After the crash

Three days after the big explosion and I’m still dusting off. (My Dell XPS1330 laptop failed 3,000 miles from home – see previous post.)

I’m back in business, using the older laptop we brought for the VP Finance. The saving grace was online backup – services that let you send your files over the Internet to be stored on a secure computer at the provider’s data centre. At home, I back up to a drive on my home office network. It was too big to bring, plus it doesn’t protect you so well if the house burns down. So I had started using online backup as well even before we left.

Now I can confirm: it works. (Phew!)

I’m using two services – Fabrik Ultimate Backup from SimpleTech Inc. and Mozy from Decho Corp. Each gives me 2GB of online storage for free, for a total of 4GB. The price, as they say, is right. There are other online backup services out there that offer free software and storage capacity as well. (To find them, google “online backup” free.)

The free capacity isn’t enough to back up everything but it is just enough to back up my current documents, audio recordings of interviews and a gargantuan (over 1.5GB) Outlook file. I’m now considering paying $200 for two years of unlimited storage from Mozy.

The beauty with these two providers is that they apparently use the same technology. It’s a different client for each service, but the software is identical, so only one program to learn. It’s very easy to set up and use in most respects. It was a little difficult to figure out how to tell it which types of files (which file name extensions) to include in backups. Still, it works – not perfectly, it must be said, but it works.

The software does backups in the background whenever the computer is not being used. The trouble is, our computers are rarely not in use and when they’re not, they go into sleep mode. Sometimes the backup programs work while the computer is sleeping, sometimes not.

I gave Fabrik the more challenging assignment of backing up my Outlook file. It’s challenging because the Outlook file is always open. Many backup programs and services can’t back up files at all if they’re open. This one can, but sometimes it seems to give up trying, probably because the file is so big. I’ll discover – by mousing over the little Fabrik icon in the system tray – that it hasn’t completed a successful backup in a few days.

This apparently happened just before the disaster. As a result, I lost all the Sent Items, Tasks and Calendar items for the four days before the crash when it wasn’t backing up. The Inbox contents were still sitting on my ISP’s mail server.

It took a few hours to restore the Outlook file. This seemed excessive, but I was just grateful to have it back. Because the computer on which the Fabrik software was originally loaded was dead, I had to go to the service provider’s portal site, log in to my account with username and password, and then select the files I wanted to restore. (There are easier ways to restore if you just want to revert to an earlier version of a file or you accidentally deleted a few.)

When they were ready to download, the provider sent me an e-mail. I followed the link in the message and clicked on the download link on the destination page.

There were programs I had to download and install on the new (old) laptop I’m now using. That took time. There were, as expected, some things I forgot or didn’t have capacity to back up regularly – Internet favourites, the little program I use to create a button bar across the top of my screen, the macro program I use to create little applets to perform often-used series of commands, etc. But nothing vital or impossible to reconstruct.

Bottom line: I have what I need to carry on working and communicating. Praise the Internet.