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| A Minor Rant | 21 Jun 2010 |
Like all sane programmers I keep multiple backups. I used to take a CD copy every day or two plus an occasional USB memory stick copy. After reading about Jeff Attwood's total data loss I decided it would be a good idea to broaden my approach; I went out and bought two more memory sticks, and a HP SimpleSave external hard drive. So now I rotate through my four USB memory sticks for daily (or even twice daily) backups, plus occasional CD copies, plus the HP backup drive is permanently connected.
Sounds good? But imagine my amazement when, after several weeks of use, I decided to check the contents of the HP backup drive, and found out that it only copied specified file extensions. Being a programmer, most of the file extensions I used were not included in HP's default list. In other words there was no backup of my important files.
Fortunately I found this out by checking my backups; I did not find this after actually needing to restore a lost file.
So the first failure of this software: not indicating clearly when it first runs that only some file extensions are included in the backup. It says so in the documentation, but of course I just plugged the drive in and since it immediately started to work I never bothered with digging out the help files. The user interface of this backup software is designed to be easy to use with the minimum of user input. So that is what I did.
Feeling thankful that I did not have to find this out when I actually needed a backup, I proceeded to bring up the dialog that allows me to explicitly enter the file extensions to save. It is inherent in the nature of a programmer's work to generate files with many extensions, and to not actually know the full range of extensions used, so I naturally tried to find some way of specifying all file extensions, which lead to:
There appears to be no way of specifying all extensions. There is no menu option for this, and the software will politely castigate me if I enter a non-valid character like '*' or '?' into the file extension name.
After briefly considering the option of just giving away the backup drive and buying a better one, I sat down and scrolled through some of my directories and produced a partial list of file extensions, about 50 names long, which I then entered one by one into the backup software.
Success! It works; I launched the software and it found all of these files and backed them up. But, I have two computers. So I disconnected the backup drive from one and connected it to the other. Now I find:
The list of optional file extensions is not kept on the backup disk drive (it's got a whole terabyte of capacity, surely they could have found some room somewhere?) but is kept on the host computer.
So I had to re-enter the 50 file extensions all over again on my second computer.
Firstly: continue being paranoid about backups. Have multiple backups on multiple media and check them. Pursuant to this, I went out and bought another backup disk (from a different manufacturer) and also some more CDs and memory sticks.
Secondly: user interfaces that just-work-out-of-the-box with minimal user interaction are certainly the way to go. Just make sure that the default option is the one that will produce the least unpleasant surprises. Also ensure that the default options can be easily modified.
I bought a new 1 terabyte disk and I use the default Windows Backup program to do a daily backup. Plus I still use all of my previous backup systems.
Article text is under the Creative Commons Zero license. Source codes are under the MIT license.
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