Tyndale Tech Latest

David Instone-Brewer's latest Tyndale Tech, sent out as an email in June, has now gone online:

Tyndale Tech: June 2007: Backup, backup and again I say backup

I would quote a sentence or two because there are some nice turns of phrase and good suggestions which I would like to comment on directly, but David has disabled copy and paste and I am not going to type the stuff out fresh. But I would like to second David's loud and strong message here. It is so important to back up. I often say that every student and every scholar will have to have one major upset before they learn to back-up properly and regularly, whether it is a stolen laptop or a major crash. If you can get by without that major upset, that is wonderful, but few do. So do it now before it is too late; get into good habits.

I like David's suggestions of relying more on the internet as a means of more permanent back-up, and I learnt one new thing from this post -- GSpace, which is a great Firefox add-on that converts your GMail spare space into a kind of FTP back up. I've already started using that one.

The one thing I would add to David's advice would be to suggest migrating to an email service like GMail because of its amazing online storage capacity. I've known people who have lost laptops or had big crashes who say, "I've lost all my emails". Never again will that happen if you get into GMail. Another thing I would add, as something of a Googleholic, is that the new Google Documents and Spreadsheets allows you to create and edit documents online, which are stored in your Google account, and once again you have ready made back ups, accessible from everywhere.