FileSlinger(TM) Backup Blog

A Good Laugh from Mozy: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-05-08

2008-12-05T16:50:00.001-08:00

This is not the Backup Reminder I was planning to write this week. Either of them. But I woke up without my higher mental functions this morning and was dozing the day away playing Solitaire (not a good idea when you have a banjaxed wrist) until I got a notice saying there were packages to pick up.

One of the packages was the monochrome laser printer I’d ordered in order to conserve the expensive ink used by the Epson Artisan 800. The other was a box from Mozy. When I saw the box, I remembered that they’d said they would be sending some goodies.

The box contained two T-shirts, a DVD, and a card good for one year of Mozy Home Unlimited. The T-shirts are the best part, with the provocative injunction to “Back the F:\ Up!” emblazoned on them in bright orange. (They’re also rather provocatively see-through.)

I do, in fact, back my F:\ drive up, daily, to my L:\ drive. But I only started doing that recently. Most people (if they aren’t the Ur-Guru) don’t even have an F:\ drive. But anyone who understands Windows’ drive lettering system will get the joke.

The T-shirts are part of a new campaign by Mozy, which may be feeling the pressure to differentiate from its many competitors. (One of the columns I was thinking of writing today involves a new online backup service, about which more next week.)

The other part of the campaign is explained on the DVD: the computer nightmare video contest. Submit your 60-second video about your worst computer nightmare (staged or real) for a chance to win an assortment of snazzy prizes, including some Mac hardware and a Flip video camera. (Excuse me, but if you’re capable of making a video to enter in the contest, do you need a Flip video camera?)

In honor of all this excitement, and because I can’t see myself actually wearing that T-shirt in public, I’m going to have my own contest, and give away the T-shirts and the test license. (I do fine with Mozy free.) Just post a comment to my blog before next week’s backup reminder appears and tell me when and how you last backed up. Note that the T-shirts are size medium (the one I’m wearing in the picture) and large (not very large, given how snug the medium is on me, and I usually wear a small). If there are more comments than prizes, I’ll select one at random. Make sure you give me a way to get in touch with you!

Until next week—back the F:\ Up. Or at least back the C:\ up.

Technorati Tags: Mozy,contest

A Backup SMTP Port?

2008-12-04T16:11:00.001-08:00

This morning my outgoing mail abruptly refused to go out. Any of it. My housemate’s mail, too.

Now, given that I have at least 8 separate e-mail accounts (I own four domains and co-own a fifth, as well as having e-mail through the Ur-Guru’s servers and, of course, an account provided by my ISP), that seemed like a problem that had to originate with Comcast. And this time it wasn’t a general outage: I could get incoming mail and access the Web and FTP servers just fine. But no outgoing mail.

Comcast’s online help technician explained that they were blocking Port 25. If you go into the settings for your e-mail program, you’ll find a setting for the incoming (POP) and outgoing (SMTP) servers. And that setting includes a port number. Outgoing mail normally uses port 25.

Except when it’s blocked, of course. Then outgoing mail doesn’t go anywhere.

After the Comcast tech had given me the alternative SMTP port number for Comcast (587), I then had to research the appropriate ports for GoDaddy (3535) and DreamHost (587). But the Ur-Guru doesn’t have any alternative SMTP ports, so we had to switch to SSL, which uses port 465. And even then he had to create a security certificate.

This was a serious nuisance for me, and I’m a fairly geeky sort. To my housemate, all this talk of ports and servers is gibberish. And it doesn’t take a geek to have a domain, a website, and a mail server provided by someone other than the ISP that provides the lines into the home or office.

This kind of blocking must be the reason I couldn’t send mail while I was in Chicago. My father has cable internet from RCN, long known for evil practices of that nature. I bet if I tried again with the alternative ports, it would work.

Blocking Port 25 is allegedly meant to guard against viruses and spam. But I’m sure I haven’t sent anything that could be regarded as spam, and nothing on my machine is infected, either. What’s more, anything that takes over a machine will probably use the accounts as configured to send out the mail, so I’m not at all sure why port 587 would be an advantage over port 25. It seems to me like the kind of decision that leads to a lot of user frustration and a lot of tech-support calls.

And, of course, if instead of finding those alternative port numbers for my other accounts, I had set my outgoing mail server to smtp.comcast.net on port 587, many recipients would reject it because of authentication problems, since a return address that doesn’t match the mail server’s domain is one of the indications that a message is spam.

Something to watch out for when you sign up with a new web host: do they provide an alternative to port 25? Because it’s not often we can avoid signing on with companies like Comcast that choose to block our basic communications.

Technorati Tags: Comcast

Undelete 2009—Nice Theory, but No Substitute for Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-28-08

2008-11-28T12:43:00.001-08:00

Some weeks ago I was approached by Diskeeper and asked to review two products: Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier and Undelete Professional 2009. I’ll talk a bit more about Diskeeper and how defragmentation relates to backups in a future Backup Reminder. Today’s subject is Undelete.

The first thing Undelete asks you when you install it is whether you have any files that you need to recover right now using the Emergency Undelete function. (You can make an Emergency Undelete CD for this, too.) I actually did, and said “Yes” to test it.

I’d accidentally dragged “My Received Podcasts” (containing a number of MP3 files in subfolders) into “My Pictures” by accident, gotten confused because Windows Explorer hadn’t caught up to it, and deleted the podcast folder from the pictures folder instead of dragging it back where it was supposed to be. Only the next day did I discover the problem, and I’d already emptied the trash.

Emergency Undelete managed to partially recover most of the files, but a partially-recovered MP3 file isn’t much good. Fortunately, all I had to do was download them again. Knowing I can get another copy easily is why I don’t include the “My Received Podcasts” folder in my regular backups.

