Awakening to an ominous rumble coming from the kitchen, Abel's son descended the stairs to find his Dad grumbling at the computer monitor. "I know I wrote the *@# letter yesterday. Now where is it?" "Well, Dad, where did you put it?" "How the Dickens should I know? It said "save as", and I gave it a name - John Deere, I think. Now, how do I get it back again?"
Son poured two cups of coffee and settled comfortably at the kitchen table. "OK, Dad", he said, "When you came home from the sale last night with those tractor parts, you asked me to put them away. If I had just opened the driving shed and tossed them in, you'd be madder at me than you are at that computer. When it comes down to it, that technological wonder in front of you is no brighter than the driving shed. You need to get it organized."
Abel took the coffee and resigned himself to the lecture. "OK Son. Organize me."
"Alright. Think of the computer hard drive as your work shop. You store all your tools in there, along with the projects you're working on. In the computer, the tools are all the applications: word processors, browsers, accounting programs. With these you write letters and emails and keep track of the farm accounts. In the shed you group the tools together - a place for hammers, for screwdrivers, for power tools. The same in the computer: you'll find Word in one folder, QuickBooks in another. Now, I suggest you create another directory - let's call it "Abel", for all your data. That makes it easy to find things, as well as to do backups.
"If the shed were to catch fire, what would you rescue first? Probably whatever you're working on. You can always replace a hammer, but you'd hate to lose that blanket chest of Grandma's that you've spent weeks refinishing. The same applies to the computer. If the hard drive dies (and they all eventually do), we can always recover the programs, because we have all the install disks. However, you don't want to lose all your data - like the farm records. So, if you put all those files in one folder, that's the only folder you need to back up."
"Back up? Oh yes, you were going to show me how to do that - we'll get to that later. First - it's fine to have a place to put all this stuff, but I still have to remember what I called it. With old 'Dead-Or-Sleeping' DOS I could only use 8 characters, but this new Windows 95 takes whatever I feed it - typos and all."
"Remember what you taught me, Dad. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should! I still stick to the old DOS limit of 8-letter names, and even Windows 98 still needs the 3-letter suffix to tell it what program created the file (.doc for Word, for instance). I find some of the backup programs chop off everything after the first 8 letters anyway. You'll have to develop a system. For starters, name that letter to John Deere JD90619.doc (their initials, and today's date) and you'll be able to find it next time.
"Now - about backups..."
"Later, son. That hay isn't going to roll itself into bales without some help from us. Continue the lesson after supper."
For tips and tricks using computers and the internet, join us at the next Kawartha Internet Users' Group meeting - Thursday July 8, 7:00 pm, at the Lions' Hall, Main St., Bobcaygeon
