Back Me Up

I did the obligatory backups today.

They've gotten easier over the years, as I've figured out what the hell I'm doing.

The first is the desktop...piece of cake, because most anything important is kept on my server. There were a couple of files on the desktop that needed moving to the server before the backup, and then I went ahead and ghosted the drive anyway.

I don't think I'll be doing that anymore. I've got a standard image that I like on my desktop. It's got all my registry fixes and such that I like, and my base installation of necessary programs that I can't live without.

As long as I keep important files on the server, I think I can forgo backing up my desktop from here on out. If Windows gets fouled up, I'll just restore my favorite image.

The Tablet, on the other hand, is quite another story. It goes to school and everywhere else with me, and so I can't just pull files from, or move them to the server any time. So, all of my Microsoft Journal files get stacked up on it. My Zinio copies of magazines live there too.

And then, the Tablet doesn't have an optical drive, so I keep Virtual Drive Pro and some disc images on it, but the images live on their own partition. So I'm good there. Plus, the server has backups of all images, and I don't have to worry about un-backed-up images, because I can't create new ones with the Tablet anyway. Remember? No optical drive.

Well, today's backup kind of sucked, because for the first time, the Tablet's OS drive wouldn't ghost to just one DVD. I had to put 90MB on a CD-ROM, which is a sonofabitch. If I'd known that, I would have been more aggressive in my pre-backup cleaning!

But at least now I know. 7.2GB on the Tablet won't compress to fit on one DVD. But I know from a previous backup that 7.1GB will. I guess it's better than the time Ghost made me put 4MB on one CD-ROM. Yeah, CDs are cheap, but damn, 4MB?

I took today's disappointment far more gracefully than I took the 4MB incident. Chalk it up to my developing Buddha nature. The day after Easter.

You know what makes me feel like a boob? Here I am, this total Nazi about backing things up. Now I've got a file server...running WINDOWS, for gosh sake. It's been running for four months, has all of my important stuff on it. And do you think I've made even one backup of it? What a moron. I've got to get on that.

I hate to screw with it though, it's been working so well. And I don't think I've got enough DVDs to do the whole thing. But I really need to do it. Really. Need to. Really.

Simpsons is on in ten, so I'll pose this question to the non-blog-reading ether:

Anybody know good CD/DVD burning software that will let me burn files that are on a network and not local? I'm running Nero 6 Ultra...you'd think it could handle it, but no.

Software that would do this would make my life so much easier where backing up that server is concerned. I'm not gonna pull everything down from the server temporarily just so that Nero can pull its head out of its butt. I'm not. Like I don't have enough problems already.

So I'll be paying attention to the comments on this blog.

And one more thing before I go. You know what cracks me up? The utter anonymity of this blog. I mean, I'll bet there isn't a single person in the world that has read this that Eric and I don't know personally. And here I am asking my vast readership a software question. Because, you know, I couldn't find a bigger forum. Like ArsTechnica.

I'll bet we haven't even been spidered by Google yet. We're pathetic, but at least we're having fun.