Undelete replaces your Recycle Bin with a Recovery Bin. You might wonder why you would need one, since your computer already has a Recycle Bin (Windows) or Trash (Mac) from which you can retrieve things if you decide you don’t really want to get rid of them. The Recovery Bin is more sophisticated, and designed to allow you to restore your whole file, not just part of it. But it’s not immediately intuitive; this is a program where it’s a good idea to read the manual.

The Diskeeper website has a handy chart comparing Undelete to backup software. Naturally, it’s designed to favor Undelete. What it never mentions is the fact that Undelete guards against one cause of data loss—human error—and doesn’t do anything to protect you from drive failure, at least when the drive that fails is the same one on which you’ve installed Undelete. (By default, Undelete creates Recovery Bins on all your attached drives, though it didn’t seem to notice my network drives, or at any rate to show them with the rest.) Nor, of course, will it get your files off-site in the event of a fire or other natural disaster. And I don’t know that it really does much of anything with files you haven’t deleted.

If you understand those limitations, however, there’s still potential for Undelete to be useful to you. One interesting new feature is the SecureDelete® function, which lets you completely wipe files away (so that even Undelete can’t retrieve them, presumably). That might have some value if you deal with sensitive data or are preparing to give your machine away and want to remove all traces of yourself from it.

I had problems with Undelete that went beyond the need to RTFM, however. On fairly frequent but unpredictable occasions, Undelete would start to suck up 90% or more of my CPU. That meant I couldn’t use any other software, and there was no way to turn it off. (I could attempt to stop the UdServe.exe process from within Task Manager, but the darn thing wouldn’t stay off.)

Tech support at Diskeeper attempted to help me with this, and seemed to think it might have something to do with the InvisiTasking function in both Undelete and Diskeeper. They talked me through running “CACLS * /e /t /c /g Administrators:F System:F” from the command line. Don’t ask me what exactly that means, because I never understood DOS, but it has something to do with file permissions and open file support. (You can check the Wikipedia entry if you’re interested.)

I kept running into problems with that, most of which reminded me just how badly I need to reinstall this computer, because the errors frequently occurred in files relating to programs I no longer have installed. But I did finally manage to get it run on most of the C drive, and at first it seemed to help somewhat.

By the next day, or at most two days, the problem was back, just as serious as before. At that point, I gave up and uninstalled Undelete, and I’ve been deleting the Recovery Bin folders from my other drives as I discover them lurking. The whole thing was a frustrating enough experience that I don’t even feel especially guilty about writing a bad review, though I do want to stress that the employees at Diskeeper did their best to be helpful. Whatever the root cause of the problem, it isn’t customer service.

And I don’t really think I can put this one down to the anomalies that seem to come up when I test backup software, because the Ur-Guru reported similar problems with earlier versions of Undelete some years back.

Even if it had worked perfectly, however, I would still reach the same conclusions. When it works, Undelete Pro 2009 can be a useful supplement to backups, but not a substitute. The truth is that most of the time, when we delete a file, we do it on purpose. And human error only accounts for 12% of data loss, according to a recent survey of data recovery companies. (An earlier study put it at 29%, but that’s still a long way from 100%.)

So if you’re prone to deleting the wrong file, you might want to try Undelete 2009. (You can fill out a profile and get a free trial.) But get a backup system put in place first.

Even My Printer Backs Up: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-21-08

2008-11-21T14:36:00.000-08:00

Things have been just a trifle busy here at FileSlinger™ Central lately. Not that this is really an excuse for not producing a Backup Reminder last week and being late with this week’s, but it’s the best I’ve got. I hope you remembered to back up anyway.

The web hosting account for FileSlinger.com was due to expire on November 18th, and I decided that rather than renew my account with iPowerWeb, I would move the domain and the site over to GoDaddy. I was happy with iPower for years, and I will say that they were quite reliable in terms of uptime. But I had a couple of different issues with them.

First, they didn’t allow hosting more than one domain on the same account, which many similarly-priced hosts do. (GoDaddy does, and so does DreamHost, where the Podcast Asylum site lives—as does the Ur-Guru’s world-famous home office.)

Second, while domain registration is supposed to be bundled into the hosting account, and renewal is supposed to be automatic—this year it wasn’t. I had to pay extra to renew the domain, and I had to do it manually.

And then they raised the price.

So enough was enough. I signed up for a domain transfer and hosting account with GoDaddy, where I have three domains registered already. (Two of them don’t have websites yet.)

I backed up the contents of my website onto my hard drive and began the transfer process. It appeared to be working fine. Unlike my previous hosting company, Web750 (about which the less said, the better—for them), iPower made no attempt to hold my domain hostage or make me pay an extra fee for moving it. They were very cooperative, for which I give them credit, because switching hosts is difficult if the old host doesn’t want to let go of your domain.

While it was very simple to move the contents of my website over, and the domain transfer appeared to be complete, for some reason the fileslinger.com domain wasn’t resolving. As far as the rest of the Internet was concerned, the domain didn’t exist. So of course all mail addressed to my fileslinger.com accounts bounced (leading to panic among some of my friends), and no one could visit my website.

Note to self: do not switch domain registrars the day before you’re supposed to come out with a backup reminder.

When I alerted GoDaddy support to the problem, they fixed it right away. In fact, they helped me solve another problem without saying “RTFM,” which they had every right to do. (For those who have not encountered that initialism, it stands for “Read The Freaking Manual.” Less polite terms also starting with “F” may be substituted.)

By the time that got taken care of, it was Monday and I had clients to deal with, as well as resuming a discussion with Diskeeper support about the product I’d planned to write my next Reminder about. And setting up my new printer.

