This is a tutorial on what I have found out regarding F@H backups, and their value.  If you are running the SMP core you may have already seen that sometimes a work unit just fails to complete. If you are overclocking you may take a look at your system temperature readings, etc. to see if you can find the culprit. The problem is that the work unit is gone by this time and after you make your adjustments you may well be sent a different work unit. All of them behave differently, so it's not a reliable check.

What if you could roll back your WU to a point prior to where it died, make your adjustments in BIOS, or whatever, and start it up again? Then you could see how the SAME WU behaves with amended settings.

I am not overclocking any of my business machines, and I have seen a number of WUs die for no apparent reason. Once there was a spurious IP conflict on one machine, and 12 other boxen hung on the network. I found the problem 5 or 6 hours later, and lost some of the WUs as well as 60-70 hours of production time. That's an example. It was that event that inspired me to think about a backup strategy that would protect the work I had already done, with minimum loss of time. Remember that I have nearly 40 machines on the SMP core. I needed something, because the client isn't exactly what we'd call 100% stable at this time.

For those of you already familiar with Windows Backup this may be elementary, but for others it may save you some fiddling. WBU is not exactly the most intuitive of programs, so here goes:

Open WBU to the "Schedule Jobs" tab, and click Add Job. This brings up the wizard. Next through it. Dialog window appears, click "back up selected." Find your F@H directory in the next window. Personally, I backup the entire directory (and *work* sub-directory), although there are some files that aren't necessary. Tick the directory in the left-hand pane. Now, this is important - after ticking the checkbox you must also CLICK ON THE DIRECTORY TITLE; when it appears in the right-hand pane you are good to go ahead.