Backup your dictionaries!

Your flashcard exercise dictionaries contain valuable exercise progress information used by the Auto-revision flashcard study system, and if they somehow become corrupted, ALL the information that JWM has learned about your Japanese Kanji and vocabulary skills will be lost. For example, it is possible for a dictionary to be corrupted if your computer crashes or there is a power blackout in the middle of an exercise session. It really does happen.

To avoid this tragedy, you should always backup your exercise dictionaries when the backup reminder is displayed by Japanese WordMage.

How to do a backup
Doing a backup simply means making a copy of the file you want to backup. Then if the file you usually use gets corrupted, you can delete the corrupted file and replace it with a copy of the backup file. Consequently, the more often you do backups, the less work you can lose. For example, if you backup every two days, you can lose a maximum of two days work. If you backup every month, you can lose a months work. Being diligent about backups of your valuable data files really does pay off.

You should backup your exercise dictionaries to floppy disk, zip cartridge, or other media. You can also backup to hard disk, but if the unthinkable happens - your hard disk dies - your backup dictionaries will be lost too. Consider this when deciding how you should do your backups. A good strategy may be to backup to hard disk every two days, and backup to zip cartridge every week.

When you decide to do a backup, create a folder for the backup files first. For example, you could call it 'Backup 6-6-99' (assuming the date is the 6th of June). Then copy the files you want to backup into this folder. When you do your next backup a few days later, create a new folder with the appropriate date and copy the files you want to backup into this folder. Use this procedure every time you do a backup, and delete old backup folders when you think you won't need them anymore (to recover disk space). You should have at least three folders on the go at one time, just to be safe.

You will find your flashcard exercise dictionaries in the 'Dict' folder inside the Japanese WordMage folder. You may need to have a look at the Flashcard dictionary list (select Flashcard dictionary list from the Preferences submenu of the Edit menu) to see which dictionaries are used for flashcard exercises. If you are a PC or Linux user, you must make sure you copy both parts of each dictionary during the backup procedure. For example, a dictionary called 'Lesson1' will be stored in files called 'Lesson1' and '%Lesson1' on your hard disk.

Another way to determine which flashcard exercise dictionaries you are using is to open the Lesson planner and note all the dictionaries shown on the right side as you scroll down the list. If you backup these, you are backing up the dictionaries in the flashcard dictionary list.