saving working files to CD

soolin

Lots of cussing and cursing from my OH as he has encountered a problem with the new PC. It took me ages to persuade him that technology is good and he started doing all his accounts on Excel saving them to floppy each month. Every month when he updated he was able to save the new data to overwrite the old.

New set up means he is using the MS Works programme and saving to CD, but when he tries to amend the monthly accounts it only lets him save a new copy and this is driving him crazy.

He is even less technology minded than me, plus he hates PCs with a vengeance so is threatening to go back to quill pen and parchment, but is there any way of changing a spreadsheet once it is burnt to disc, without having to save a whole new copy?

Soo

albertross_2

not unless it is rewriteable..

Save everything to hard disk, backup to CD.

Floppies and CD's and usb drives shouldn't be used for working files. They fail sometimes. If it fails with your only copy, that's all your data gone.

espresso

As these spreadsheets used to be save onto floppy, they can't be very large files. Why not just save the latest monthly account files with the date in the filename as a CD has nearly 600 times as much space as a floppy.

soolin

Thanks everyone, slight lull here OH has gone off in a strop to whinge at PC World about the inefficiency and shortcomings of PCs generally. He's also going to buy some different rewriteable discs to try them.

He may be gone some time!

albertross_2

If you insist on saving stuff to external media, then a usb drive may be better, but I can't stress enough how bad an idea it is to save your master data to a CD/flash drive/floppy.. that's what hard disks are for. CD's/DVD's etc should be used for backups, and it is a good idea to name each version differently in case you make a mistake and need to go back.

MadCowMan

as previosly mentioned - dont have your only copy on Floppy / CD / USBStick.

Use a combination of the above by all means , but dont fully rely on it. Even the tapes used for enterprise backup fail occasionally , so nothing is certain ( especially a floppy )

an ideal solution would be to use an online service like carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/) to hold your backups , which can then follow you from machine to machine. ( see the backup sticky for more details )

Avoriaz

MadCowMan wrote:

as previosly mentioned - dont have your only copy on Floppy / CD / USBStick……………..

Don’t have your ONLY copy on anything.

Always have at least two copies of all your important data.

Your main copy should be on the PC, with at least one backup copy, preferably to a reliable media such as an external hard drive. If you backup to CD have two separate CD backups in case one fails. CD backup is not reliable.

I have about 150 gb of data, music and video files etc. and as my laptop only has an 80gb drive, I have two external 250gb drives, each holding a full backup.

I am seriously thinking about making an arrangement with a friend and neighbour over the road to keep DVD copies of my data as if our house were destroyed in a fire, all my backups would be destroyed too.

I used to sell computers for a living and I have seen companies ruined or severely impacted through the simple loss of data and lack of proper backups.:eek: