Happiness is a warm backup

 

Following on from our article about file organisation, here, finally is the promised sequel on backups. Many thanks to all of you who wrote in and confirmed we were on the right path. Please keep your requests coming in.

 

Backups today are very much in the same situation that seat belts were not that many years ago: we all know we should be playing safe, but many of us quite simply can't be bothered, despite the fact that the chances are high we will at some point in time regret it. Now, while I'm not suggesting backups should be made compulsory by law (though there's a good argument for including something along these lines in a code of conduct or good practice), there is really no good excuse for a professional translator not taking simple precautions to back up their work. The economic consequences even in the short-term are likely to outweigh the cost of your investment, and that's just thinking about working hours lost, not the consequences for your reputation or client relations. Although any client is likely to understand and sympathise regarding an equipment failure, they're very unlikely to be impressed by a supposed professional who does not have a backup copy to retrieve their work and thereby minimise any potential inconvenience. Indeed, such a failing could lead them to immediately investigate switching suppliers.

 

In addition, there's also the question of peace of mind, and not just regarding any work currently in progress. Many of us now rely on a wide range of tools to help us in our work, ranging from customised electronic dictionaries to speech recognition and translation memory. These precious resources depend on files that represent months and indeed years of work. Indeed, even the corruption of our e-mail address book file can result in a substantial loss or at least inconvenience. It would be extremely foolish not to protect ourselves losing the time we have invested in ourselves, whether it be in contacts, reference material and client support, or productivity/QA tools.

 

So, without wanting to sound alarmist, it really is absolutely essential for every practising translator to have some form of backup system. Ideally, moreover, you want a solution that is not dependent on your usual workaday computer, best of all a solution that is separate from any computer at all. Now you may start to smile when you read this, particularly in the light of my recent claim about not wanting to sound alarmist, but here goes anyway: even better than best of all, you want a solution that is portable and can be stored off your working premises. Look at it this way: if there was a power failure in your street or your house burnt down, you'd have to keep on working anyway, wouldn't you? That's pretty much in the nature of freelance work. If you work for direct clients, in particular, you simply can't afford to ever let them down, and that's just good business sense, never mind good ethics or a strong personal commitment to your contacts. In the unfortunate event of such a situation, the likelihood is that you could buy yourself a laptop and get up and running pretty quickly as long as you are able to reinstall all your software and work files immediately. Moreover, putting yourself in such a position will help you reduce the tremendous stress you would be under in such a period (and let's hope it never happens). Indeed, the very act of making a good backup and getting it safely stored away is itself a good stress-buster. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised that if we wired ourselves up to half a dozen machines we'd even discover that the warm glow of satisfaction that follows a good backup is due to the release of multiple endorphins. One way or the other, making comprehensive backup copies of all our work files and data, plus copies of all our software CDs and storing them at a friend's house or on a colleague's premises (and possibly returning the favour) is, at the very least, a fine way of helping ensure you get a good night's sleep. So, having made up our minds to play safe, not sorry, let's take a look at the various different backup solutions available.

 

Whales and minnows

 

Before charging cautiously ahead, it's probably worth us quickly catching our breath to consider what sort of backups are useful to a translator. The basic distinction revolves around both immediacy and size. It obviously takes more time and possibly a different medium to back up your whole computer system, rather than just the last day or hour's work. In the former case, you'll be backing up many folders containing many files, whereas in the latter you'll be backing up one or maybe just a few more. Similarly, you're unlikely to want to do a system backup more often than once every few days, but you'll want to back up work in progress once a day at the very least. As a result, it's probably best to have two different backup systems in place using two different media. Until not long ago, this would have been tapes for your system backups and floppy disks for work in progress, but as you'll discover in this article things have now changed.

 

Recommendations: Think of putting in place two backup solutions, one for all your files and settings, and one for work in progress. Store your big backups and copies of your software at a nearby friend or colleague's house so that if the worst comes to the worst they are always available to you.

 

Word - your hidden friend

 

Most translators' work is done in Microsoft Word. Surprisingly, however, many of us are unaware that Word itself offers us a backup solution, albeit not of either of the kinds just described. Basically, it contains an option that allows you to maintain two copies of the file you're working on, one containing your work with all the changes made until you last saved it, and a "backup" copy that is a file containing all the changes prior to the last set. In other words, it's a file that is always "one step behind". This has two advantages. Let's assume that you're overwriting a text in Word, proceeding one paragraph at a time, rather than one sentence at a time, an approach that can be particularly useful for texts requiring considerable stylistic attention but that don't have any special formatting demands. You will consequently be deleting the source text one paragraph at a time as you proceed. Now imagine that it's been a long day, you're tired and your concentration is flagging. What happens? You mistakenly delete two paragraphs of saved translated text as well as source text and save your document. You then switch off your computer and only realise the mistake when you start work again the following morning. Because you have shut down Word, you can't undo your mistake by clicking the "Undo" button. What you can do is open up Word's "one-step-behind" backup copy and use that to retrieve your work.

 

All right, I'll admit it's not perhaps the sort of mistake we make every day, but I'm sure you now get the picture and can imagine a series of little problem situations where this backup copy can prove very useful for saving time and unnecessary leaps in blood pressure. What it's really intended for, however, are those really nasty situations when the file you're working on becomes irretrievably corrupted - something I'm sure those of you who work with graphics-intensive files have had the misfortune of encountering at least once a year, which isn't to say that it can't happen with much simpler files, especially if they have been converted from other formats. So, none of us can be complacent, not least of all because in these cases we don't just risk losing a couple of paragraphs' work, but the entire file.

