Quicken 2011 Backup

Hank Arnold wrote in news:4e7f0ea1$0$4352 $ snipped-for-privacy@cv.net:

Mine is similar, except the backups made almost every time I exit go to a network attached hard drive. Karen also goes there, but a different "partition" (it's a WD MyBook NAS with a scheme of dividing up portions that is to me difficult to understand).

I also make images of my HD at intervals, alternating 2 external drives, using Win7 Backup.

It's really unfortunate that Karen Kenworthy passed away, but her nice software is still available (free):

This is a very good process, but the one thing that catches my attention is, what would you do if your house burned and destroyed your computer AND the backup drives? I backup my Quicken files each month, after I've completed my reconcile checkups and my Turbo Tax files each year, onto thumb drives. I store one of these in my storage building in the back yard and the other in my bank safe deposit box.

If my house burns, again, I will have the files available to import into a new computer with the Quicken and Turbo Tax client software freshly installed.

Gordon

I made a batch that:

1. Asks for and confirms a password
2. Uses free 7Zip to compress and password protect the backups into a folder.
3. Uploads the folder to a cloud service (DropBox, SpiderOak, etc).

Keep folder under 2 GB and storage is free. Batch also zips other data and uploads to a second service. Batch can be run on demand or by Task Scheduler.

Except that thumb drives are notoriously bad for backups!

How's about burning a CD or DVD instead??

That answer is from 2006. The technology has improved very much since then. Are flash drives impervious to "wearing out"? No. What is the number of read/write cycles the current crop of drives can do? Over

Also, it is the read/write cycle that causes the most "wear" of a flash drive. Backups have a very low read/write count, compared to, say, the hard drive in your computer. Yet, in many situations flash drives have replaced the hard drive in notebooks and high-performance enterprise disk arrays.

Since I am not a hardware whiz, I'll take your word for that. What what I've read, the current life span even without excessive use is about 10 years. Then you have the problem about whether 10 years from now you'd find a computer that can READ them (!). I'd have a hard time using some of my 3" 'floppies' now, never mind my old 5 1/4 inch floppies! (Forget my 8" ones, but those were from work anyway and I don't care anymore now....another story.)

Some say to recreate to 'current' media every year so one keeps up with the technology.

Let's try simple things first: 1. Is the target drive full? 2. Did your drives get renamed. This happens when you unplug and replug an external drive.

In Quicken do a control-B and look at what the target drive is. Use the file explorer to list the drives on COMPUTER. Is the target there? Right click on the drive and use tools to verify the disk is OK and not full.

Your comment about recreating to "current" technology is spot on, but I'd do it in 5 year intervals, not one year intervals. Five years should be long enough to allow you to keep up with the technology curve. For example, CDs came on the scene over 20 years ago, but they can still be easily read on current hardware (except for some Apple models that no longer have an optical drive).

While we're on the topic, if you put your back up media in a fire safe, make sure the fire safe is rated for computer media. The fire safes of yore were designed for protecting paper, which has a much higher temperature tolerance than CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, floppies, etc.

btw, I have a few 8" floppies, plus some paper tape from my old IMSAI micro.

Paper tape! The kind that had 3 holes, a delineator, then 5 more holds for a total of 8 across a strip?! That used to be how I backup up my programs in high school in the 1960s when we had access to a remote GE Mark computer using a TTY 33 teletype as the access vehicle! Brings back memories...

Yup, that kind of paper tape. :)