P.Mean: Some thoughts on a backup policy (created 2011-12-31). News: Sign up for "The Monthly Mean," the newsletter that dares to call itself average, www.pmean.com/news.

How big are her files? She should probably not bother backing up any files that can be re-downloaded. I made that mistake with an earlier project and backing up all the original files made it so tedious that I did not do it regularly enough and ended up losing data. Also, if she's not doing this already, she should be processing her data in such a way that she can reproduce the processing with a trivial amount of effort. That means avoiding changes directly to the file but rather making changes through a series of syntax statements such as IF team="Chefs" THEN team="Chiefs" She should make sure that any changed files are stored under another name so she can gracefully back away from an ill-thought-out change. Then she doesn't need to back up anything except her program syntax. Because the redownloaded raw data plus the syntax is almost as good as a full backup. Finally, I have lots of old USB hard drives that are "too small". If she can get by with 120 or 250 GB of storage, I can find something that she can borrow. I just need ten minutes to remove the old files.

This page was written by Steve Simon and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Need more information? I have a page with general help resources. You can also browse for pages similar to this one at Incomplete pages.