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.
I LOATHE those e-mail Xmas cards people send me,
where I 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 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. It is dubbed by Windows,
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, 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?