The Sheila Variations

My advice: Get an external hard drive, and back everything up to that. Maxtor makes a great device with "One Touch" backup software. You can now get a LOT of storage for cheap.

If your laptop ever dies, all you need to do is hook your new PC up to the external storage and, boom, there everything is.

I use a Maxtor external drive and it's well worth the extra storage space plus the peace of mind.

As far as content management: Word is just as good as anything out there, from what I can tell.

Good luck on the book!

Sheila-I haven't used any of these myself but Ed's suggestion of an external hard drive is a good one. I personally wouldn't even look at a zip drive unless it was free. You can go here (never used these so no judgement on how good they are):

http://www.maxtor.com/en/products/external/onetouch/index.htm

or here:

http://amacomus.com/website/Home_Page.htm

to see some options.

The few things I want to save I just burn to CD/DVD. One thing to think about is not just a hardware failure but also some disaster like a fire. You will occasionally want to make a backup and keep it in a safe place. Since I don't have that much it fits on a CD and I keep a copy at work. So for your situation a couple of questions:

What kind of laptop and what operating system do you have? How much data are we talking about here?

The right way to do this will probably be an external drive. You should also get a backup/restore system but perhaps burning cd's would suffice. Whatever you do, make sure what you are buying is compatible with your laptop hardware and OS. You also may not see any better speed on the bigger files as that problem may not be storage but CPU or RAM.

Have fun.

Dave E is right. The thing to have is a CD burner. Very inexpensive and CD's go anywhere.

Another option: online file storage. I've never used it, but if you have broadband it might be the way to go. No hardware to buy, and you can access the data from any computer. Google online file storage and see what you think.

External hard drive is the way to go. I have used both. I currently have a Western Digital. You get lots of space and if you have Windows XP it is pretty much plug it in and it works.

I currently support a company that uses CD burners for backup. We have a learning curve on these, since there are a few steps to get it to work. Also it is hard for people to understand CD-R's vs CD-RW's and how to use them. With an external hard drive you treat it just like another hard drive and drap and drop files.

As far as file organization...

If you have Office 95, 97, or 2000 you can use Microsoft Binder to group files. It is used to combine different types of files together, but may be useful in your case of dealing with alot of files.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,5224,00.asp

Another option is Microsoft OneNote. I have used it some when testing out a tablet pc. It's orginal use is to organize hand written notes, but I found it useful in organizing all my information. It is like a 3 ring binder for your pc. You can create sections, tabs, etc. Worth looking at the trial version.

http://office.microsoft.com/home/office.aspx?assetid=FX01085803

If you do not like these ideas for file organization, then let me know. I will test out a few freeware/shareware applications to see if they are worth a shot.

Thanks! Amy

I agree with those who say that EXTERNAL is the way to go. But external completely under your control; that is, all of your files are within your reach, NOT online. Worst case scenario: the site on which you store files is inaccessible (for any number of reasons, including it's been hacked into a "denial of service" conditon).

My recommendation is something I discovered not too long ago: a flash drive. If you don't know, a flash drive is a very small (mine's about the size of a pack of gum) device that plugs into the USB drive. The one I have is by SimpleTech, holds 128MB of data (that's a LOT), cost about $30, and you can read AND write directly on it. There are flash drives that can hold probably more data than you'll ever write.

As to content management, I'd stick with Word and its associated applications on your PC.

Why am I not surprised to hear you're writing a book, Sheila! You must have enough material for several. Best of luck with it.

Sheila, an external drive is a good idea and very easy protection. I have two of them - one which is off premises. Yes, I am paranoid - but there is too much information to take a risk. I am going to send you some things via email ...

I would counsel against an external hard drive. You are better off with either a ZIP drive or a burnable CD drive.

A ZIP drive is just a special super-high-capacity floppy. That's how to think of it. And it's nice, if you have it hooked up via USB it becomes easy to attach it to other computers. And of course you can swap disks when you run out of space.

That said: an external CD burner is really your best option. The disks can be read in ANY PC, and they really are the standard everyone uses now.

As for software: the best tool I've ever used for book writing is Framemaker. But it takes time to learn it and is kind of technical. I would otherwise counsel sticking with Word, and just arranging things in folders. The current novel I'm working on is past 60,000 words at this point and it's ALL in Word.

By the way: if you got a burnable CD-ROM or a ZIP drive, you could also use it to periodically back up your weblog.

I repeat that the burnable CD is probably your most flexible option. And it's got more than sufficient space--a few hundred megabytes per disk. Which may sound small compared to hard drives these days, but is really quite generous. You can fit an entire 250 page novel in 1 megabyte, which means you could fit hundreds of books on one CD. That's more than enough space--and again, the disks can be read on ANY PC that has a CD drive.

The ZIP drive is a good second choice, but then the disks can only be read on other PCs with ZIP drives, which are becoming rare. An external hard drive is okay but if the hard drive breaks down you're FUCKED. With a CD burner you can just burn multiple CDs now and then so you have multiple backups.

