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, and I was sending it out with a late Xmas card greeting to my pals on my lists.

STARLADY FORGETS CALENDAR!
AGAIN! Happy Xmas/Ditto New Year!

Don’t you just hate those e-mail Xmas cards people send where we 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 itI CHANGE THE SIZE of GRAPHICS with IRFANVIEW the best free download graphics workshop program you can get. Go there, it downloads into your pocket in a sec.

I also used to go to ncrtec.org/ which, BEFORE GOOGLE IMAGES WAS INVENTED, was a COLLECTION of graphics online, 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. TODAY, GOOGLE IMAGES 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!  Even a picture of GOD!

Anyway, as I'm showing off big time to Pops that I can borrow a graphic, put it in an article and post it online, thusly illustrating my FREE SEMINAR COLLECTION, and also SHOWING DAD how I can E-mail a graphic greeting card of my own design, my poem, and a google graphic…and I'm also making him eat healthfood grilled chicken 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.  I have since learned to back up the INBOX FILE which is emails. And the PAB.NAB which is address book, by using a FILE MANAGER ZTREE,to move a copy to another drive, to a floppy and to the two older PC’s in this house. (We had floppy discs then, first flat 5" ones then smaller 3" stiff ones. A whole 'nother era.I won't bore you.  So what happened was,  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 managing 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!

But this time nothing happens. My dad is watching politely. Somehow I'd given wrong command and everything I was working on erased itself. Before a witness. So if I weren't so dizzy from making barbecued chicken I'd have backed it up. Moral of this story, before grief strikes your desk, BACK THAT SUCKER UP! First you gotta find it. You need zTREE an easy to use DIRECTORY SURFING TEXT EDITOR.

And back up your address book, the one I used most in 1995 was inside the NETSCAPE BROWSER vers 4.7 from 1995,  was dubbed  Netscape/ Windows as c:\programfiles\netscape\abook.nab  and in those days one had to learn to type that out. But nowadays GMAIL keeps our addie book safe in the CLOUD. You can explode the mother PC and all its grinding gears but in those days we ALWAYS should have Put the address book-back-up on a floppy and kept a cloud copy on shelf! FINDING it was 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  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 30^th 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, or a back up service, below, 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? 

Top 3 back up services

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/maintenance/tp/online_backup_services.htm

Assured file safety in case of your antique pc crashing and burning? ya think? PC’s lose 8% of their lifespan every year!

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