My beloved Epson Stylus Photo 1280 had finally reached an intolerable level of unreliability. After it left streaks all over my niece’s birthday card, I ordered an Artisan 800 all-in-one. Beautiful machine, even though the ink charger sounds like something out of Star Trek. I’ve been adjusting its settings and testing out its capacities (like printing on CDs).

And I came across a setting I certainly didn’t expect to see on a printer: “Back Up Data.” Huh? I thought. What data? Printers do have memory in them—to allow for background printing—but they don’t normally store data.

The data that’s on your Compact Flash or Smart Card, that’s what data. There are two card-reader slots on the Artisan, and a USB port, as well. So without ever turning on your computer, you can not only print your photos, but back them up onto an external hard drive. This may be faster than transferring them onto your computer first, though it does mean there’s one less copy.

I haven’t tested this feature, in part because all my USB hard drives are connected elsewhere—except Vesta the Vault, and I’m not sure I could enter the password directly from the Artisan’s control panel. (And if I can’t, it will probably blow up or something, because the darn thing is classified as a weapon.) It appears to be a quite straightforward process, however, though many users may only discover it by accident, as I did.

In any case, I’m delighted to know that Epson has backups on the mind, and I’ll be back next week with more backup news.

Technorati Tags: Artisan 800,iPowerWeb,GoDaddy,Web 750,Buffalo MiniStation DataVault

Twice as Fast May Be Fast Enough for Memeo: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-07-08

2008-11-07T14:06:00.001-08:00

Once in a while when I test a backup product for this Reminder, I get anomalous results. The anomaly usually takes the form of bizarrely slow performance. The causes are hard to pinpoint, but my chief suspect is conflicts with existing backup software, especially those that support open and locked files, or with some other background program. I seem to have an inordinately large number of programs and processes running in the background at any given time, from Skype to SyncBack.

Back in May when my BFF Jay Pechek gave me the Buffalo LinkStation Mini and the MiniStation DataVault, both drives came with Memeo AutoBackup.

Memeo is the kind of company you want to like. Its history is rather like that of Spare Backup. According to the bio provided to me by Memeo’s helpful PR representative in response to my July request on HARO, Memeo CEO and Co-founder Hong Bui was inspired to develop backup software because of a particularly egregious data loss experience:

“A TSA guard at the airport dropped Bui’s laptop as he went through the security checkpoint. It fell apart and he lost everything. As a passionate software developer, Bui immediately wanted to solve the problem of media management and identified three use cases that encompass the digital life: backup, sync and share. As we continue our transition to an entirely digital world, Bui is leading the development of products that allow people to make this jump seamlessly by protecting content, syncing it to multiple locations for ease of use and seamlessly sharing media with friends and family.”

Despite being a geek himself, Bui managed to create a product that’s easy to install and easy to use. I’m pretty sure Memeo is the only backup program I’ve used that specifically backs up to an iPod. It also lets you keep more than one version of a file, something that my main file backup tools, Karen’s Replicator and SyncBack Freeware, don’t. (Ooh. I just noticed there’s a new version of Replicator. Pardon me a minute while I download and install it…)

Since there was no need to duplicate any of the backups I already had in place, I set up a backup of my D drive (the second internal hard drive, which acts as a first backup for my client data) to the new network drive.

And had one of those anomalous experiences. It took five days to back up somewhere under 80 GB of data—and that’s five days of leaving the computer running all night. And though subsequent backups (performed when data is updated, as well as on start-up) were much faster, that seemed unreasonable.

Since I hate writing negative reviews, I was hesitant to talk about this. Besides, I was waiting to hear from the Memeo support team, but nothing developed until recently. In fact, I had just about decided to uninstall Memeo, which I was no longer using (it seemed to interfere with performance if I left it running). But a week or so ago the abovementioned helpful PR person connected me with an equally helpful Memeo support person, who asked me to send him the log files and recommended that I download the newest version of Memeo. Apparently the development team has nicknamed it “AutoBackup Accelerator” because it’s twice as fast as the version that shipped in May.

Installing the new version of AutoBackup was simple. Setting up my new test backup plan was a bit more challenging. Memeo’s backup configuration wizard automatically excludes external hard drives as sources for files to back up. Without the exclusions, Memeo’s “Smart backup” by file type could create a real mess: imagine what would happen if you tried to back up your source and destination drives simultaneously.

But I wanted to back up a USB drive, and not just to be difficult. When I start up my computer, Replicator copies all the files that have changed since the last startup to the F drive (the Seagate FreeAgent Go drive, now named Freya). But an external hard drive can fail just as easily as an internal hard drive, and I wanted to be sure that all the data on Freya got backed up to the Buffalo LinkStation Mini (Lachesis, because it’s mapped to drive letter “L”). It turned out that I not only had to remove the F drive from the exclusion list in the new backup plan I was creating, but to remove it from the older backup plans. I ended up deleting the older backup plans.

This time I was backing up slightly more data—about 93 GB instead of 70-some. And instead of being copied from my internal hard drive, the data had to move through the USB cable from Freya through my laptop’s CPU and then through the network onto the NAS drive. I assumed that would slow things down a bit, and that the average user backing up her C drive to a USB 2.0 hi-speed drive would get a faster backup time.

Nevertheless, the current version of Memeo lived up to its promise of being twice as fast. The initial backup required only three days, and that only during working hours, since I didn’t leave the computer running overnight. Memeo seemed quite happy to have me shut down in the middle of the backup without having to start over at the beginning when I rebooted.

I’ve decided not only to continue using Memeo, but to leave it set to start up when Windows does, which it does by default. The idea behind having Memeo start with Windows and run in the background is to provide continuous data protection. Since the data on Freya only changes when Replicator runs (or when I manually copy a file to it), there’s no real need to have Memeo running in the background all day. I let it start up and update the backup (it doesn’t seem to cause any problems with the function of Replicator, which also runs at startup), and then shut it down.

