EMAIL WITH
A SOLID GRAPHIC IN IT. That is your homework assignment! A fantastic bevy of
graphics is available at GOOGLE.After you go there, hit IMAGES,
then put in “goddess” or “GOD” if you want two dozen choices on a page. See one
you like, click on it, you get a page of its own. Then where it says CLICK TO
EXPAND SIZE, do so. THEN RIGHT CLICK on it to save it
I also used to go to http://www.ncrtec.org/picture.htm a
COLLECTION of graphics online, but who knows, it may be gone as GOOGLE IMAGES
makes all those things obsolete. Whenever you’re websurfing, you see a graphic
you love, you right click and save; that's how to download the piece you like.
This site will give you what you ask for. I asked for GARDEN, it had many.
Babylon, French Impressionism, all kinds. Pictures of SAINT PETER, it had many.
Galaxies, MANY!
Anyway, as I'm showing off
bigtime to Pops that I can mail a graphic greeting card of my own design, my
poem, and a google graphic…and I'm also making him eat healthfood when he
wanted to go out and eat Chinese, God looks down at the sin of manic hubris to
one's elders and whammy! I suddenly realize that I am out of nowhere
missing one mailing list out of my NETSCAPE ADDRESS BOOK, with 1000
names inside it, that I've somehow hit a button and erased it, while I WAS
INSIDE the NETSCAPE COMMUNICATOR ADDRESS BOOK, REAL easy to do
BTW.
CONTINUALLY making single
keystroke wrong, maybe hitting a delete when I shouldn't, and ERASING entire
LISTS ---is the bane of my life and experience has taught me to make fresh
backups of my netscape address book on every national holiday! (meaning
regularly).
I could never figure out how to
work WINDOWS EXPLORER the worst file manager on the planet but ZTREE a GOOD
FILE MANAGER YOU CAN DOWNLOAD WITH YOUR MODEM from http://ztree.com makes
FILE managing WORK easy. I hit C
for copy and the whole file can be copied anywhere I want. It asks me, 'where,
Mistress?' And I say PUT it on that directory, or subdirectory or even that
FLOPPY and i order you to go find Drive A. The whirring sound of obedience
ensues and shazaaam! My FLOPPY has a COPY!
Before grief strikes your desk, BACK THAT SUCKER UP!
First you gotta find it. The one I use most in NETSCAPE BROWSER vers 4.7 from
1995, is dubbed by Netscape/
Windows as c:\programfiles\netscape\abook.nab learn to type that out. ALWAYS
Put the address book-back-up on a floppy and keep it on shelf! FINDING it's the
only hitch I ever have…. I run to my shelf, grab three dozen disc boxes, shake
them, spill discs out by the hundred, I sweat bullets until I find it! Label
neatly dated. Usually dated with an imprint made a few weeks earlier. ADR-BOOK!
Plus DATE. Then, it takes me a few minutes to see that EVEN THIS IS A THREE
WEEK OLD thing. New people have arrived since then, But it IS the latest back
up of my address book, and I'll have to make do.
I see that I DO NOT WANT TO
OVER-WRITE on today's address book in my PROGRAM FILES ON C DRIVE which is this
week's record, as THAT BACK UP on floppy is three weeks OLD and there are new
names since then. I JUST WANT THE NAMES IN THAT ONE LIST, one list of about
fifty names. WHY ERASE the other eleven lists or overwrite them, (same thing)
just to get the names in that one list!? SO, HERE IS WHERE A SECOND PC
works bigtime! I BOOT UP THE SECOND COMPUTER in the other room which has a year
old ADDRESS BOOK IN IT, (I rarely go in there) and I LOAD this 'fairly recent'
BACK UP of 3 week old address book ONTO its hard drive, off the FLOPPY in the A
DRIVE. Using ztree. COPY A:\abook.nab to c:\program files\netscape\user\abook.nab
but with ZTREE you don't have to write all that out. ZTREE can SEE the
directories. You see them on the screen, the trees and an F-8 toggle command
gives you two screens so you can move around and compare things.
THEN, after I INSTALL the latest
BACK UP on the machine in the back room, you know how netscape is, it
automatically self loads when you boot, so you can't expect to SEE WHAT YOU
JUST LOADED! NO, you must TURN OFF MACHINE. COMPLETEMUNDO. Then re-boot so the
NEW ADDRESS BOOK WILL LOAD. Now I go into Communicator, then into Address book,
see all the names on this ONE "LIST" and YES! THAT PARTICULAR LIST IS
NOW THERE! However, shades of the l9th century, I have to make a HAND WRITTEN
list of the fifty names in that list on a piece of paper. But I don't care, I'm
so grateful to have that list back! And I don't have to get the email exactly
as these names will 'appear completely' on your PC if you type in the first
three letters, Abe L and bingo the LINCOLN comes in. So I just write Abe and
Harry and Thomas and the last names will come from the address book itself.
Lincoln Truman and Jefferson and the email addies, all fly in by magic, and
thusly, very easily can I re-make the LIST.
I then take the written scribbled
list of names, go back to my main machine and ONE BY ONE reinsert the fifty
names onto the LIST in my main PC. Sweating bullets. It is absolutely necessary
to have ZTREE and to have two PCS. You can't do a partial LIST LOAD with
EXPLORER FOR WINDOWS. And figure out how to unload abook.nab and check and old
version, then reload it. It can be done, but I do not like moving or copying
files unless I have to.
I try to avoid moving entire
files. These are usually a half million bytes. And, I would have ERASED my
BRAND NEW address book in main PC if I OVERWROTE it with a file from three
weeks ago, (when I did my last backup.) OTHER new names would have been erased
by that super-imposure! So go to http://ztree.com
and instruct your PC to download the free file manager, unzipped version or
zipped.
Now, pick a target
directory. C:\ZTREE if you know how to use explorer to CREATE a target
directory. I don't. I can't figure explorer out.
Kim Henkel 'invented' ztree and
is always there and will help you! It's free for 30 days then it's 30$ but tell
him I sent you, maybe a ten percent discount for mentioning Anita, but use it
for a month first, on the house. Before you decide to buy it. Then he sends you
a key cuz on the 30th day the thing drops dead without the key!
To reiterate, if you want to
reinstall a three week old back up to an address book, you are going to erase
the current version of ADDRESS BOOK which is the newest version on your main
machine. You don't want to do that not when usually we erase just ONE LIST out
of all the names and lists on your PC. That one list can be found in a backup
and names written down and those names re-entered one by one.
IF I COULD MAKE YOU UNDERSTAND
that, and how important it is to back up
and how easy it is with ZTREE, or a back up service, below, keeping
copies of every file in the older PC’s standing in the house…then my feeble
attempt at clarity and lucidity in language is getting better. OK class, anyone
understand that? Anyone didn't?
Top 3 back up services
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/maintenance/tp/online_backup_services.htm
Assured file safety in case of your antique pc crashing and burning? ya think? PC’s lose 8% of their lifespan every year!
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