On Tuesday, I planned to meet a friend after work. She’s in from Hong Kong for a couple of months, but this is the only week we can get together.

I arrived a few minutes early and waited in front of the restaurant. Thirty minutes passed, and she still hadn’t arrived. Neither of us have a cell phone, so I imagined that she’d been held up and would soon be here. Still, I went inside and ordered a cup of chai.

Another forty-five minutes went by, and I began cursing myself for not having a backup plan. To relieve the cursing, I ordered a tilapia taco. Eventually I went home, knowing that the mystery would be solved once I got there.

Sure enough, there was a an e-mail canceling our appointment (time-stamped for six minutes before I left my office). She’d had a flat tire and wasn’t going to be able to make it.

Under the circumstances, any sort of backup plan would have been better than nothing. She didn’t have my work number. I didn’t have any way of contacting her except via e-mail.

We agreed to try again on Wednesday night. This time I made sure she had my work number (and it might have been wise to give her the number of the restaurant at which we were meeting, and to carry that number myself in case I became the one with an emergency). Dinner went off without a hitch.

Certain parts of life need backup. So do computers. Not only do I now have one a computer backup plan, it actually works. It took a while to construct, but here’s what I have:

• I started by reorganizing my My Documents folder based on the structure suggested by Gina Trapani.
• I downloaded (and eventually purchased) a copy of SyncBackSE. Here again, Lifehacker proved to be a valuable resource.
• Most of my backup profiles consist of two backups: One to zip all the files, and the second to upload them to my server. A couple of them either aren’t suitable for zipping or are already zipped, so they go straight to the server.
• All of my backup profiles are scheduled. Docs, my Firefox profile, and Quicken backups run daily. The rest see so little activity that they run monthly.
• The docs folder is synced daily with my U3 flash drive (512MB, using SyncToy), where I use Challenger for encryption.
• I sync my Palm daily, so my contacts, calendar, and tasks are always fresh.
• My contacts are also synced with my Plaxo account.
• As if a belt and suspenders weren’t enough, I also sync Outlook with my Yahoo account.
• I maintain a software profile of my computer, so that in the event of a hard drive crash I won’t have to remember what programs were installed.
• I own disks for the major software: Windows XP, Microsoft Office, and Quicken. Much of the rest are downloads, which are organized in a downloads folder. This folder is occasionally backed up to the server. In the event of a crash, I’ll have those downloads available if I choose to reinstall them.
• Bloglines subscriptions and del.icio.us links have also been backed up.

One major hole that needs to be patched up are all those music files I ripped to my hard drive. Currently the best solution I’ve come up with is to get a hard-drive based MP3 player, as my 2GB flash player won’t cut it for a job like that. Alas, I’ll just have to chance it until I decide to spend that kind of money.

I’ve done the best I can so far in creating and implementing this backup plan. Undoubtedly more small holes will come to mind, but I’ve taken care of the important ones.

Posted by on Thursday, July 13, 2006 at 5:32 PM
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