And while this is not quite what the AutoBackup team had in mind when they designed the program, it’s working just fine.

Technorati Tags: Memeo AutoBackup,Karen's Replicator,SyncBack,FreeAgent Go,Buffalo Linkstation

Why Caroline Chose BackUPMax over Mozy: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-31-08

2008-10-31T06:54:00.001-07:00

Today’s Backup Reminder comes courtesy of Caroline Xerxes, who posted a comment to the Backup Blog asking us to cover BackUPMax. (Apparently there are two spellings of this: the personal version is BackUPMax and the business version is BackUPMAX.) She explained that she’d switched to them after problems with Mozy.

Since I’d never actually heard of BackUPMax, I invited her to write the review herself, and here it is.

I used to be a customer of Mozy. However, after months of poor customer service and virtually non-existent technical support, I decided it was time to look for another solution for my data backup needs.

After some digging, I found a company called BackUPMax. They are a technology partner of Remote Backup Systems, a company in business since 1987, the largest distributors of online backup software in the world, and the original founders of online data backup. Their pricing was reasonable for the features I was looking for (less than five bucks a month), and I liked the look and feel far better than Carbonite and iDrive, which I also considered. So, I downloaded their free trial.

The software turned out to be extremely user-friendly and versatile. Accounting data, pictures, word documents, spreadsheets… It backed up everything I needed it to, and the software does not have a cap set on individual file size. They don’t allow backup of music or movies yet, but they say it’s on the agenda. It even backs up open and locked files. Since it does not require configuration of Windows VSS, it will back up open files on any Windows system, regardless of whether the system is NTFS or FAT32.

Once you’ve got everything set up the way you like it, the backups run automatically with no interference from you. They use military-grade 448-bit encryption, so no one can see your files but you. A 128-256-bit SSL is used to protect your files during transmission to their two different data centers.

I really like their restore interface, as well; you can restore a file using the BackUPMAX software itself or from another computer using their web interface. (It stores up to three different versions for a full 45 days; you can choose one of the three, or just select “show most recent version.”) Since the software will run on both Windows and Macintosh machines, you can restore a file to a PC that you originally backed up from your Mac.

BackUPMAX also offers something neither Mozy nor Carbonite offer: the Security Suite. If your laptop is stolen, you can log into the BackUPMAX website from any computer to activate any of the options included. It can use the computer’s onboard webcam to take pictures and record video/audio of the thief, halt all BackUPMAX operations, send details of the networks it has connected to, or even shred the hard drive so the thief can’t access your data. There is also a geo-location function that can help pinpoint the location of your laptop without a GPS, using only your laptop’s built-in network card.

BackUPMAX also provides a business edition, for the backup and restore of Windows Server operating systems, as well as SQL and Exchange servers.

All in all, this software provided everything Mozy does and then some, for the same price. The customer support is fabulous, the technical support team is responsive and knowledgeable, and I get the security and reliability I wanted from an online backup service. Needless to say, I am now a paying customer.

If you have a favorite backup product that you’d like to write about, send your review (along with your contact information) to sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.

Technorati Tags: BackUPMax,Mozy

Who Wants to Review Backup Software? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-24-08

2008-10-24T08:32:00.000-07:00

Yes, I was bad. I missed last week’s Backup Reminder. It’s those pesky clients again.

I did want to mention that last week I had the opportunity to visit United Layer’s data center in San Francisco, and was impressed. For most SOHO users, colocation (that means paying someone to store, power, and maintain your computer hardware in a secure location) is overkill. Even the Ur-Guru hasn’t seriously considered it, though when he heard about the megawattage going into the building, he was tempted to move his whole office there.

But if you use an online backup service, chances are they rent space in a data center like United Layer’s. If it’s possible, you might want to inspect the data center before committing yourself to an online backup service or a web host. Even in a building with uniformly controlled power supplies, temperature, and security, some setups are better than others. Do you really want to entrust your data to people who set up their server racks haphazardly, leaving the network cables hanging over the hot air vents to form a fire hazard? Maybe not.

So that’s the summary version of what I was going to write last week.

This week it occurred to me that my Faithful Readers might be able to help me deal with the backlog of backup software makers and service providers who want their products or services reviewed on this blog. If these hapless people have to wait for me to investigate all of them, it’s going to be a long time before anything gets reviewed. So I thought I’d list them and see whether anyone wanted to try one out and write a review of it. In some cases, you get a free copy of the product for indefinite use; in others just a trial version. If you see something you like, e-mail me at sallie[at]fileslinger[dot]com and I’ll get you set up.

Backup Software in Search of Reviewers

(In roughly the order that the companies or their PR people requested the reviews.)

