Why you should keep PAPER records

I used to record my brewing info on paper. Then I just started using promash and kept everything on my laptop.

Here's why that was bad practice. When you laptop drive fails you lose all your info!

All my recipes that I have created in the last year are toast. Augh!

Sorry to here about the drive....
Did you try taking it somewhere to be examined?
A lot of people/places say to get rid or it and want to sell you a new one.
It is possible to recover info from a toasted drive..it all depends on how bad it is ..and if you want to spend the $.

Thats why I have my external harddrive. Great for backing up pictures and beer recipes.

Same thing happened to me, except that I usually print out a paper copy from promash when I go to buy the ingredients, so I have a paper backup. The other recipes I lost I found from my posts on this site. Now if I can just get that windows emulator software so that promash works on my new mac...

The new OS is supposed to give you the option of booting in Tiger or windows. I think you have to get a trial version to test the viability of the program.
I've found a couple of programs for the Mac (for free), but nothing quite like ProMash.


http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20249
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/home_learning/beeralchemy.html

Or save to a floppy/CD/email it yourself every time you update your log. I always do that with important files after losing my hard drive a couple years ago (luckily before I brewed).

uwmgdman said:

Or save to a floppy/CD/email it yourself every time you update your log. I always do that with important files after losing my hard drive a couple years ago (luckily before I brewed).

Click to expand...

ditto that. I have free email accounts (hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc) and I use those accounts to back-up important files.

-walker

I'm pretty sure when our techies were setting up my new work machine, they told me they could install a second hard drive to run alongside the regular drive, bacfking everything up on the fly. I don't know my terminology, but I'm pretty sure they do that with some servers. When it comes time to replace the work machine, I may investigate whether getting something like that set up is feasible. Thankfully, the techie in question lives right next door; maybe a pint or two of homebrew can gain me some technical assistance.

I have 2 big empty journals and 1 journal just started for just these notes. I much prefer written to typing.

I do both computer & a notebook. I wish my former brewing partner had taken better notes. I'm afraid the recipe for Stiffy died with him. I've worked out the grainbill, I think, but he NEVER wrote down the hopping! He hopped by guess & by golly, but he made some fine brews.

I keep all of my recipes on a computer AND a thumb drive, as well as every brew session in a spreadsheet file that I use during brew day. I always print out a copy of that and record the gravity, notes, and other stuff. So I always have a backup paper copy of it in case the unexpected happens. It has worked for me so far.

Yeah, I rememebred I had some of them copied on to another computer, but I lost about 4 months worth. And two of those brews were my favorites.

A sweet stout made with honey mlat and 5 other malts and a hoppy amber.

Frick and frack!

The drive is not even regonizable by the bios on the laptop nor on another computer. Seems the laptop went haywire and I'm pretty sure if fried the drive. Good thing for extended warranty! But that don't get the recipes back.

That and I'm sitting here with 10 gallons of beer that tastes like unripe apples. What a week!

I used to keep all my brew notes on paper, but they burned in a fire and now I keep it all on a computer. Not really, but you can see that it is not the technology that is the problem (paper has just as much chance to be destroyed as your hard disk does), but that there were nop backups kept.

While brewing, I write down all my notes on paper, which then get transfered to my computer. Every week or so, I backup all of my data (not just brewing, but all my documents) to DVD(I have never had a hard disk fail in my life, but I am careful).

For some important documents (like my resume, and some other stuff), I store them on University servers (which have redundant storage to all but guarantee that the data will never be lost).

My company is about to (finally) release its flagship product which is a secure, recoverable data archive that works with your existing local or networked resources, assembling them into a high-capacity, fault-tolderant virtual file server. In a nutshell and in its simplest form, it mimics both RAID 0 (mirroring) when used with two hard drives and RAID 5 (distributed parity) when used with more than two hard drives. If you lose a hard drive, the application will allow you to replace it, then fully rebuild the archive and all its data.

If anyone is interested, I can post some stackable coupons for all HomeBrewTalk members when launched.

Brewsmith said:

Same thing happened to me, except that I usually print out a paper copy from promash when I go to buy the ingredients, so I have a paper backup. The other recipes I lost I found from my posts on this site. Now if I can just get that windows emulator software so that promash works on my new mac...

Click to expand...

If your new Mac has an Intel chip then you can download and install Boot Camp from Apple and boot directly into Windows XP on your Mac from its own partition on your hard drive. IIRC, Boot Camp will allow you to format a Windows partition without having to erase your hard drive. You will have to buy your own copy of Windows to install though. None of the Windows based beer recipe software will know the difference.

John

I have a 3 ring binder with plastic sleeves for my printed copies of my recipes. I keep this out when Im brewing for a quick reference and note taking.

I also keep my recipes on my hard drive and a memory stick so I can transfer them to my laptop.