Do you remember to clean up your backup drive on occassions?

[Maureen K Clifford]

This reminder might save you a lot of angst - which I've had this morning because I forgot to do this simple thing. Consequently my back up drive was full and so wouldn't back up any of the work over the past few days. Being a half-wit on occassions I decided until I could get hold of my son to stick a usb stick in and back up onto that which sounded logical but apparently wasn't. Still not sure what I did wrong but it has taken one very cranky although helpful son to put it to rights again.

It's now on my computer calender to remind me that every two weeks I remove all back up apart from the latest three.

Easy to do using Windows 7 - go to start, then computer which will bring up all your hard drive discs, double click on the drive you want, go to the little picture of a disc with a green arrow - mine has Maureen's PC on it don't know what you will have named yours, double click on the icon and it will come up with a box giving you options. Click onto manage space and then another box comes up with more options. Go to data file backup - open that up and delete the old files from there.

I use the computer a lot - more so now with TAT poetry so will be doing this fortnightly - for most of you probably monthly would be sufficient. On the plus side it also speeds up your computer as you have effectively de-clagged it

[Neville Briggs]

I just use one of those portable hard drive things to store stuff. It has more memory than my PC.

[Zondrae]

G'day Mareen,

When I ran a pc I used to have to 'defrag' and double backup from time to time. Now I run a Mac and have no idea how it handles fragmented files. I do a full back up (I hope that is what it is) from time to time (usually about once a month) onto
an external drive which I always take when I go away from home for more than a day. I also have multiple stick drives with bits and pieces on them.

The Mac has a programme called Time Machine where you are supposed to be able to go back in time to previous backups which looks very impressive on the screen, but I'm not sure how useful it is in finding something when you don't know when or where to look.

I seem to have 'lost' some of my poetry files and have no idea how to trace them. Lucky for me I have paper copies.
I guess I have to either retype the poems or seek professional help. I might try checking out those stick drives first.
I'll get back to you with any results.

[Glenny Palmer]

Good luck Zondrae. Losing your poetry is like sitting up all night wondering if your kids are safe. My commiserations. Hope you find the little blighters. xx

[Neville Briggs]

oh well they are only words , not really that serious is it folks?

How could you say such a thing !!

[Maureen K Clifford]

OK my back up drive might be a bit different from how you mob are doing it. I have 2 hard drives in my computer and it is set to do an automatic back up from one to the other each week on a set day and a set time. But I now understand that all it does is copy and save the info from that week each time, but each time the save is a bit bigger (like our collaborative poems) hence you don't really need to keep all the back copies.