SugarSync, “a web-based backup, storage and synchronization software/service from Sharpcast. SugarSync gives people an easy and simple way to keep their digital media and files automatically in sync across multiple computers, backed up online and remotely accessible from their mobile phones or through any web browser. A one-time download is all it takes to make sure your information is securely stored and always accessible.”
Multiply “gives users a comprehensive solution for sharing and discussing their personal media while providing peace of mind by automatically backing up valuable content in its original high resolution. While other social networking sites typically only save low-resolution copies of photos or grainy, flash-converted versions of videos, Multiply Premium users will have the confidence of knowing that their media is being backed up automatically, and archived in their original highest resolution.”
Memeo AutoBackup (PC) or Memeo LifeAgent (Mac). This software now ships with all of Buffalo’s consumer drives. I have used it, but don’t feel I should be the one to write about it, because I had a strange experience with it. (It was unnaturally slow, something perhaps caused by interference from one of my numerous other backup programs, and I think an honest description of my experience would be unfair to Memeo.)
FileEngine, “the only server that includes everything for less than $8/day.” This is actual hardware, a server in a bright red case that you rent for your company to use. “FileEngine includes standard installation, monitoring, maintenance, unlimited support, unlimited users, remote administration and an integrated backup & disaster recovery solution.” It actually sounds pretty cool. I’m not sure I need a server for my two-person, three-computer network, but if you have a small office and keep files on a central server—or you want to—you could be a good candidate for this product. For those who don’t know, buying your own server runs about $10,000, and of course any support would be extra, so it does seem like a reasonable deal. ($8 x 365 days is $2920, a veritable pittance.) I am actually quite curious about this one.
PutPlace, “a new way to think about backup. We back up all your content on all your PCs to a single place, with automatic duplicate elimination at our back end so you only pay for a single copy of all your unique data. So no more paying for 4 copies of the same set of iTunes on 4 PCs.”
Elephant Drive, “unlimited online backup and storage. It’s very big, it never forgets, and it works for peanuts.” They have a blog full of customer testimonials and other useful information. There’s a home version and a business version, and you can get 1 GB of storage for free.
Titan Backup. I have the installation program and reviewer key for this one. I was thinking of testing it on my mother’s computer, but didn’t have time. (How about it, Mom? Want to try Titan?) The marketing manager has offered an impressive discount to readers of this e-zine/blog. Titan’s clients include Johnson & Johnson, the DEA, and the Hong Kong Police. The program’s feature list is pretty impressive, and I might in fact want to try it myself to compare its performance on my overloaded machine with that of Memeo.
VisionWorks’ NullFTPClient and NullFTPServer. Both come in Free and Pro flavors. Strictly speaking, these are file transfer tools, not backup tools, but you can use them for manual backups over the Internet. Is there anybody out there not already wedded to a particular FTP client? Or maybe you want to set up an FTP server so you can exchange large files with a client. Step right up and claim your review copy.
Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier and Undelete 2009 Professional Edition. Diskeeper is “most known for speeding up PCs with defrag software.” Seriously effective defrag software, not the basic version that comes with Windows. Undelete does what it says—recovers files that you’ve deleted. Actually, given the performance issues I’ve had lately with Enna, maybe I should handle Diskeeper myself. But I bet one of you out there who has hit the “Empty Trash” button too soon and lost something important would like to try out Undelete 2009!

Wow. There’s some really cool stuff there. (Well, it’s cool if you’re into backup, anyway.) For writing a clear, honest, and thorough review, you get the same payoff I would: a free copy of/license for the product, either permanently or temporarily, and in many cases, a chance to interview the CEO or another prominently placed person at the company if you want some background information. So…any takers?

Technorati Tags: Diskeeper 2008,Undelete 2009,NullFTPClient,NullFTPServer,Titan Backup,Memeo AutoBackup,ElephantDrive,PutPlace,SugarSync,Multiply,United Layer

Special Offer on Mozy Home Unlimited Ends 10/21/2008

2008-10-20T09:46:00.001-07:00

If you’re thinking of signing up for Mozy Home Unlimited (the $4.95/month plan for Mac and PC users), now is probably the time to do it. In honor of Apple’s new product launch, Mozy decided to offer a 20% discount on Mozy subscriptions—even if you didn’t buy a new MacBook. (And yes, even if you use Windows; I checked.)

To get your discount, sign up for Mozy Home Unlimited by tomorrow and enter the code “CelebrateApple” in the discount code box.

Technorati Tags: Mozy Home

Mac Backup Tips from Howard Greenstein: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-10-08

2008-10-11T14:29:00.001-07:00

This week’s backup reminder comes to you from Howard Greenstein, one of the many who answered my call on HARO in July. Howard is a Social Media Strategist and President of the Harbrooke Group. He’s been blogging for more than 10 years—which means he used to do it all manually, back before there were blog engines like Blogger and WordPress—and he recently started a blogging column at Inc Magazine’s Startup Blog, where he helps small business understand technologies they can use to better market their businesses. He’s hoping that the advice below will save someone a headache in the future.

Backing Up your Mac

As a small business owner with a laptop Mac, my business travels with me wherever I go. That is both convenient and dangerous. It is great to have all my mail, presentations and files at whatever client location or conference I happen to be at on any given day, but dicey to realize that I’m one cup of spilled coffee away from losing all my data. So, I’ve set up a few ways of ensuring that even if my MacBook goes south on me, I have a way to recover everything that’s important to me with just a few nail-biting hours of time. As a Mac owner, there are several choices, ranging from “free” to a few dollars a month for a service to a couple of bucks for purchase of backup software. I’ll review a few choices I’ve made, and reference others that are available for readers to pursue.

Back to the Future

Apple’s OS X 10.5 introduced Time Machine, a built-in way to store not only a copy of your hard disk data, but multiple copies, each from a different day or week. While Time Machine is a great utility for keeping a ’running backup’ of your disk, you may need a large amount of storage space. Each time a copy of a changed file is saved, it takes up more disk space. I bought a Western Digital My Book 1 TB drive to use partially as a Time Machine backup disk. My Mac has a 160GB drive, and about 135GB is used. I have Time Machine Backups going back 5 months, and I’m currently using 270GB of the 360GB I allocated in a hard disk partition to back up drive.

Time Machine is easy to use - set it and forget it. You turn it on, tell it which hard disk to use for backups, and every hour the Mac will check for changed files and back them up. Time machine keeps more files from the last few days, and check points for each week going back as far as it can before it runs out of room.

