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"Thanks for a great book.  Most e-books are small, almost pamphlets but the Desktop Search Handbook is great value for over 60 pages of info"    - Greg H, Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Here's the opening pages of Office BACKUP Handbook:

" This ebook is about recovering things that you thought were lost with the focus on documents, files and emails used by Microsoft Office programs.  Most of the tricks we’ll talk about also apply to other programs and situations.

We all know the importance of backups – inevitably you lose something you wanted, either in the short term or from years past.

Most writings on backup assume everything works fine.  You buy that - then do this and this – hey presto, you have a backup!  There’s little talk about restoring files and almost never anything about what happens when things go wrong. 

In the Office Backup Handbook we’re taking a practical approach after many years of saving and restoring files.  We know that restoring has to happen at the worst of times.  Your computer hardware or software might not be working properly (since that’s why you need to restore data in the first place) and you might be under time pressure (computer failures will delay that important task you have).

So we’ve written a practical guide with plenty of ‘step by step’ instructions for both backup AND restoring files.  We’ll show you how to do this with commonly available tools that you either have or can get for a low price. 

As with all the Office Watch ebooks and newsletters, we’ve tried to go beyond the standard software ‘how-to’ to give you practical advice and tips that we’ve learnt from decades of computing experience.  You don’t have to do everything we recommend, some of it may not apply to you or may seem excessive for your needs – that’s your choice. 

With backups the inclination should be towards caution, simplicity and redundancy:

Caution – assume the worst might happen.  Murphy’s Law says it will happen, especially if you’re not cautious.

Simplicity – making a simple backup system that has less chance of failing and also makes recovery of data straight-forward.

Redundancy – having multiple copies of your files in case one backup goes bad or you need an earlier version of a document.

Backups aren’t just about recovering files after a computer breakdown or loss.  Sometimes you need to recover an earlier version of a document – perhaps you removed wording from a draft that you now realize is needed.   We’ll show you options to recover that information.

The good news is that many software developers have learnt caution over time.  They’ve had to suffer from loss of files for all sorts of reasons so they tend to build fail-safes into their software whenever they can.

In part, this ebook is about knowing where those features are and how to make use of them.

The first part of the book will talk about some of these options that are not normally considered backups, but really are part of any attempt to recover things that are lost.  With a tip of the hat to Marcel Proust we’ve called this section – Remembrance of Things Past – we promise our version is shorter and more readable than the great man’s famously long tome.

Then we’ll talk about more traditional backups.  How to make a copy of some or all of your files for safekeeping.  We’ll cover the basics like types of backups, what to backup and what to ignore and where to store those copies.   The basic concepts of data recovery are also covered.

Next we put those concepts into practice.  There are step-by-step instructions for the four most commonly used tools for data backup, the Windows Backup utility supplied with Microsoft Windows, two popular data compression and backup tools WinZIP and WinRAR plus the free Microsoft tool SyncToy.

Data recovery – how to get back a file you have previously backed up.  This is often overlooked but is important because often you or your computer is in disarray when you need to recover data so it’s best to make this process as simple as possible.  We’ll give you step-by-step recovery instructions for Windows Backup, WinZIP, WinRAR and SyncToy to complement the backup steps in the previous chapters.

Next we talk about where and how to store your backups.  What do people quickly grab as they are leaving from an approaching fire or flood?  These days it’s common to hear ‘computer’ or ‘hard drive’ among the answers.   We have some suggestions for offsite storage of your backups.

Finally are some extra tips.  This is a grab bag of tips and suggestions from the Office Watch team learnt, often the hard way, over many years.

The case for paranoid simplicity

Most of the ideas and suggestions in this chapter are based around the concept of paranoia – the nagging suspicion that things will go wrong, and when you want to recover a file, things are more likely to go ‘pear shaped’.

In a nicely behaved world you’ll be able to restore files when you need them but in the real world things may not go that smoothly.  You may not have the software and hardware to restore that you expected.  Or the hardware may not work right, or recognize your backups.  You might have the software but it stubbornly refuses to install, you might have lost the license key or one of many other unforeseen possibilities.

The most common problem is that your carefully saved backup refuses to be read when it comes time to restore it.  I’m sure there’s a mathematical formula to describe this variation on Murphy’s Law but in layman’s language:

The more important the file - the more difficult it will be to recover.

So the file you desperately need will be hard to get.  If you’re just testing backups then everything will go smoothly.

The result of long and bitter experience is that we’re inclined to go for simple solutions using well known and easily installed tools in preference to some flashy but more proprietary options.  That’s why this ebook doesn’t have reviews of the myriad of backup programs out there.

Ebook power

Like the Desktop Search Handbook and Office Extras Handbook and Eye-catching Signs with Word the Office Backup Handbook takes advantage of the flexibility in e-books. 

Because this is an electronic book you have options you don’t have with dead tree (paper) publications.

With Adobe Acrobat e-books you can navigate using the bookmarks pane on the left to jump around the e-book, it’s a more convenient and faster version of the traditional table of contents (but we’ve still included a TOC below)

Searching.  Use the Find or Search commands (under the Edit menu) in the Acrobat Reader to quickly locate what you need.

Searching.  Naturally this handbook can be indexed and searched by any Desktop Searching program that indexes the content of PDF files. Just save it to a folder that is indexed and the Desktop Searching program should do the rest.   There’s lots more detail about this in our Desktop Search Handbook.

Bookmarks.  Choose View | Navigation Tabs | Bookmarks to see a tree view of the headings in the handbook. Click on any heading to jump to that section.

Resizing.  You can change the Zoom setting in Acrobat Reader to make the text larger and easier to read.

Updates.  Unlike a paper book, registered purchasers may get free updates to the entire book. In this case until 30 October 2006.

Comments.  You can add your own comments and notes to an ebook – see the Comments menu in Acrobat Reader.

Attachments.  PDF files can contain documents within them for you to save onto your computer – much in the same way that email messages can have file attachments.  Using this feature we can give you examples to try and use anyway you’d like.  Choose View | Navigation Tabs | Attachments in Acrobat Reader v7 or Documents | File Attachments in Acrobat Reader v6.

Printing.  We let you print out all or part of ebook for your own use (many ebook publishers do not).  Instructions are below."

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