Lost all my saved recipes 1003Christine Dabney And do you know how much time-effort it would be for each poster to post all the recipes they've ever posted, just so you could copy some that never even...
This is *not* a gloat; just some advice from a long time computer guy. The problem with contemporary computers is not that they are unreliable; to the contrary, it's that they are *so reliable* that you tend to become complacent.
Backups are your friend.
Even if you don't want to back up everything on your computer (why not?), you should still keep off-line copies of any files you care about. "ZIP" drives are under $50, a single disk holds100 MB, and that is a *lot* of recipes. External hard drives are not much more.
I've been collecting recipes from rec.food.cooking since 1988, and have added hundreds of others from various places. The entire folder that holds my over-4000 recipe collection and all the rest of my food-related stuff is still under 60 MB.
I'd be really annoyed if I lost that collection; not only are most of the recipes irreplacable (predating the "wayback machine", for example), many of them have annotations that wouldn't be there if they were replaced from original sources. Not to mention all the other personal files that are truly impossible to replace, even if you could remember what they all were. Many of those are considerably more important than recipes, too.
I've always used Macs, which are *far* less likely to trash your files than Windows, but no operating system is safe from a hard drive that just refuses to spin or a chip that blows out. That happened to me once.
I "manage" four Macs here -- mine, Friend Wife's, and The Lad's, plus The Dotty Daughter's, when she's home from college. Everything is on a network, and backups happen transparently and automatically, once a week, to 4mm DAT tapes. *Everything* on those machines gets written to tape. Other than the disk failure I mentioned above, we have never had a catastrophic data loss -- not once in fifteen years. But I have used the backups to recover from human errors on several occasions, and they were very much appreciated.
With good backups, replacing a failed disk is merely annoying (and a bit costly) but not a Royal Pain In The A**. Not doing regular backups is like taking long trips at night in the winter without a spare. Tires are very reliable these days; you probably won't need it, but IF YOU DO...
Isaac