To restore, just go back to the right time in your “history” (see the diagram), click the file to restore, and hit the big “Restore” button. One downside of Time Machine is that it is not a bootable copy of your data. So, if your hard disk breaks, but the rest of your Mac is working, you can’t just boot up and get back to work. But there are several programs that will allow that.

I think I’m a clone now...

I’ve used two different programs over the past few years to create bootable, exact copies of my hard disk. Both effectively “clone” your hard disk to another disk, making the copy almost indistinguishable from your current drive. One is Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich software. CCC version 3.1.1 is Donation-Ware, so it is free for you to try. I used it for several months with good results, but for some reason, about the time that Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) was released, I switched to Super Duper from Shirt-Pocket software. Super Duper also has a free version that will make an exact copy of your disk. For $27.95 you get an upgrade that allows “smart updating”—in other words, the backup program only copies the files that have changed, making your exact backup fast and efficient.

On another partition of that 1TB drive I bought, I created a space slightly larger than the 135GB hard disk, and I run Super Duper weekly to make an exact copy of my hard drive. Once the initial copy was made, each “smart update” takes an hour or so. Every Sunday night, Super Duper turns on and automatically runs that process. In the morning I have an exact copy of my drive. If you want an all-in-one drive plus wireless access point solution, Apple’s Time Capsule is an easy to purchase, set up and forget solution.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an iMac...

Recently, my 1 TB drive had some sort of glitch, and I got worried about its reliability. I couldn’t see the drives on the desktop, but Disk Utility saw the drive as empty—no partitions. Long story short, I bought ProSoft Engineering’s Data Rescue II over the net, downloaded it, and copied a bunch of data from the 3rd partition on my 1TB drive. Somehow all the checking of the disk “brought it back,” but I still wasn’t satisfied.

I took two steps to ensure my data would be safe. The first was getting a second large hard disk, and making another Super Duper backup. (The drive actually came courtesy of Blogger Robert Scoble, who held a contest with Seagate in NY’s Times Square, and I was one of several lucky winners. I consider it fate that I won a drive the same week my other drive went flaky—don’t let this happen to you!) I use this drive once a week in the middle of the week to make a Super Duper copy, so now I’m never more than 3 days away from an exact copy of my data.

Put it in the cloud

The second thing I did was look into online backup solutions. Even though I have 2 exact copies of my hard disk now, they’re both still in my home office. If I had a fire or theft; I’d be very much out of luck for backups or a computer. A friend had recommended Mozy, which is a service from storage vendor EMC. Mozy is a small download that you install, and it searches your drive to show you files you can back up.

You can select your Documents folder, or only Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents, for example. The free backup holds only 2GB, which is fine for many people. If you want to back up more than 2 GB of data, say the 17.3 GB of iTunes I have in the picture, Mozy allows unlimited data storage for $4.95 a month. Yes, UNLIMITED, for HOME users. If you’re a business, you’re supposed to use Mozy Pro, which is $3.95 a month plus $.50 per Gigabyte for a desktop, $6.95 + .50/GB for a server. For those of you playing along, that would be about $55.00 a month for my 135 GB hard disk, assuming I backed up about 100GB (and not system files or programs). So, for Mozy’s purposes, I’m a home user. (Also, there’s no final version of Mozy Pro for Mac yet, only for PC, so I’m not feeling guilty here).

I find that Mozy, on my Cable Modem, seems to upload about 1.0 Mbits/second, so the initial upload will take several days. Then, at night or when my computer is idle, Mozy will update any changed files so I always have a good copy of data “in the cloud.”

There are other online backup solutions, including Sugar Sync which promises you not only backup, but access to your files (such as your music) from any computer with a browser or to some files via your iPhone. The 100GB I’d like to back up would cost $14.99/month from Sugar Sync. Since I don’t need that kind of access, I’m not using it, but it has been well reviewed and for those who want any time/any place access to files, Sugar Sync could be well worth it.

Mac and Me

Another choice for online storage is the old .Mac account, now known as Mobile Me, which allows backup and sync between several computers. It also allows access to files via browser wherever you are. It also provides an email account that can be accessed from many devices, or via browser. A 20GB storage plan, enough for most people, is $99/year.

Other tips and tricks

There are other things you can do to keep your data safe and secure, and out of the house or office. You can upload all your contact data to Plaxo, which will sync with your Mac’s address book and provide a convenient online storage for that data. If your contacts are on Plaxo and they change their information, your address book gets the updated information automatically. Gmail from Google lets you store up to 7GB of email on their servers for free. Using the IMAP protocol, you can get that mail on your desktop or in a browser, and the online mail is always up to date. It is an excellent way to keep your mail backed up. Google also allows you to store documents in Google Docs, which can be edited and shared. If you need more room for mail and documents, you can even run a small company on Google Apps for Domains. As a small business, I have 2 accounts for $100 a year, and that gives me 25GB of mail and documents.

To store your photos, Google’s Picasa allows you to upload several GB of photos from iPhoto. Yahoo’s Flickr.com Pro service allows unlimited storage of photos, and sharing with friends, for only $24.95 a year. Your first 100MB of photos are free.

One other sharing solution is DropBox - you can sync files between multiple computers and access the information online. 5GB of file storage is free, so you could consider dropping some critical files and have them stored on your brother’s hard disk, and have his stuff on yours, or save files between your work and home computers. It works on Mac or PC.

There’s no excuse to lose files with all these choices. The only thing keeping you from being fully backed up is a few dollars, and inertia. But nothing’s a harsher lesson than figuring out what is and what isn’t backed up when a hard disk fails.

