FileHamster is a free version control system that runs on Windows and automatically saves a new copy of your file every time you save. What this means is that the history of every document you create is saved and can be recalled at any time.

FileHamster runs in the system tray of your computer and watches any file you tell it to watch. Whenever a new file is created in a watched folder, it will create a backup, and as you change and re-save the file, it will create new subsidiary backups. Double-clicking the FileHamster logo in the system tray will bring up a list of all the files it has saved, allowing you to view the history of any document at any point in its history. You can open any file from the chain of revisions and use it as any other file.

To be honest, I don’t use FileHamster that much — it just sits in the background, quietly doing its thing, without me even being aware of it most of the time. But, as with any backup strategy, it’s good to know I could access my past revisions, if I needed them — and I never know when in the future I just might.

FileHamster (Windows-only; Free)

1. Local backup: Use either an external hard-drive or thumb drive to keep local backups.
   • Download and install SyncBack Freeware (Mac users can use the built-in Time Machine or Google “automatic backup software” to find an appropriate program — I don’t use a Mac, sorry).
   • Set up a new backup “profile”. Select the folder you store your writing in, and a folder on your backup drive, and set to backup all files and all sub-directories. (The other option is to set up a “Synchronization” profile, which will keep the files in the two folders identical. If you accidentally delete a file, it will be deleted in your backup, too — this is not a viable backup strategy!)
   • Don’t run the “simulated run”. A window will pop up listing all your profiles. Right-click the one you just created and select “schedule” to create a new schedule for your backup. Select the “scheduler” tab and enter a time to run the backup automatically. Since I leave my PC on all the time, I chose 4 am. Leave it set to “Daily”. Click “OK”.
     

     Note: On XP, the scheduler needs your windows login to run. If you’re like most people, your PC has a blank password — make sure to allow SyncBack to override XP’s restriction against blank passwords. Your password is blank if you don’t have to login when you boot your computer.

   • Your files will be backed up to your external hard drive or thumb drive (leave them plugged in all the time, by the way) every night while you sleep. If you need to recover a file, just surf to the external drive as you would open a folder normally.
2. Remote backup I: Every week, burn a set up backup discs and take them to work or a trusted friend or family member’s house. Every month or so, burn a second set and mail them to someone you know in a different part of the country.
3. Remote backup II: Use an online backup service like JungleDisk, Mozy or Carbonite. You can use Mozy for free if you have less than 2GB of files to backup — after installing the program, right-click it’s system tray icon and select “Configure”. Select the “File System” tab and choose the folders you want to back up. All these services will run automatically, making sure the latest versions of your files are saved.

With the exception of your CD/DVD backups, everything in this system is totally automated, which means you don’t have to think about making backups. If anything happens, you can fairly easily restore your lost files, whether from your local backup or from one of your remote locations — at worst, you’ll have to wait a couple days for your out-of-town contact to mail the discs back to you, and you’ll have lost up to a month’s work. That’s the worst case scenario — not too bad a trade-off for being able to salvage most of your career after a horrible disaster!

Another increasingly good option is to use an Internet service like JungleDisk, Mozy or Carbonite. These are Internet storage services which offer automated backups in the background while you work (or leave your computer on overnight and set them to run while you sleep).

• Mozy offers up to 2GB free, more than enough to store most of your recent work. You can define specific folders for backup, and restore from the desktop application or from their website. Backing up your entire hard drive costs $4.95 a month.
• Carbonite offers unlimited backup of your entire PC for $49.95 a year. Like Mozy, you can restore a single file or your entire hard drive from the desktop application or from their website.
• JungleDisk works slightly differently, charging a tiny amount (15 cents) per GB per month, allowing you to choose exactly what you want to backup. If you just want, say, 4GB (several years’ worth of text-based files), you might pay only $0.68 US a month (that’s 68 cents, no typo!). JungleDisk uses Amazon’s S3 service, a corporate storage service, to store files, so you know it’s secure and likely to be around for a while. With the JungleDisk software, your remote storage acts like a second hard drive on your computer, so you can drag and drop files (or use the built-in automatic backup) and open them directly to and from the server. You can also use their JungleDisk Pro software to access your files from any other computer, for $1.00 US a month.

