Tonight as I was preparing to do my duties as Official Nag of the online Kiss of Death chapter, I realized that my KOD directory was not in the backup set that I had restored onto the new computer. That meant that those files are lost. Maybe forever or maybe I can get that hard drive working again for a short period. I've been making a list of the files I need to pull off, if the disk every comes to life for a few minutes.
I was able to search the internet and find some of the information. My critical spreadsheet is in the files area of a Yahoo group so that others can see what's scheduled. I never thought that I'd be the one desperately in need of the information. However, I was really glad it was there. I was able to get the tax forms from the IRS website. I had to check past emails to see what the number of the tax form is for Canadian citizens. With some effort, I was able to put things back together and send out my monthly emails to the instructors.
The lesson to be learned is to utilize other people's servers. I use Gmail, so I have my emails saved and don't need to worry about using too much space. (Well, I do, but most people can save their emails forever in almost 3GB of space.) Yahoo had my spreadsheet. The IRS had the tax forms. There are services that will let you backup your entire hard disk to their servers. I'll review some of those later. For now, use the simple, free services to make your life easier.
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3 comments:
So what types of things should I backup on the free services? And how do I do that?
My standard answer is to backup anything you don't want to retype or recreate.
Google documents are great for backing up single documents. I have manuscripts, spreadsheets, and my agenda for Dallas there among other things.
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Here's the limit for Google Document storage...
Documents
* Each document can be up to 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image.
* You can upload documents from any of the following file formats:
o HTML
o Plain text (.txt)
o Microsoft Word
o .rtf
o Open Office (.odt)
* Each user has a limit of 5000 documents and 5000 images.
Spreadsheets
* Each spreadsheet can be up to 10,000 rows, or up to 256 columns, or up to 100,000 cells, or up to 40 sheets -- whichever limit is reached first.
* Each user has a limit of 1000 spreadsheets.
* The limit on spreadsheets open at one time is 11
* You can import spreadsheets up to approximately 1 Mb in xls, csv, or ods, txt, tsv, tsb format.
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I also set up a Gmail account, so that I can email documents to myself. The fine print says that are not responsible if some files disappear, but they have a much better track record than my computer does.
You can set up your own Yahoo group and put files up in the files area.
Thanks Lynn... I will do that with my writing and other docs I need to keep. I never thought of doing that. I usually just saved to disk, which works too, but this might be easier to do and to remember to do.
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