Thanks to Howard for that ounce (or two) of prevention for Mac users. Almost any backup solution costs less than losing your data. And I have tons more of them to write about in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Super Duper,Carbon Copy Cloner,Time Machine,Time Capsule,DropBox,SugarSync,Google Apps,Picasa,Flickr,Seagate,Mozy,Mobile Me,Harbrooke Group,howardgr,Howard Greenstein

Stupid Outlook Tricks: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-03-08

2008-10-05T18:09:00.001-07:00

What I really need is a set of backup vocal cords. I was planning to do some recording this week, and what happens? I have laryngitis, with added coughing. Even if it didn’t hurt to say more than a few words at a time, I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to the squawking.

There are lots of text-to-speech programs out there, but I don’t want to subject anyone to them, either. After all, synthetic voices make people think of voicemail systems, which brings out hostility and frustration.

But sometimes it really would be nice to be able to swap out body parts the way one does computer component. (This from someone too squeamish even to get her ears pierced, never mind have electronics implanted for anything not life-threatening.)

My brain is not at its most focused right now, but I’ve read four novels since yesterday morning and even a sick person can only sleep for so long. I am, therefore, writing a backup reminder, even if it’s a trifle lame.

Last time I checked, the most common cause of data loss was still human error. Though the “undo” command can save us from those mistakes we recognize right away, we don’t always realize that we’ve deleted the newer version of the file instead of the old one, or whatever.

There was a time, right about when Windows 95 came out and the Mac ceased to be the world’s only user-patronizing computer, that I got really fed up with those “Are you sure you want to send that file to the recycle bin?” messages. I found out how to bypass the recycle bin and send files into oblivion. (At the time I was oblivious, myself, to the reality that a lot of deleted files can be recovered if the drive hasn’t been reformatted.)

I didn’t have a cat walking across my keyboard then, and my mental response to the dialog box was “Of course I want to delete it. Why else would I press the delete key?”

Naturally there came a day when I deleted something by accident and regretted it. It wasn’t a total disaster, but I decided to turn the Recycle Bin on again after that.

And then there’s e-mail. Time was, you always read your e-mail on the server via Telnet, because there wasn’t another way to get to it. But these days, most people use a POP e-mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird that copies their messages onto their hard drives.

In most cases, when the e-mail client finishes copying the messages, they get deleted from the server. But you can tell your e-mail client to leave messages on the server so that you can access them from another computer—or retrieve them if you’re a little too quick to hit the “delete” key.

I have most of my accounts set to leave my messages on the server for 3 days after I download them to my main computer. That generally gives me enough time to check them from elsewhere, if for some reason I need to get to those messages when I don’t have Enna with me.

You can decide how long to leave messages on the server. I don’t recommend leaving them there indefinitely, especially if you get a lot of mail, because you’re likely to fill up the quota your ISP gives you, or at least slow everything down. (And anyway, most of what’s left up there will be spam, and why keep that around?) If you’re planning to go on a long trip, you might want to set the length of time to match the length of your trip, but otherwise, you probably don’t need to keep messages on the server more than 7 days.

If you’re going to leave the mail on the server as a backup, however, you need to make sure not to check the box that says “Remove from server when emptied from deleted items” (or whatever the equivalent phrase is for your preferred e-mail client). Because then, if you delete a message by accident while clearing out the spam that makes it past the junk mail filters and don’t realize what you’ve done until later, you’re out of luck. I learned this the hard way just recently—twice, in fact.

It doesn’t look too professional to have to say “Sorry, I deleted your message before I could read it—can you send it again?” Especially when you’re supposed to be a backup maven.

And, speaking of e-mail, if anyone has experience with Outlook synchronization programs like PSTsync, SynchPST, and Easy2Sync, I’d love to hear about it.

Technorati Tags: Outlook backup

Backing Up My Mom: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-26-08

2008-09-28T15:28:00.001-07:00

My mother came to visit last week and we engaged in Extreme Tourism. (Example: at the time I normally write this reminder, we were catching a helicopter for a tour of the Bay Area.)

The last time my mother had a computer was in 1999. It ran Windows 98. She used it for (CompuServe) e-mail and not much else, and ended up giving it to her uncle—who actually still has it, and still uses it.

Mom got an older Acer laptop a few months ago, and uses it for web browsing and Yahoo! mail. She’s started saving her bookmarks to Yahoo! as well, instead of inside her browser. When you’re essentially operating “in the cloud,” and have no local data to speak of, you don’t really need to back up your C drive.

One thing about Extreme Tourism, though: it tends to result in a lot of photographs. (Not to mention blisters, sunburn, and sore muscles, but those have nothing to do with backups.) I had my Aiptek HD video camera, which is also an 8-megapixel still camera, and Mom had my sister-in-law’s Canon PowerShot, which worked pretty well in spite of her complete unfamiliarity with it. We both had plenty of photos to offload in the course of our travels.

I copied all of them to my computer initially and waited until I’d backed them up to at least one place before deleting them from their respective memory cards. One copy is never enough.

I then put all the photos—about 1.5 GB of them—onto a memory stick and transferred them onto Mom’s computer. This meant she had something to back up.

So I installed a free online backup service for her. If she keeps taking pictures, or starts downloading those dressage videos she watches on YouTube, she’s going to need more than the 2 GB quota pretty soon, but for now, it’s enough.

And it will back up automatically when the computer is idle, which means Mom doesn’t have to remember to do the backups herself, or have the computer on at a particular time of day. My own online backup operates on a schedule basis, but I almost always have my computer on by 8 AM, and the online backup is third or fourth in the sequence of redundancy.

Mozy estimated that the initial backup would take 6 hours. As Mom had a plane to catch much sooner than that, we postponed the initial backup until she got home. And when Mom first turned her machine on, she got an error message about Mozy.

