Backing Up is Hard to Do

My desktop was set to backup to an external hard drive once a week.  Automatically.  Well, now I have a laptop and hubby has taken it upon himself to do a weekly backup.  Oh, my, the aggravation.  For weeks he has done one on DVD discs.  Do you know how many bad discs you get in a package?  Too many to count.  So he switched to an external hard drive we had and it kept turning itself off.

While he was out running errands and hitting the driving range with his golf clubs, I had an epiphany.  My computer has no financial records on it.  I keep my email online.  The ONLY thing of importance to me on this laptop is the layouts I make and the kits I download, and the photos I scan or download.  Period.  And the only thing that changes is I make new layouts each week and get new kits and scan new photos....you get the idea.  So why not zip these files and put them onto CD discs.  And add new files, layouts, pics, as I get them.  Great idea!!!

Oh, my can we say slooooooooooow.  It is a great idea, and I am in the process of doing it.  Thumb drive would be faster, but I had a partial box of unused CDRWs.  No use for them.  I also had plain CDRs.  I used those first.  They formatted fast.  Burning to the CD was a very long process, though.  And each CD holds 3-5 kits.  Do not ask me how many I have!!!

I used up all the CDRs and started on CDRWs.  They take a very long time to format.  Grrrr.  I did zip and put all my LOs on a thumb drive.  But the thumb drive is so tiny (translation: easy to lose) and the CDs come in a nice holder that takes up space and is harder to lose.  So CDs it is.  Although when all these CDRWs I have around the house are gone, I will move on to DVDRs.  So they will hold more than 3 kits.  And some of my zipped kits are even too big for a CDR.  Who knew?

So as I continue to do layouts, download freebies, and buy kits, I will be catching up with the long backload of kits I already have, zipping them and putting them onto CDs. New kit zips will go directly to CD as I download them.

So, here I go...zipping and burning, zipping and burning.  But I only gotta do each kit ONCE.  No weekly backup, thank you very much.  Yay.