Well, crap. Lost all my recipes

Northern Brewer General
1

Husband disassembled the old laptop to make a stir plate this weekend. Thinking we were smart, we made sure all the old documents had been moved to the new machine. We didn’t think about the fact that all our recipes were in Beersmith. :frowning:

So, I’ve lost almost all my recipes, all our notes, system setup, everything. Years of research and trial and error, gone.

Of course, the damn thing didn’t even work; the fan was too small. (FWIW, the guts of an old external hard drive ended up working perfectly.)

Back up your stuff, y’all.

2

I not only back it up, I write it down in notebooks, too. A broken water line in the brewery wiped out my main brewing computer a few years ago and the written records were invaluable.

3

Could you hook up the old HD to a USB universal adapter?

I have one from NewerTech and it’s great, after my motherboard died on my old computer, just popped out the HD and hooked it up to the new machine.

4

Thumbdrive for backups for the win !

5

Google Drive. I back up everything. 5 gigs of space for free. Not only that, but it syncs to various devices if you want.

6

I also record everything in a notebook. I used to do it on both the notebook, and beersmith, but then all the sudden (without warning) my beersmith reset itself, and all my notes were lost.

thankfully i had hard copies in my notebook

7

I write it all in a notebook. I debated switching to electronic a few years ago but then decided (or hope) that one day my kids will prefer to read over my handwritten recipes, comments, and ramblings.

8

Google Docs.

I brew with my dad and brother and we can share all the recipes, notes and expense sheets there.

I made a Google Spreadsheet that calculates my water volume based on grain bill, ABV based on OG/FG and a few other things.

I just print it off on brew day and away we go.

9

Glad to hear that I’m not the only brewer still keeping a written logbook of all of my brews in addition to the digital copies. I even store my logbook in a firesafe.

10

Wow… Sorry to hear that - definitely a tough loss. Good reminder though… I have all mine on my iPad in iBrewMaster, and I transfer my key recipes, ideas, details and thoughts into a written journal… but, I really need to probably sit down for a couple hours and bring it up to date again.

Thinking I will be doing some of that today while I am brewing.

Any hope at all of some tech superstar finding a way to save/retrieve them somehow???

11

If you still have the old hard drive, you should be able to retrieve the files by either inserting it into an external enclosure[/url] or using a [url=http://www.newegg.com/SSD-HDD-Accessory/SubCategory/ID-43]bracket

to mount the 2.5" drive into the drive bay of a desktop.

12

The external enclosure idea would be what I would do, assuming you didn’t go looking for magnets inside the laptop hard drive.

I am also one those brewers who keep hard copy records. I take cryptic notes on the beersmith printout while I’m brewing then afterwards I neatly transfer the recipe, methods, measurements, and notes over into a composition notebook; I then three hole punch the printout and file that away into a binder. It all sounds a little excessive now that I’m typing it out…

13

in addition to gdrive, I like dropbox, its free and if you decide to expand you can opt to pay for more space. I have 50 Gigs for free but only because I invited some friends and advertised on facebook for them.

Good luck.

14

Beersmith allows you to install on 2 computers, all my recipes are on my desktop and laptop. I also plan to print my favorite ones out and do the 3 hole punch thing for a binder.

15

I’ve got this thing called ClickFree and it is a 500GB automatic backer-upper. It also does multiple PC’s. All I do is plug it in to the USB once a week and it does it all.