New from Snowy Wisconsin

[scrapeanna]

It's a snowy day here in WI for a transplanted Okie!
I'm a little paralyzed with fear of crashes (on HD of course). What's your best advice?

I've been getting the SG ezine for about 6 months, have PSE 6, have done some PSE lessons and a few layouts, beginning to get a "little" handle on basics, but want to get it right about back-ups. I work from a laptop and have paper-scrapped for 10 years or so. I recently got the Premier membership and have downloaded "goodies" for a while. I've unzipped and used some, but have a couple of questions.

When you unzip a file/kit, what do you do with the old folder with the zipper on it. Should I maybe save that separately? How much is too much to have on my laptop HD files for scrapbooking? I am going to get an external hard drive this week. What is the best use for this.....just backups, for all scrapbooking storage, or do I keep just move the things I'm presently working with to my laptop? As an ex-schoolteacher, I want to get it right! I do know how to back up to cd's and need to do that before I go any further I think? Advice PLEASE!

Rie

[troush]

Rie,

Welcome to Scrapper's Guide...

As for backups... It depends on how much space you have on your laptop. I have a desktop that I do most of my work on. I have a second internal drive that I keep my photos and scrapbooking stuff on. Then, I have two external hard drives that I use for backups. I do a full backup of the entire system at the beginning of the month. Then, whenever I add any pictures, download, etc, I do an incremental backup to that same external. I also do a weekly incremental backup to catch anything else. The next month, that one goes into the firesafe in the basement, and the one in the safe becomes the new backup drive. I start over with a full backup. That way, if the house burned down, I'd only loose about a month of work.

Some people use an online backup like Carbonite (do a google search). It's relatively inexpensive. But, you need broadband or DSL to use it and it will only backup your C drive.

The reason I use 2 is if the house burned down, hopefully the backup in the firesafe would survive. A lot of people use 2, and store one at a friends house - hopefully both houses wouldn't be hit by the same disaster.

If you Laptop can backup to DVD's (or even CD's), I would save up your zip files, until you got enough to fill up a CD (700 Meg) or DVD (I forget 4 gig?) and then burn the zips to a DVD. That way you would have them, but they wouldn't take up space on your laptop. I'd store them in a firesafe, a friends house, or safety deposit box.

-Trish

[Wendy]

Hi Rie ...

... and welcome to Scrappers Guide :)

Wendy