PREVENTING THE COMPUTER OOPS
 By Dan Gutman

 There are ten pages missing from "Paris Trout," Pete Dexter's hot new book
that was awarded the 1988 National Book Award this month.

 They were eaten by Dexter's computer.

 He had just completed the middle section of his book when he gave his
computer the command to put page numbers on each page.  Suddenly, for no
apparent reason, the computer swallowed 110 pages--two months worth of the
novelist's efforts.

 The classic Computer Oops strikes again.

 The oldest, most repetitive and boring advice given to computer owners is
also the most important-- BACK UP YOUR WORK.

 It's a thankless job, but you should make a backup copy of everything you do
and store the backup in a safe place.  Your computer may not be attacked by a
virus or power surge, but data is a very fragile thing. Fire, theft or a
simple computer glitch could put you out of business.

 With a backup copy, what could be a disaster is merely an inconvenience. You
need an extra copy of your computer work just like you need an extra key for
your house.

 Most people don't start making backups until they have their first disaster.
That's closing the disk drive door after the data has escaped.

 I learned this lesson the same way Pete Dexter did, the hard way.  I had just
spent a month working on a cover story for a computer magazine (A+). It was
the first time I had written for them, and I wanted to make a good impression,
both with my writing and my professional manner.

 The day I was to turn in the finished article, I tapped the RETURN key on my
keyboard and my screen went wacko. The article disappeared completely and the
screen was filled with a bunch of strange lines.  When I started up the
computer again and tried to open the file, there was nothing there.  It had
completely disappeared.

 I broke out in a sweat.  There was absolutely nothing I could do.  A computer
isn't like a car.  You can't pop open the hood and poke around inside to
tinker with the innards.


                                    
 
 Naturally, I hadn't taken the 5-7 seconds it would have required for me to
make a backup copy.  I was forced to reconstruct the entire article in one day
from rough notes and my rougher memory.

 I can laugh about it now, but it was one of the worst experiences of my life.
Now when I'm working on any big project, every fifteen minutes or so I save
one copy on my hard disk and one copy on a floppy.  Every few days I print out
my progress on paper, just to be on the safe side.

 It may be computer paranoia, but at least it lets me sleep at night.

 There are several ways to make painless backups.  For most personal computer
users, making an extra copy on a floppy disk is simple enough. For businesses,
in which your data is even more plentiful and precious, you want to take
additional precautions.

 You can make a backup on another hard disk drive, a "streaming tape" drive
that backs up data continually, or a Bernoulli box.  Recently, optical disks
and digital audio tape have become viable backup media.

 "Fastback Plus" ($189) by Fifth Generation Systems of Tustin, California is a
program specifically for backups that can copy 10 megabytes of data in ten
minutes. Versions are made for both IBM and Macintosh.

 Don't wait for your first disaster. Sure, it's kind of a drag to make
backups. But it's not as much of a drag as it would be to recreate your
graduate thesis or your company's accounting records.


                                  

[PRESS RETURN]: