computer housekeeping
Chores. You have to do them. Or you live in a hotel or employ a housekeeper. They need to be done. Washing the dishes, laundry, hoovering, shopping, taking the rubbish out and cleaning the cat litter tray. And you know what happens when they don’t get done. Life get difficult and then chaos ensues. The same is true for your computer.
Both friends and clients ask me about this or don’t know about it. So this is a basic guide for you all.
It doesn’t matter whether you have a Mac or a PC, you still need to keep your house in order. So what are those chores? Here is a short list of the main ones.
- Backing up your important data on a regular basis
- Removing redundant data
- Drive defragmentation
Lets have a look at these ideas in a little more depth.
Backing up
When I ask people about their back up strategy they look at me as if I’m asking them when they last went to the dentist. And it is a little bit like that. You may have spent an hour writing a document and editing it. Then saved it on your computer. But then your computer dies the next day (does happen!) and you don’t know what to do. It’s good to take a paranoid attitude to this because the life span of a hard drive is between 3 - 5 years. Everything is working fine one minute and then the next minute it’s dead. That’s modern technology for you.
So what should you back up? Anything that you don’t want to risk losing. Anything that is unique and that you couldn’t get again. Your photos, your documents, perhaps your music collection. Software is not unique so you don’t need to worry; you can get that again. Files are getting larger and larger so it means that storage media needs to be larger too. You used to be able to put everything onto one CD but you can’t do that anymore. Perhaps a DVD would do it.
The easiest way to back up is to back up everything and use an external hard drive. Big companies do that onto tape drives. They do it every evening. All you would need to do at home is to purchase an external hard drive that is the same size or larger than your computer hard drive. You can then connect that to your computer using usb, firewire, scsi or fibre channel even. With this strategy you don’t need to worry about what to back up, you just put the whole lot on your drive.
You can back up as you go, meaning that you save in two places instead of one. Or you can back up everything say once a week. It’s dead easy, just drag and drop the whole lot. When prompted if you want to overwrite the files say yes. It may take some time, so do it when you don’t really need to use the computer.
My personal back up strategy
My strategy is a bit more complex. I do more of a selective back up, a clone drive and an emergency disc. I also back up to a server. For my most important files such as account spreadsheets, addresses etc I make two copies. One onto hard drive and one onto CD. I back up all my software onto a DVD. I also archive some files and software that I don’t use very often but need now and again. In order to free up space I don’t leave it on my main drive. The bigger files that need more space such as photos and music go onto a hard drive and onto a DVD.
I do it all once a month and put a date so I don’t get confused about versions. Every two months I create what I call an emergency disc. If the house burned down or I lost it all, then what essential files and software would I keep? One DVD. I send that disc to a friend for safe keeping. Just shows my level of paranoia. And with that DVD and a new computer I could start again.
The other method is the server method or online backup. If you have a .mac account you can use idisk or you can put zipped archives on your own server and companies like Amazon and Yahoo offer this service too. It means that you can let them worry about backing up the server and you can also access your data from all over the world. If you have a website then probably have lots of unused space on your hosting space where you could store back ups. Ask your web master/designer for more details.
Following my scsi experiment I’m going to split my system onto two drives: software on one and files on the other. You can read more about that in my post scsi experiment.
Removing redundant data
Otherwise known as having a clear out. When you back up on a regular basis then you will see what you have, especially if you do selective back up. So what do you delete and what do you keep? The text message inbox or the e-mail inbox comes to mind. Something to do when you’re waiting for the train.
Let’s start with software. Some program that you got as a trial version, used once and forgot about, like the sandwich toaster. Will you use it again? Not likely. Delete it. On a PC you can uninstall so that you remove registry entries as well. On the Mac you can simply drag it from the Applications folder to the trash can. (There will be library items to delete as well. So you may need to do that as well.) If you think that you will be using it again then archive it. When you have a shortlist of software to archive, then pop them onto a CD.
Then look at the big files such as movie clips, music and photos. Sometimes you have duplicate copies. Use the same strategy as above: use it, lose it or store it. Then look at your smaller files such as Word documents, spreadsheets etc.
Why do you need to do this when you have the space? Same reason as you do it at home. If you don’t need it, you don’t use it and you don’t like it, then get rid of it. Your hard drive should never be full. About 85% is about the maximum. Your computer uses your hard drive for what is called virtual memory. It’s a way of adding to your actual available ram. It just means that your computer can run more smoothly because it has that space available to do certain things. If that space is not there then the machine can slow down considerably, can crash a lot or at the worst just die. So you hoarders out there, be warned.
Disk Defragmentation
I’m going to try and explain what this means in layman’s terms, so I hope that you can understand it and why you need to do it. Mac users on OS X apparently don’t need to do it, but it is being debated.
If you imagine that your hard disk drive is a big room with lots of shelves. A bit like a library. But imagine that each book is exactly the same size. Let’s say they are all lever arch folders. All the same size. (When your computer formats a drive it divides up the space into units depending on the system eg Mac or PC.) So when you save a file, a digital photo for example, your computer divides the size of the photo file by its smallest units. So your photo may need ten lever arch files. But what happens when you get to the end of the row? We may need 10 units for that photo, but we only have eight on that shelf and then two on another shelf on the other side of the room. That’s fine. Your computer can handle that. But now all the units are not next to each other for that photo and the process of fragmentation has begun.
As that room starts to get fuller it becomes increasing difficult to put the units allocated for one file next to each other. And that means it’s then harder for your computer to retrieve that file when you want it. It takes longer. You have part of it on one shelf and then the rest somewhere else. Get the picture? This is fragmentation.
So de-fragmentation is the process by which all the units for a particular file and put next to each other again. And you can see that this could take a long time depending on how fragmented your drive has become. Can be done in as little as half an hour or could take up to six hours if you haven’t done for a while. In Windows, it’s Start>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter. Get it going at the end of the day or when you’re about to go out. Should be done by the time you get home or wake the next morning. How often? Once a month or once every two.
The pay-off
So what do you get if you do all this? Things run more smoothly. Your computer has less work to do and will probably be a bit faster as well. You will feel on top of things knowing that you will be safe if it all goes down the tube.