Naturally, in my last recommended software post, I raved about Autoruns and its ability to get rid of Internet Explorer BHO's. I SHOULD have mentioned along the way, NOT to make any changes until you had a good restoration point or a backup of your system. Changes COULD result in the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!
It did to me!
Luckily, I had the restoration POINT, PLUS a good backup. No panic, just a little creative use of Tanj-it, and use of that restoration point. You've been warned!
Okay, we all know backing up is akin to volunteering to clean up the garage. Somebody has to do it, as long as it's just not you. You are TOO busy. I feel for you, people. I'm waaaaaay too busy myself. Forgot my brother's birthday yesterday until, oh, about 3am THIS morning. Sorry about that Rick. The present's nice. Hope that buys me forgiveness.
At any rate, I automate a lot of my backups. I have a half-dozen different methods, involving copying off-site over the internet, on to DVDs and between the various machines operating on the network here at the Castle of Confusion. The main work machine, Nuklon copies key data from one drive to another within Nuklon, the copies are then copied to an external hard drive, followed by the data being parceled out between computers Kingston and Ollie. Kingston's basically JUST an emergency use computer and print server these days, while Ollie is the telecom computer. There are also backups onto two thumb drives and a livable cloning of the work environment on CindyMax the laptop computer.
Should you adopt my complete system? Nope.
What you CAN do, is run an automatic system that gives you OOPS backups of your key data. The kind of stuff that changes daily. To do that, go ahead and download Karen's Replicator from Karen Kenworthy's site. While you're at it, investigate some of the other utilities at her site.
Karen's a programmer and former magazine writer. She writes clearly and programs cutely, and that's a pretty good mix. I wish she'd switch to Delphi Pascal, rather than Visual Basic 6, but, being an end user rather than tinkerer with Replicator, I can live with that. The program is NOT the most intuitive, but there's a lot of choices that can be made, or you can just accept mostly defaults and copy data from one folder on your system to another folder. And that gives you OOPSability. (loosely defined as being able to greet disaster with "OOPS," rather than a long-line of curse words, because you have the data backed up). And it can all be done without you lifting a single finger ... after setting it up.
I run Replicator full-time. Its big white K on a red background is a comfort, sitting in the system tray.
About 5am, it wakes up and goes through the list of things I need it to do. It backs up the programming environment daily, the actual projects daily to different odd and even day folders. It also backs up the novel (every time I make a change, I give it a new name, allowing me to compare from one editing session to another). It backs up my Firefox bookmarks and passwords daily into different folders for each day. My wishlist for birthdays and Christmas get backed up once a week. Settings for various programs are backed up once every two weeks. Then there's all the data moving between Nuklon, Kingston and Ollie, plus the external drive. All of it gets done between 5am and about 8am. That's when the virus scanners and scumware detectors take over to do THEIR scanning work before I get up.
Initially, a big system (and mine has close to 1.5 terabytes at this moment) will take a lot longer than three hours to backup. But after the first backup, Karen's Replicator only backs up changes. And that leads to economical three-hour backups. So don't get worried.
Karen Kenworthy has updated the program over the years about a dozen times. I didn't like a change or two, but communicated with her on the one REAL PITA, and the response was a quick update. I apparently wasn't the only one who disliked the particular change in question.
What remains is a pretty decent program. It works best at night, when you aren't using the computer, but it CAN be made to work while you are working (never recommended). Leaving your computer on at night might not be something you want to do, so schedule it for lunch hours or evening meals. Just remember, if you DO leave the computer on for night-time work, don't forget to reboot the computer about once a week. Certainly no more than every two weeks. Windows has a flaw that accumulates like bad gases, if left on without rebooting.
All in all, I recommend Replicator. There are better programs out there that cost bucks. But amongst the freebies (for non-commercial use), Replicator is just about the ultimate set-and-forget program.
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