DONNER UND BLITZEN

Dick Pountain/22 May 2002/00:24/Idealog94.txt

In hindsight it looks very like hubris, and the gods punished me for it in a spectacularly classical manner. You see, I believed that I had finally sorted out my backup problems for once and for all. In a previous column on this topic I spelled out my ideal backup system: that is, one that would write my important data to CD continuously and transparently in the background. I had actually achieved something very close to this by stringing together various technologies in mix-and-match fashion. My HP CD-RW drive has Adaptec's DirectCD packet-writing drivers installed (yes, I know, I know) so that it can be accessed from Explorer like any other Windows device; a neat Danish program called Synchronizer Professional (www.juul.stejle.dk) allows me to create customized backup tasks that keep remote and local directories in sync either on CD or over the network; and Windows 2000's excellent built-in task scheduler (see Reader's Tip in Dave Moss'sQ&A this month) lets me run these jobs overnight without intervention. I have things set up so that every night all the data I have changed during the day gets written to a CD-RW (one of a rotated set) and every Sunday my whole D: drive gets copied to another PC over the network.

Yep, that's right, I finally caved in and got myself networked, but to maintain my high perversity index I chose a USB rather than Ethernet network: since both machines are laptops with USB ports all this involved was obtaining a lurid purple 'jelly' cable and downloading a USB-USB Bridge driver (a lot cheaper than two PC Card Ethernet adapters) and if it only does 3Mbits/sec rather than 10, so what, it's still quicker and more convenient than Laplink. This system had been working nicely for about three months and my data was more secure than it has been since those long-lost days when when the contents of my D: drive would still fit on one Travan tape cartridge.

My Thinkpad 600 and CD drive accompanied me to Italy where I plan to spend most of this Spring. Just wire up the boxes on my desk overlooking the green hills of North-West Umbria and I was back on Cix and the Web so fast that no-one at PC Pro even missed me. And so it went until a few days later I was sitting in the village bar one sunny evening, accepting drinks from the hospitable neighbours, when Beppe the landlord came in to announce that it had started to rain. This was news because there's been a drought, and everyone was waiting anxiously to plant their tobacco and sunflowers. I went to the door to see huge raindrops and a suddenly darkened sky, when the village lights went out, followed 30 seconds later by a positively thermo-nuclear thunderclap that stopped all conversation. The lights came back on again, and the whole affair was repeated once more some five minutes later - then the dark clouds fled and the sun came out again, but I had a nagging feeling in my gut. Sure enough we got home to find the lights and telephone out, and when I went upstairs I found that in my newly-arrived incaution I'd left the Thinkpad plugged in to the phone socket. A flick of the surge-trip switch restored electrical power, but the Thinkpad's LEDs did not come on, and unplugging the modem cable (with difficulty) revealed blackened connectors: it had been deep-fried by a couple of million volts up the modem port. The phone stayed off for four days until the Telecom Italia van reached us, but that scarcely mattered.

I edited the Real World section as normal, thanks to the offer of a seat at a Silicon Graphics workstation in my friend Giorgio's 3D graphics school (and by redirecting my Cix mail traffic to a POP3 box). I even learned how to use Cix from the command line again via Telnet, a real nostalgia trip. Then I came back to London for a couple of days to sort out my spare laptop, and found all my data intact thanks to my new backup regime, with a complete copy already on the spare's hard disk. That still left me with a couple of days work reinstalling all the applications and utilities though, thanks to the promiscuous way that Windows mixes up applications with data, making it impossible to take a complete backup of your configuration that's portable to different hardware (my spare is an HP Omnibook so restoring my regularly-taken Norton Ghost images of the Thinkpad's boot drive is not an option). I have learned some hard lessons over the years, so I keep a directory called Program Zips on my data drive - that gets automatically backed up - containing the installation files for everything bar the big boys like Office and Paintshop Pro, whose original CDs I carry in my travel wallet. Some things still go missing though: I've yet to find where Windows hid the address book for the fax service, somewhere within the taboo WinNT directory tree.

As for my dear old Thinkpad, IBM wants £200 just to look at it and tell me whether it's salvageable, so it looks like becoming a paperweight. That's because I made the elementary mistake of telling them the truth (never do it kids) about that lightning bolt, so it's not covered by warranty. A sad end for the PC that carried me through a whole dictionary: the legends have completely worn off its 'A' and arrow keys, to a smooth shiny black.