Local backups can be stored on one (or more) of the following media:

• External hard drive: For around $80-$130 US, you can get an external hard drive that connects to your computer via USB or FireWire and is big enough to hold your entire computer’s contents.
• USB flash drives: Small, pocketable flash drives, usually smaller than a pack of gum, are now available in sizes up to 16GB (with 32 GB drives starting to come to market). Because text files tend to be pretty small, a writer can easily store his or her entire career’s output on a single thumb-sized drive.
• CD or DVD: A single 650 MB CD will hold years of work; a 4.7 GB DVD many times that. Handled properly, CDs and DVDs should outlast just about any hard drive or flash-based storage — under archival conditions, they can even outlive you.
• Network-attached storage/home server: An “NAS” is essentially a hard drive that connects to your router and is accessible from any other computer on the network. Several companies are now introducing full-fledged servers for home users, which also attach to your network and offer services, including automated backups, to all the computers in the network. Some of these devices can hold terabytes of information.

It is the writer’s deepest fear, losing a manuscript. Fortunately, we’ve come a ways since the days of the Underwood and IBM Selectric; the options for creating backups of our work have multiplied dramatically in the computer age, with minimal effort on our part. In this series, I’ll explain some of the options available to writers, and then describe an effective and easy to implement system for making sure your work is safe and sound, whatever the eventuality.

The key to effective backups is that they have to be routine or, better yet, totally automated. We’ll use some simple software and free or cheap online services to do most of the work of making backups automatic; for the non-automated parts, add an entry to your calendar reminding you to backup.

The other key is that there should be multiple layers of redundancy. By definition, we can’t predict what circumstances we might need backups for, so it pays to be prepared for something as small as a file being corrupted as well as something as big as a flood destroying your home. I’ll describe a system that creates three separate backups to prepare you for any eventuality short of global disaster or war.

With very little preparation, writers need not fear losing their work — or, at worst, more than a few days’ or weeks’ worth. Lots of writers still fear trusting their work to a computer, irrationally favoring their tried-and-trusted paper systems. Paper is far more fragile than computer storage, though — a misplaced cigarette butt (or unruly dog, or spilled cup of coffee, or…) can destroy an entire manuscript! Computers allow unlimited copies to be made, in theory — use as many backup strategies as you need to feel secure.

WordPress regularly releases new versions to fix bugs and close security holes, so it’s important to keep up-to-date.WordPress Automatic Upgrade makes upgrading from one version of WordPress to another a snap. When a new version of WordPress is released, you’ll see a notice on your WordPress dashboard when you log in. When you see this, go to the “manage” tab, and then the “Automatic Upgrade” tab. From there, just follow the directions. WPAU will take the site off-line, deactivate your plugins, backup your database and files, download the new version fromWordpress.org, install it, update the database, reactivate your plugins, and bring everything back online. You can choose a fully automated upgrade, but I prefer to walk through step-by-step, because that allows me to download the backups as they’re created rather than at the end of the process (in case something goes wrong in the upgrade process — which has never happened to me, but just in case…).

You don’t want to only backup your database when there’s an update, though. While most of the files that make up your website won’t change except during upgrades, your database changes every time there’s a new post or comment. Ideally, you want to backup at least once a week, maybe more if your site gets a lot of traffic. The WordPress Database Backup plugin will allow you to create and download backups on-demand, but what’s better, it will do automated backups and email the file to you, on whatever schedule you choose. Once it’s installed, you tell it which database tables to backup — the default WordPress tables are selected by default, but lots of plugins add their own tables; I suggest selecting them all — and when to do it. From then on, every week (or whatever interval you’ve chosen) you’ll get an email with the most recent backup attached. Just keep these — I have a folder in my email program for each website I run, and the backups just go straight into their respective folder. If anything ever goes wrong with your site and you need to restore the database, you can easily upload and import the most recent database backup.

Between these two plugins, just about all the most tedious work of keeping your website up and running are taken care of for you. I’ve used both on several sites and through several upgrade/backup cycles, and both work fantastically.

Regular readers have seen me rave about Adobe’s online word processor Buzzword before. Written in Flash, Buzzword provides a writing environment so slick that it’s actually inspired me to write more!

This week, Adobe launched Acrobat.com, folding Buzzword and a couple of other projects they’ve been working on into a somewhat integrated interface. The total package represents a nice start to what looks set to become a major player in the office suite field.

Overview of Acrobat.com

Acrobat.com is a free service offered by Adobe consisting, at this point, of 5 sub-applications: Buzzword, the online word processor; ConnectNow, an online meeting space; Create PDF, a file conversion application; Share, a file sharing system; and My Files, an online storage space. All the programs run in Flash, as you’d expect this being Adobe and all, and should run in any modern web browser (including Firefox 3) and on either Windows, Mac, or Linux (although Linux users will have to follow special instructions to upload files to the service).

