Technology is killing my writing

Man, that's hard to handle, Jen. I hope you get it all figured out soon; this is not fun to have happen.

Jaycinth constantly mentions backing up one's work, because her computer fouls her up so much. I wouldn't just back up my work, if I were you, on the email from now on, but also on a CD as well as a USB thumb drive. If one thing becomes corrupted, you still have another medium from which to extract the needed information.

But like the old saying goes, 'don't put all your eggs in one basket'. If you drop the basket, you lose all the eggs.

I know this is painful to hear now, but I hope you can use this information in the future.

I'm sorry this happened to you. I wish you the very best in getting your stuff figured out.

Hope your luck changes.

Sorry to hear, and thanks for reminding me to back up my emails.

jenfreedom said:

Okay, I've calmed down some. I found most of my contracts and very important stuff on my notebook. Luckily, for whatever stupid reason none of my sent emails vanished so I'm trying to piece back together who's emailed me what from that.

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That's good to hear. I'm glad things are turning around for you.

And now I have a question. I back up my computer (but to disks) and I'm not very tech savvy about that kind of thing so my questions:

* How do you know if you actually did back up onto your disk. All this time I've been backing up my files but what if I'm not? Don't you have to insert disk and play it to find out and won't that erase current data and just show the backup stuff? And is it really necessary to use a USB drive as well as disk back up?

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It depends upon the kind of disc you use. I use CD-RWs, because I have a combo drive in my laptop. Windows XP has a CD writing wizard that can help you to put new information on a CD. It does not erase the CD but rather simply adds to the information thereon.

The only way you can erase the disc using the CD writing wizard is by clicking on the 'Erase this Disc' icon. Then it's a pretty drawn out process to erase the disc.

USB drives are handy because they provide an added measure of protection. They're not perfect, but they save information more like an old floppy does. They're not good around magnets, though, just like floppies.

The idea of having more than one way of backing your files up, is to keep you from losing your stuff entirely. If one format fails you, you have another format to fall back on. That was the reason I suggested the USB drive as well as other formats.

* And two is there a quick way to back up email? What I've been doing, and probably why I slack at it, is manually moving my emails I need to save to folders on my computer. Like open, copy, paste into folder. It takes forever. What does everyone else do?

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I personally have never dealt with backing up emails before, except that I know there's a way to save them to your computer. I also remember having printed up several hard copies of emails I had received in the past. Depending upon your email account, printing up your emails or saving them to your computer should be pretty easy. However, I've only done this with a couple different service providers, and alas, I've not dealt with either ISP in a very long time.

No lectures please about how I should have found this stuff out years ago when I first got email. Believe me I know.

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No lectures intended, Jennifer. I'm glad to be able to help.

Thanks
~ Jennifer

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You're very welcome!

callalily61 said:

Our computer was acting up a couple of months ago. I had all my writing etc. backed up to my flash drive, but no emails. I played with Outlook awhile but got frustrated. Finally I spent about 20 minutes Hitting "save as" on all the important emails and saving them as text files in folders on the flash. All needed info is saved; it's just not "pretty."

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I think with Outlook/Outlook Express you can select any number of emails at once and do "Save as..." and they will all be saved in one big text file.

Also, with such programs as Outlook, the emails are already saved in a big file on the hard disk. The hard part of backing up is finding the file that corresponds to the email file folder you're using. Once you find it you can copy it to some other medium.

With web-based services such as hotmail and gmail, saving a bunch of emails to your hard disk or another medium is a pain...