Get the burnable CD drive Red. Trust me on this.

I'm going to echo Dean and say the burnable CD is the best idea, just don't go for the bargain basement CD-Rs, they're made too cheaply and can break down easily.

I have a small USB flash drive that I used to back up some files I update often. I've been burned before, so I use that, CD-Rs and save it on three different hard drives. But I may be a bit obsessive-compulsive when it comes to backing up key files.

Red,

Redundancy is good. So is redundancy.

When I have a big project, I back it up several ways:

* I have several computers in my house - and I back it up on more than one of the computers.

* I use online storage (Yahoo Briefcase, or just FTPing it to space on my host)

* I have a 256mb Flash drive - about the size of my thumb, and it cost about $45.

* I periodically burn the project onto CD.

If the project is important, I use a combination of the above.

External drives are good, but more expensive than any of the above, and just as prone to failure as any other hard drive. If a project is important, I never put all my eggs in one technological basket.

The rule of thumb for anything that matters is to have more than one copy and store it in more than one location.

When making backups remember that you want to protect against:
prime media failure - i.e. you drop the laptop under a bus.
site failure - the house burns down
technology failure - your backups become unreadable either because the media has decayed or because the technology to read the media has become obsolete - like wire tape readers from the 1940s.

Your most reliable backup is a hardcopy on acid-free paper in a fire-proof safe or, best of all, in a bank vault. That is a real bother, but it lasts.

Second best is to use a combination of burnable CDs, as several people have recommended, and some convenient off-site storage.

I have an account on a college system that is backed up regularly and has its tapes kept in vaults. I use that as my primary backup and FTP each chapter as I finish it. For secondary backup I keep the dissertation on a CD and drop the CD into a safe deposit box. I think I also have a copy on my wife's hard drive, but that is just so I can quickly go to work if my machine blows up.

Speaking of which, time to back up the dissertation and, while I am at it, time to back up the blog.

For sorting things, I just use a directory tree in my documents folder - one tree for letters, one for drafts, one for notes on pamphlets, and so on.
Ted K.

Sheila, I am in the process of learning about servers and setting up a server for myself. I need it for a variety of things. If you would like, I can supply some storage space for you there and you can use FTP software to store things on the server. I don't know when I will be off the steep part of this learning curve but perhaps others have server space for you too. It is a way of accessing data from anywhere on the planet. And it is near the top of my summer recess 'to-do' list.

What's the book about?

You need to be in control of your own data. That means no online storage at another site. Companies go out of business or change management policies and there goes your data.

If your computer is new enough to have USB, then your best bets are
(1) a USB Flash disk. Solid-state memory plugs into the USB connection. Don't get less than 128Mb. Quick, easy backup of a whole directory.
(2) a USB CD-RW. You can burn a 600Mb CD every week and have a nice progression backup series. Oh, if you have friends or family close by, store every other weeks backup disc with them. It's called offsite fire protection.

I have no experience with Zip drives and never will since they have a reputation of destroying the disks they are trying to read. Google "click of death"+zip+drive.

Definitely avoid zip drives. They're obsolete and weren't any good when they were new.

A CD burner is a really good idea - CDs have no moving parts to fail and you can make 2-3 backups of everything easily, and put them in different places - parents house, fireproof safe, etc.

Online storage is a good back-up-to-the-backup for your most important stuff that you want to be able to get anywhere anytime- you don't have to call mom to have her send the CDs.

I do both the CD-burning and online. An extra hard drive is OK, but they can fail, if they get dropped, if they get old, or even if they simply don't get used.

Wow. I have to take notes. You people are AWESOME. You have no idea how helpful this all is.

Oh, and Steve? You'll have to buy the book when it comes out to find out what it's about. :)

I would like to place an early order for a first edition of the book! Two copies please!

Yep, I have to agree with the general consensus of external drive/CD burner/online methods. Depending on how paranoid you are, use all three. As for online space, how about using...sheilaomalley.com? I don't know about you, but I have truckloads of spare space on my site. Late last year, my hard drive crashed mightily, but since I had various back-ups using these three methods, all I lost were some pointless emails.

Avoid Zip drives at all costs. They are the suckiest sucks that ever sucked.

Don't use Word. Use plain text. Try TextPad, for instance.

Plain text files are universally portable and much, much smaller than Word docs. And when you work in a text editor, you're writing, not typesetting.

It doesn't matter what you use to back up your files, anywhere near as much as it matters whether you back up your files. Floppies are adequate; you can get about 200,000 words on a regular floppy in plain text.

Good call on the plain text - I do that too sometimes. Word files add about 2 orders of magnitude to the file size over plain text. Also when Microsoft comes up with a new version of Word, your older files may not be supported. (This happens a lot). Plaintext will also be supported and can be reformatted later.

I think the book is about external drives and CD burning. That is why she is asking these questions- ha ha!

Damn, we all fell into her clever trap.

Sheila O'Malley's Backups In A Nutshell coming Fall 2004 from O'Reilly Press.