 

Word's backup file can be a real lifesaver in these situations and I strongly recommend that absolutely everyone working in Microsoft Word always select the option that automatically creates such a backup file to ensure they are always prepared for the worst. Note that Word is NOT automatically set up to do this. Here's what you need to do: Click on the "Tools" drop-down menu in Word and select "Options", then select the "Save" tab and click on the first choice under "Save options", namely "Always create backup copy", making sure that there is now a tick in the check box before clicking on OK. This will leave you with two work files that have the same name but different file extensions, *.doc for the latest saved file and *.wbk (standing for Word BacKup) for the "one-step-behind" backup copy (see screenshot). If the *.doc file becomes corrupted, close it WITHOUT saving and delete it. Rename the *.wbk file to *.doc and then open it; (the * stands for your file name). Now inspect the document carefully. If all is OK, save it after your first change to create an identical backup file and then carry on working.

 

All in all, this is definitely a worthwhile option and has no real drawbacks unless you're running drastically short of hard disk space (in which case you'd be better off backing up everything and then deleting some very old work files on your hard disk to create more space anyway). On the other hand, it's of no use if you get a hard disk crash or your computer gets struck by lightning or carried away by the winged monkeys who serve the Wicked Witch of the West. To protect yourself against these threats (including the latter) read on.

 

Recommendations: If you do any work in MS Word, always set the option that creates a backup file of every job you do. This applies equally to TRADOS projects in Word.

 

Floppy disks

 

When the first 1.4 MB floppy disk came out it could store several months' work. That's very definitely no longer the case today. Indeed, the translation memory project file for a large job I have just delivered, which represented the best part of one month's work, totalled a splendid 65 MB alone. But even some of the large Word files we find ourselves handling can be pretty substantial. For example, the largest file in the aforementioned project totalled a merry 4 MB. That's certainly a size that can be coped with by zipping the file, which would reduce it to just under 1 MB. Moreover, with many programs like WinZip and even Microsoft windows now facilitating the creation of files that are zipped across several disks, even my mammoth 65 MB file could be zipped across two floppy disks.

 

If we get a lot of requests from bulletin readers to cover how one goes about doing this, we'll dedicate an in-depth article to the solutions available, but I'm not going to dedicate any more space to it here. There are a number of reasons for this. First and foremost, there's the suspicion that many of you will now have CD burners on your PC's that allow you to back up your files to CD, a solution that offers much higher capacities that are infinitely more suited to today's large files, while also enabling the files to be copied much faster. That is, in fact, why you will find that modern PCs increasingly come without a floppy disk drive at all. But there's also another reason and that's that floppy disks simply aren't as reliable, especially in the long term. I can unhappily confess that I've lost count of the number of floppy disks that have failed during my 20 years as a translator.

 

Recommendations: Floppy disks are fine for saving work in progress, especially if the floppy disk drive is relatively new and therefore likely to still be reliable. Even if it fails, replacements can be bought for around £15. Floppy disks themselves can also be brought very cheaply. They are not a terribly reliable medium, however, and are unable to cope easily with the very large files we may often be required to handle nowadays, especially for technical or marketing literature that can contain plans, tables and large graphics files. Despite essentially being an obsolete medium, there's no need to feel that you absolutely have to use any of the other solutions for backing up work in progress outlined in this article if you already have a reliable floppy drive working on your current PC. You should, however, plan to put a solution for system backups in place as soon as possible, since that's something simply no longer worth attempting with floppy disks.

 

Compact Discs

 

When CD burners for writing to compact discs first emerged, it looked as if all a translator's backup worries had finally been solved in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, fate had other ideas in mind. For example, although you can store about 700 MB on a CD, a single translation memory file can quite happily break the 90 MB barrier, meaning that the folder containing all your memories and terminology databases can easily grow to over 2 GB, and that's just for an individual freelance translator. In my own case, leaving aside speech recognition user files, e-mail folders and the rest, backing up all my work folders for just a couple of years' work would require eight CDs and an awful lot of patience. This patience aspect is very important, since a backup system that is cumbersome and lengthy is likely to be used much less frequently, increasing the amount of work that could potentially be lost.

 

At the same time, CDs aren't ideal for backing up work in progress either, even if they're rewritable CDs. There are two reasons for this. The first is that, unlike a hard disk drive or floppy disk, for example, you can't record new information in an area where old information has been stored. Consequently, each time you save a new version of your file, any parts that have been changed are stored in new areas of the disk, gradually making less available in addition to the space taken up by all entirely new material.

 

Secondly, and more importantly, while you continue adding new versions or new files to any given CD, that CD remains "open" and has to be finalised before it can be read without problems on any other machines. As a result, any scenario involving the untimely demise or disappearance of the PC on which you have been writing to the "open" CD will make retrieving the information on your backup copy a difficult if not impossible task.

 

In other words, CDs aren't the very best choice for system backups or for backing up work in progress. They are, however, on the other hand, ideal for another kind of backup: making copies of your software CDs so that you can restore or repair your system installations even if the original CDs are damaged or lost.

 

In addition, you will need a CD burner to create a start-up CD for emergency use in conjunction with other system backup solutions, such as tape streamers and external hard drives.

 

Recommendations: If you don't have any other solution, CDs are certainly a viable option for system backups. They aren't, however, the most efficient or foolproof option for backing up work in progress. When it comes to making backup copies of your software installation CDs, however, they are the ideal choice, especially for making cheap copies that can be stored with family, friends or colleagues so that you are able to reinstall everything quickly on another machine come what may, including a house fire or burglary. Don't forget to write down all your installation codes and passwords so that these can also be stored with your off-site backup CDs. It is also a good idea to keep a relatively recent system backup set of CDs off site even if you are using a more sophisticated on-site solution.

 

 

Continued here (Part two)

First published in ITI Bulletin, 2005.