Keeping track of my stuff

[jbcohen]

Do you have a backup hard drive on your PC? Do you have backup software to do the backups? Do you have off site backups? Off site backups means that you backup these sermons to a portable hard drive and take the drive physically from were the PC is to another location. For example to do an off site backup you might back up your PC at the church office to an external hard drive and one fine day when you go home you take that drive home with you and it sits on your dresser for one week then returns to the church to get updated then returns home with you. Or it can go home with anyone in the church to return to the church the next week to get updated. The point is that the drive holds a backup of everything and is physically not located with the PC its backing up so that if anything should happen to the PC you still can reconstruct al of the data from the backup drive.

What would happen if the church burns by arson or what ever? All of the data is lost on the PC. If you have an off site back up when the church is rebuilt you buy a new PC and restore the data on the off site backup to the new PC and voila the PC quite litteraly does not know that anything happend and thinks nothing did.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by AndrewH

I don't know if it's been improved with the newer Sony models, but on my PRS-600, the more books you load onto it, the slower it is when you turn it on. At one time I had my entire ebook library loaded on my reader and it would take 20-30 minutes to boot up. For me an omnibus would be greatly preferable to 500 individual files tagged as a collection.

Perhaps something to consider.

You could create a single file with a linked table of contents, but that poses two problems:
1. The multi-category stuff mentioned above, which falls into more than one book
2. How do you keep it easily updated? Rebuild the file every week when you give a new sermon?

I'm not sure how to exclude the sermons from all your other stuff. Perhaps a collection for everything but sermons? (Not sure if that's what WW was saying earlier with his category starting with an underscore.) Place everything that's not a sermon into a _Generic category and access it that way?

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by AndrewH

I don't know if it's been improved with the newer Sony models, but on my PRS-600, the more books you load onto it, the slower it is when you turn it on. At one time I had my entire ebook library loaded on my reader and it would take 20-30 minutes to boot up. For me an omnibus would be greatly preferable to 500 individual files tagged as a collection.

True, but how often does the average person turn their ebook reader off?

The only time mine ever scans its card (2500 books or so) is when I load new ones, and while it does take a fair bit of time, I deal with that simply by picking times so it's doing that while I'm in the shower, or eating dinner, or that sort of thing. It uses so little battery power that there's no real reason to turn it off 99.9% of the time. I just charge it every week or so, and use the sleep-mode switch most of the time.

By the way, offsite backups are an excellent idea. DVDs make good backups for ebooks (and e-stuff); just burn one every so often, and toss it into a drawer at work or something.

[AndrewH]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

True, but how often does the average person turn their ebook reader off?

I turn mine off whenever I'm not using it (I now only keep 30 books on it, and it boots up very quickly). You'd be surprised how much longer a charge lasts than simply putting it into sleep mode. It also has to "boot up" every time it's disconnected from the computer, which is the default method of charging unless one has purchased an AC adapter.

Dropbox, SugarSync, etc make great cloud backups, BTW. The cloud is, by definition, off-site.

[Bro Pete]

jbcohen and Worldwalker, I appreciate your advice to backup my files. I use an external hard drive for everything and 2 duplicate flash drives to carry my sermons around with me. (one stays with my travel stuff and the other goes back and forth with my notebook.) My The problem with a flash drive is that if I do not have access to a computer, I can't read them. (I really dislike carrying around a laptop.) Since I got my reader, I carry it nearly everywhere I go. More than once I have been travelling and been asked to preach on short notice. It seemed convenient to me to create one file with all my sermons divided by Bible book and chapter. That way when I thumbed through my tree-book Bible I could look at my notes on that passage.

WW thank you for the walk through on your reader. From my home page I usually select "Books" which shows all the books and can be sorted by date, title, author, file name, and latest read. I can see how using collections would winnow out the books I don't need. Since I've never used collections, I can also see how I need to get control of my tags.

You guys have been a great help. A sermon can take 15-20 hours to prepare, much of that is research and consulting commentaries. With over 500 original sermons, I would hate to be a poor steward of my time and duplicate the work I've already done.