I spend a lot of time at work solving technical problems or helping people with some computer feature they want. Someone will come up to me and say, "I'd love to be able to" or "Wouldn't it be neat if" and I think about it and see if it can be done/created/fixed. I like doing this because I learn a lot this way.

There's a computer at work that generates spreadsheets every day. It's a fairly old computer, not on the Internet, not on any network, and basically all it does is putter along and create spreadsheets with some operator input. The simple problem was that the spreadsheets need to be backed up, hopefully multiple times throughout the day.

But there were complicating factors too: the computer is not on the Internet or a network. As an old computer there was a limit to the kind of backup software it could handle. It was in use constantly so the backup process could not be long or complicated. Sometimes the folder names in which the spreadsheets were kept would change. And we wanted the sheets to back up to an external drive in case of hard drive failure.

I started by looking around for backup software. Every one I found did everything but walk the dog. I could have gotten one of those but it seemed like overkill. Why spend large amounts of money just to back up a dozen spreadsheets?

Finally I got a solution. I started with a 2GB flash drive, which was on special at Best Buy for $30. Plugged that into a USB port in the back of the computer, and there was my external hard drive. For my backup software I used a lovely free program called Karen's Replicator, which you can get from Karen's Power Tools at http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp . (You'll need Visual Basic Runtime to run this program, which is also available at KarenWare.com.) Those of you with REALLY old computers will be happy to know that Karen's Replicator runs on Windows 95/98/ME/2000 as well as Windows XP.

Karen's Replicator allows you to set up rules for copying files from one place to another. I set up a rule to copy all *.xls files (all Excel files, in other words) from directory x to folder y on the flash drive every day at 10am. Two more sets of rules copied the files from directory x into other folders on the flash drive at 3pm and 8pm. I now had three sets of spreadsheets created throughout the day safely on the flash drive. A quick test showed the copying of the files took just under 30 seconds -- short enough that there would be no operator issues while the program was running.

So far this has worked great. For a situation where an entire computer needed regular backing up, it wouldn't be ideal. But in a case like this when you're just trying to back up one critical set of files, it's excellent. I'm keeping my eye on the flash drive -- I don't think it's going to fill up but I wonder if there's any chance that this regular data read/write will wear it out, and if so when. (There's also a faint chance that a curious operator will remove the flash drive; I have attempted to address that by putting a bit of white tape on the drive with the words ARCHIVE DISK. DO NOT REMOVE OR I WILL FIND YOU.)