I was going to say that a great plan would be to startout by putting it in reverse :wink:

 

Often, not...

 

Copying files to a new directory or hard drive is not the same as saving.

That's your first misconception, and the correct answer will likely alleviate your fears.

 

I'm not going to get into this too much but I was in the computer science field for over 35 years. There is NO file degradation when backing up anything or saving anything to a directory, CD, DVD or ANYTHING!!!

I have JPEG files that are over 20 years old and are backup up once a month over and over again.

If this were true at all every word document you have would look like Chinese after a year!!

 

2,

Have you considered uploading your files to a server. Godaddy.com offers your own url and server space that you can save your file on which allows you to save or access them from any computer, anywhere. Just type in your url and password. The server is password protected and backed up as well. Just a thought.

 

If you do like I do you create a folder on your hard drive like in my case it's BOOTH. Within that folder are sub folders like EMAIL, DOCUMENTS, TAX, IFTA, PICTURES, MUSIC and so on.

When it's time for me to backup I can put a CD or DVD in my drive then I grab the root folder BOOTH and just drop it on the CD or DVD. You can use a USB key drive or anything.

The trick is to be aware of where your saving all your files. Don't let them go to MY DOCUMENTS and all over the FU**ING place. Change all your default settings for saving to go to your own personal directory. Then it's a simple matter of just dropping your whole directory like BOOTH onto the backup disk.

At home I have a 40 gig hard drive on my desk with a $20 option that plugs into the hard drive on one end and USB on the other. I plug the USB cord into my laptop then drop my whole folder onto the backup drive.

Each time I backup I create a new folder on the hard drive called
Booth-Backup-Aug-19-2008
or whatever the date is. Then I drop my whole BOOTH folder into that folder.

I also have a second hard drive that is the same size and once in a while a make a mirror copy of my backup drive onto a secondary backup drive.

I also burn DVD's with the files I cannot afford to loose like EMAIL, TAXES, DOCUMENTS and a few other things.

I started backing up with magtape in the 70's then to floppy's then to cassette tape then to streaming tape then to DAT drives then to CD then to DVD then to hard drive. I have everything I ever created back to 1974 when I started in the computer field and is now all on either DVD's or hard drive.

And by the way. I was the first person in Digital to play a song for the first time on a Digital VAX computer when Multimedia was just getting going. I was the engineer doing the programming at the time to make the computer play music

Eric Clapton's Torn Down.

 

The light bulb just lit, with that idea.

I surf various places, but haven't spent enough time to overcome the learning curve.
One of those sites is paintdotnet, which is where I think I developed the misconception. Not sure that was the place, or just one of many.

Now, I'm impressed, Steve. I remember when DEC was the darling, and then no more. I had trouble programming in basic, with punch cards.

I was excited by the CBM from Commodore. It was really neat to see words input on a screen, and then manipulated - wow, that was something.

That was my first state of the art machine. Cost $2,500 and had dual 5.25" floppy drives, a printer and 32 K of RAM.

Kurbski, I am under the impression that Godaddy is russian.
There is something else about them I don't trust, but I don't recall what that is. Just being russian is enough for me to avoid them, even if they are somewhere else.

Backing up is a discipline that I have heretofore ignored. I have lost a little, but not a lot, so far.

I appreciate all the input.