Backup

One of the things that I've never been comfortable with is the idea of backing up a PC. Its a necessary task, and one that's saved me on occasion, but its not something that I think of as a user-obvious task.

The reason is that if you lose a specific file, or files, and you've been taking copies of it along the way, then restoring it isn't any big deal. Even though Windows can sometimes get in the way (say, you've got the original open, and you want to open the dupe; Windows may object because both files have the same name (except for the suffix, I would think). That doesn't make sense to me, because they're obviously not the same file -- in fact, if you took a file and copied it exactly, they're not the same, either -- they're literally two different files, and any self-respecting operating system ought to be able to tell that. But still, okay, not a big deal. You have file A, and you close it, and open File B, and tell the operating system to save it as File A. It says 'are you really sure' (which always sounded more like a philosophical question than a procedural one), you say yes, and hey presto, its done. And you hope like hell the original didn't have something that you actually wanted.

But if you don't know what files are involved, or if you only know some of them, then life gets a lot more complicated, very quickly. Which is what happened to me, yesterday. It took me a while to get back from it, and I'm not completely back -- and may not get there, either.

Two things you should know. One is, I have modified the Bookmark ToolBar on this copy of Firefox so that it will change if you click on an icon. Normally, four folders show on the toolbar. Push the green StumbleUpon icon, and those four will shift to the right, and where they were are now the StumbleUpon icons. I like it that way -- the things I don't often use aren't taking up space, but when I want them, hey presto, there they are. And the other thing is, I have a package called FeedDemon on this laptop. Its an RSS reader. You point it to sites which have an RSS feed, and it will periodically go out and get a new copy of the primary screen for those sites. I've had it for years, and I like it.

Except for right now.

Yesterday, something happened -- I don't know what -- and my toolbar mod was gone. In its place was the standard StumbleUpon toolbar, which has two icons on it. The four folders which were supposed to be there were gone completely. I looked in Organize Bookmarks, and they weren't there. It was as if I had deleted them. This did not please me. Three of the folders were minor things, but the fourth was a collection of sites that I've come across using StumbleUpon, and wanted to remember. It wouldn't be the end of the world if they were lost, but I'd be irritated.

I tried using Windows System Restore, but it didn't do me any good. But on one of the iterations, I looked in Manage Bookmarks again, and there they were -- only they were in a new bookmark folder that was under another bookmark folder. There's supposed to be only one. I fiddled around, and found that the SU button made the new bookmark folder appear and disappear. The SU toolbar stayed visible all the time, which lead me to beleive that somehow it was that 'extra' bookmark folder.

Sometime in all of this, FeedDemon told me that it had an update. I ran it, no problem, and forgot about it. I finally got the bookmark toolbars cleaned up, and I went to look at the FeedDemon change. OMG. It started up fine - but it had no feeds at all. They were completely gone. I futzed around with System Restore some more, and I found what looked like the files, but they weren't complete. And so far, I still haven't found them.

Which brings me back to backups. I do have a backup of FD -- its tied to a package that essentially compresses the files in question and puts them in a separate directory -- but it doesn't seem to know anything about the files -- it just backs up the application itself. Why would FD put its working files somewhere other than where the app itself is? Who knows. But you'd like to think that a backup package would know that -- would be able to detect that a file, some file, had changed, and that therefore it ought to take a backup of it. But how would it know that the file was needed? Worse, how would it know that restoring that file, needed or not, wouldn't have adverse effects on some other application, or the operating system itself? If its a private file, probably not, but if its one where multiple apps use it? Yeah, thats possible.

Its a fascinating problem, and I'd love to talk with someone who's thought about it.

But as for me: I'm just ticked.
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Update: Turns out it was not that big a deal. A pain, yes, but not that big a deal. And now I have stuff sorted better, plus, I have it being copied to Newsgator, so if it happens again, I can download from there.