All of the services are technically still in Beta, although I’ve been using Buzzword for well over half a year with no problems. Since the applications in Acrobat.com consist of a mix of acquired third-party applications and apps developed in-house, the integration between them isn’t very consistent — for example, you still can’t access Buzzword documents directly from Share or MyFiles, a feature I hope is in the works.

To use Acrobat.com, you need a free Adobe account. If you already use Adobe’s other services, like Adobe Exchange (Adobe’s repository for add-ons for Creative Studio apps like Photoshop and Illustrator), you already have an Adobe ID. If, like me, you are a former Buzzword user, Acrobat.com will walk you through the process of converting your former login into an Adobe ID — it only takes a few seconds.

The Applications

Like I said, Acrobat.com consists — for now — of five separate applications:

• Buzzword: A gorgeously-designed word processor, Buzzword offers features about on par with a rich text editor like Wordpad, such as tables, images, bulleted lists, and text formatting and highlighting. Documents can be shared, with the author deciding whether others can only read the document, annotate it, or edit it directly.

  With the release of Acrobat.com, Buzzword gains the ability to export as PDF, which it does very well (this is Adobe, after all). Still lacking is support for standard fonts (the system comes with several custom Adobe fonts, which are beautiful, but are replaced by boring fonts when you export a document from the system) which is supposedly in the works. Also somewhat disappointing is the fact that you can’t, as yet, save Buzzword documents to your MyFiles or Share account — you have to download the document (losing your gorgeous fonts in the process) and re-upload it to those services.

• ConnectNow: A fairly full-featured webconferencing app, ConnectNow allows you to share your screen, chat, send live video, share files, and collaborate using a whiteboard. Each meeting space is assigned a unique URL that you can invite attendees to visit; email invites can also be sent from within the system, but that just triggers your default email program to open a new email with the link already inserted.

  Some form of contact management would be nice, so a list of potential attendees could be consulted and invited quickly. Meetings are limited to three people, including the host, which rather limits the usefulness of the app, but I assume Adobe will increase that limit as the system becomes better established.

• Create PDF: This does about what it says. You can upload up to 5 documents, and Adobe will convert them to PDF. The conversion is straight across; you can’t add new features, edit tet, or do anything else. In other words, this is not a replacement for Acrobat.Actually, the Create PDF apps is just a quick link into the PDF conversion screen in Share; your shared documents will appear at the bottom, and the new PDFs will be saved to the Share system.
• Share: Acrobat.com’s document sharing service offers a slick way to send and receive documents. Documents you’ve uploaded or received via Share can be previewed online (although I found it couldn’t preview Word 2007’s .docx format); a button click opens the Create PDF dialogue for quick conversion; you can generate a direct link to any document that can be opened by anyone; and documents can be embedded into web pages.
• MyFiles: Adobe’s file storage service offers 5 GB of free online storage for most kinds of documents and images, Adobe product filetypes (including Flash), and zip archives. You can’t upload media files, fonts, executables, and several other file types.The options available in MyFiles are exactly the same as those in Share, which makes me curious about why they are presented as two separate apps.

Acrobat.com On the AIR

Acrobat.com finally brings offline functionality to apps like Buzzword, via Adobe’s AIR toolset. The Acrobat.com AIR application allows you to use Acrobat.com apps without using your browser, making for a quicker overall experience. SInce the app is running on your desktop, you can drag and drop files directly to MyFiles or Share. It’s unclear, though, whether you can use the AIR application without an Internet connection (and I’m too lazy to disconnect mine and see!) and whether that’s a feature that could be enabled.

In my tests, though, Buzzword opened in a separate browser window, rather than within the AIR application. Hopefully that will be worked out soon!

Overall Thoughts

Acrobat.com is a good next step for Adobe. I’m glad to finally be able to save PDFs from Buzzword, and the AIR application makes Buzzword an especially compelling word processor for everyday use.

What I hope is that this “next step” isn’t Adobe’s “last step”. Acrobat.com has the potential to be an amazing online/off-line, available anywhere, full-featured productivity suite. The addition of a presentation designer (SlideRocket?), database program (Blist?), and spreadsheet (Blist, again?), plus a couple of other niceties would make Acrobat.com a real contender against the bulky and expensive MS Office — and even against OpenOffice.org’s free suite.

For now, Buzzword and the 5 GB of free storage offered by MyFiles are more than compelling on their own. The sharing works well, though I’ve had little occasion to use it (email works fine for me, as it happens). It’s so easy to create a PDF from just about any file these days that the Create PDF service is hardly necessary, though it’s nice to have the ability built in across the Acrobat.com suite. All in all, Acrobat.com is a beautiful, elegant suite that’s still a little random and haphazard but seems to be coming together nicely. I expect great things!