2008 - The Year of the File!

Long term readers may remember my catastrophe of November 2006 when I lost over 160Gb of data in an external hard drive crash. I was in the process of organizing the data ready for transfer to DVD a few days later. The power was cut and re-connected about 4 times within10 seconds and this caused the data to become corrupt.

After that I took more care but last week the external drive finally died for good, 2 weeks after its guarantee ran out! I lost a few files but nothing serious. I have decided to designate 2008 as The Year Of The File.

I am a very unorganized person and hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.

The Spreadsheet

Firstly, I need to organize my SP map and mods collection. It’s messed up and I am unsure of exactly what I have. This is closely linked to another project for 2008 called The Spreadsheet. I will be using Stef’s spreadsheet and adding links to the relevant pages and files for all the Half-Life series maps and mods. To do that I will need to ensure I have all the files and they are correctly named etc.

The spreadsheet will be available for download as soon as possible and will be updated very regularly. It will allow readers easy access to the complete list and also the ability to simply order the maps and mods based on the column titles etc. Hopefully it will be very useful.

New External Hard Drive

Now, since my old external hard drive died I had to get a new one. I found a special offer for a Maxtor OneTouch. The great thing is that it has a really easy way to make backups. Once you setup the system you just need to press the button on the drive and it runs a back up automatically.

Running backup isn’t exactly hard but only having to push one button just before you go to bed is even easier. No more excuses!

One last thing the Maxtor comes with a 5 Year limited guarantee, which I think is pretty good. I’ve even considered buying another one to duplicate all the data!

However, not everybody has the option of being able to buy a new drive and may have to use what is available to them.

Alternative Software Solution

It’s with this in mind that I can highly recommend a free application called Allway Sync. It has been perfect for me. It allows complete control over syncing files, folders and drives. I love it and use it for drives other than my new Maxtor.

Offsite

As part of a soon to be announced Half-Life 2 SP mod, I and the other mod leader needed a way to ensure we were both working with the same file.
Drive HQ was suggested and so far I have been very impressed with it. It’s free and allows you around 1 GB of data to be stored and shared. The great thing is that more than one person can share a login, meaning it’s easy for teams to share data safely.

You need to download and install a small application and then you are set. This should be a must for those important files that you really can’t lose. Again, highly recommended. It has its limitation but for most people it should be excellent.

Extreme Situations!

Now, sometime a Windows crash results in you having to reinstall the operating system and all the applications. That has happened a number of times to me and it takes all day to do it and it drives me crazy. I started to look for a solution and found Drive XML.

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

The program allows you to:

• Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
• Browse these images, view and extract files
• Restore these images to the same or a different drive
• Copy directly from drive to drive
• Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler

I was planning to use this over the Christmas period but just didn’t make time. It looks like a fantastic solution but you will certainly need to get your hands dirty. Sounds like the challenge is worth the result.

Conclusion

The only files I have really worried about losing have been the backup for the website and some text documents that I created. Most of the other files have simply been downloaded from the Internet etc.

This year I start to map and I am very scared I will spend hours on a map only to lose it in some accident. well, hopefully that won’t happen and this post will encourage you to take responsibility and action regarding your important files.

There could be many other hardware, websites and applications that are suitable for the above actions, but these are the ones I found and use.

If you know of other ones please let me know.