"madgardener" wrote in message
...
I hate to ask this, but I would like to request something of you out there
who have read my rambles over the years. I have experienced some serious
hard drive problems of late and the 398 essays that I had already copied
and sent to myself over the course of the last two years has been lost
completely. All I'm asking is if you have any of my writings (rambles)saved
to e-mail them to me. And before you say to go to the archives and
rec.gardening, I have, and I am. It's slow going. I had enough to do one
book, and there are enough rambles and pieces to make two or three books!
I am serious about this now. If there is no one out there who has any
writings or rambles I understand. I'm facing LOTS of research and transfer
time to replace what I so painstakingly had gathered up (and it wasn't a
drop in the bucket!) Thanks for anything ya'll can do.
madgardener up on the ridge, back in steamy Fairy Holler, overlooking a
hazy English Mountain in Eastern Tennessee

You obviously didn't have a correctly thought-out system to creating
backups. Do you have a CD burner? If yes, you should be backing up YOUR DATA
(the work you create) daily. Based on comments I've seen in some tech
newsgroups, many people never get around to creating a backup routine
because they think they have to back up their entire hard disk, an idea
which is almost useless if you're running Windows. Just back up your data.

If you're running a business on a computer, you should be backing up to a
separate piece of hardware, like an external hard drive, or better yet, a
tape drive. A copy of the backup should be kept off premises (safe deposit
box, or fire safe in a building not attached to your home). Why? Because a
backup is useless if it's in the same burning house that melts the computer
itself.

Finally, if you need to do something free, get yourself one or more free
email accounts from Yahoo. Email copies of your data to those accounts and
you're all set. The are two limitations to this idea. First, your ISP may
have size limits for outbound e-mail messages. And, Yahoo has similar size
limits for incoming messages. You can figure out ways around this issue.