"The Wonderful World of Backups" by Troy H. Cheek on Jan 29, 2005

Well, for the third time in as many weeks, I'm restoring pretty much everything related to web browsing on my computer from backups. The same backups. From two months ago.

I started using Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client (see mozilla.org for more information) because the old Mozilla combined suite suddenly stopped working on my computer somewhere between re-installations of Windows. I found out later this was due to a small registry error and could be fixed with a simple registry edit. By the time I figured that out, I'd already gotten hooked on Firefox. Of course, I'd installed and uninstalled and re-installed and over-installed half a dozen browsers before I made this decision. I got tired of having to copy over or re-create my bookmarks and passwords and whatnot every single time I changed my mind, so I looked around for a solution.

I found a pretty good solution in the free MozBackup 1.4 (see mozbackup.jasnapaka.com for more information). This product has been officially discontinued, but at least the developer (Pavel Cvrcek) cleaned up his final version and made available for download. I love it when a developer does that. I hate it when they just stop development and leave only buggy versions floating around the net. Or, even worse, decide that since they have no interest in the program, nobody should be using it and actively seek out and destroy anyone trying to keep it alive.

Anyway, I tried MozBackup and it did indeed allow me to back up both my browser settings and my email for every variation of Mozilla that I tried it on. It worked and it worked well. I used it almost weekly.

And then, like pretty much any backup program, I didn't need to recover any of these backups for a while and got out of the habit of backing up. I even eventually uninstalled it from my computer, telling it to delete all the old backup files as it did so.

Two months later, I'm downloading some bit torrents while browsing the web while digitally recording a TV show while maybe downloading some email and suddenly it's guru meditation time. Well, that's what it would be on an old Amiga. Four bombs on my Atari Falcon030. On my current Windows system, it's a nasty Big Blue Screen O' Death. One of those IRQ NOT LESS THAN errors which can mean anything from bad RAM to bad harddrive to bad CPU to bad device driver. Given that it mostly happens when I'm downloading/browsing while watching TV on my computer's capture card, I figure it's probably a driver problem with either my network card or my capture card.

No biggie. Rebooting always works. And it did this time. Everything was just fine and dandy. Until I tried to browse the web. That's when I discovered that Firefox had pretty much forgotten everything I'd ever told it. Hmm. That can't be right. Intuitively, I closed and re-opened the browser a couple of times to see if this was just a glitch. Turns out, intuition is bad in a case like this. Mozilla browsers have internal backups of bookmarks and possibly other settings. These internal backups are overwritten if you close and re-open the program a couple of times.

Deciding that I wasn't going to let this happen again, I dug up MozBackup (discovering in the process that it had been discontinued) and re-installed it. In the process, I discovered that I had not actually deleted my old backups after all, so I was able to restore my bookmarks to the state they were just a couple of months previously. My bookmarks don't change that often, it seems. I only had to track down and re-add about half a dozen sites to be up to date.

Oh, and update the 'last-read' pointer on the approximately two dozen web comics which I read avidly. This took a while, as I keep getting distracted by old storylines.

Being a borderline genius, I realized that would have been a perfect time to backup all my settings. I naturally didn't, deciding that I'd do it later.

'Later' turned out to be after the next couple of times I'd done stupid things to lose important browser settings. In fact, I'm in the process of re-creating them now, so 'later' is likely to be right after I post this update.

On a lighter note, I've been helping nephew Austin with a speech he's doing. He was allowed to pick any topic he liked, so he chose home videogames. We searched the net for some information on the origins of videogames. We discovered so much information that we decided to only cover game systems that came out prior to the year that Austin was born.

By coincidence, this turned out to also be the dividing line between the game systems I was familiar with and the game systems where I couldn't win a game if my life depended on it.

Suddenly, once again, I feel old.

Copyright 2005 by Troy H. Cheek. Reprint with prior written permission only. Comments and questions to