She called me immediately, of course, which is what she usually does when she’s having problems with her computer. Because Mom hasn’t use a computer since the days of Windows 98, and didn’t use it much then, she isn’t familiar with terminology like “taskbar” and “system tray” and “desktop.” That makes it hard for her to explain, and for me to understand, what exactly is wrong.

Grammar Girl will be delighted to know that even before installing the backup program, I set up GoToMyPC on my mother’s computer. In fact, I did it while in a hotel room in Monterey. GoToMyPC is basically an easy-to-use version of UltraVNC, which I used to use sometimes in order to see what was on a client’s screen, back when I was foolish enough to do computer consulting for a living. So now—or at least for the duration of the free trial, after which I have to decide whether it’s worth $20/month, I can see what Mom is talking about, and even fix it. (Hmm. I suppose I could use GoToMyPC to install and configure UltraVNC on Mom’s machine…)

So I logged in to Mom’s computer and took a look. By the time I got around to doing this (a good two or three hours after Mom’s phone call), this is what I saw:

Whatever that error message meant, clearly it wasn’t preventing the backup from functioning, and Mom just e-mailed me to say the backup was complete.

I confess I’m more excited about the ability to access my mother’s computer than about the online backup. I suppose you could consider GoToMyPC a backup tool, in that it provides you with a whole backup computer at need—and lets you get copies of files you forgot or deleted or that have become corrupted.

It’s probably more accurate to say that my mother and I are acting as backups for each other, since each of us now has a copy of both sets of photos. (Well, I have several copies, but her copy definitely counts as offsite backup.) Which makes me think, as did my headline, of CrashPlan, the social backup tool. In fact, if I’d thought of it sooner, I might have installed that instead of Mozy.

But then Mom’s backups would rely on access to my computer, and since my C drive is fairly full, she’d actually need access to one of my external or network drives. And while I am at home, online, and connected to those drives fairly often, I do take this monster heavyweight Pavilion dv8040 out with me sometimes, and I do turn it off at night, and Mom is three time zones away. Better she should have an always-on backup location.

The question to get you thinking until next week is: what kind of backup plan does your mother have? And when did she last back up her photos of her grandchildren?

Technorati Tags: Mozy Home,CrashPlan,GoToMyPC

Tracey’s Time Capsule Story: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-19-08

2008-09-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

This week’s Backup Reminder comes to us from Tracey Franks of Words and Money. Like me, Tracey is a professional writer. Unlike me, she’s an expert on finance. She’s also a Mac user—a recent convert. Since I know that some of my most loyal readers have Macs, I like to include Mac-backup stories whenever I can.

And since I have about a zillion things to do before my mother arrives tomorrow, I’m grateful to have a guest post to offer you.

For some reason I’ve always considered myself to have good computer Karma. Everyone else seemed to have a nightmare come true about losing data or experiencing “the black screen of death.” Even though I had heard plenty of these stories from friends, I never experienced anything like that. Sure, I’d had some freeze ups or forgotten to save a document properly, but I never really lost control of my technology life.

Backing up work is important for everyone, but particularly when you write and edit for a living. The problem is that when I’m deep in concentration on a project, I forget to back up or don’t do it nearly as often as I should. Ideally, I need a backup secretary to just do it for me so I don’t have to think about it. The Tech Guy who comes to my house, and saves me from entering technology hell, always preaches the importance of a backup system. Yeah, I know, but that stuff happens to other people because it’s never happened to me. And off I go back to my corner of denial.

A corporate client had given me a large project that I was working on one morning when my computer Karma ran out. My trusted Sony Vaio had been trying to give me signals for weeks that its hard drive wasn’t feeling well. Like a bad parent, I ignored the signs of impending illness thinking “this too shall pass.” Besides, we’d had a good six year run together without a single problem.

Finishing a piece of the project, I reached for my thumb drive to back it up and then it happened to me...the black screen of death. I’m fairly certain my neighbors could hear the guttural scream that came from somewhere within my body. I reached for the phone and called Tech Guy, begging him to drop everything and recover my work from the bowels of the Sony Vaio. My deadline with the client was hours away.

“Did you back it up?” he asked.

“Um, sort of. Well, some of it,” I replied.

I felt like a little kid who just did something I wasn’t supposed to do, and so I braced myself for the lecture. Tech Guy didn’t give me a lecture, but he did come over and retrieve what I needed to make my deadline. Then we talked about how to get my computer Karma back.

A visit to the Apple Store not only sold me on the iMac with the 20-inch screen for my 45-year-old eyes, but also on their version of a backup secretary, the Time Capsule/Time Machine. It works with both Macs and PCs, so there’s no reason why everyone can’t use one of these wonders. This little white box backs up everything on the hard drives of my iMac and my Powerbook G4 every hour, which is probably an hour more often than I was backing up my work. It also serves as a wireless router so I can work anywhere in my house, and even outside in the backyard if I choose to.

When I hear the quiet hum of the Time Capsule entering its backup mode, I feel a sense of relief that Big Brother is watching over me. It’s so quiet that one day I shut down my iMac right in the middle of a backup. When I realized what I had done, I grabbed the manual and saw that those Apple guys had thought of everything. Once I powered my iMac back up, the backup continued where it had left off. Nice! I can also tell the Time Machine to only back up certain folders or files on the hard drive. With 500GB of storage, I’m not too worried about running out of space.

Tech Guy still tells me to back up more often than every hour, and I will admit he is right. At least my corner of denial is smaller and I feel like I’ve got my computer Karma back...for now anyway.

Technorati Tags: iMac,Time Capsule,PowerBook

A Plea to Companies That Publish White Papers

2008-09-17T17:59:00.001-07:00

Every week, it seems, I get a call from a diligent salesperson, calling to follow up with me because I downloaded a white paper. I invariably disappoint them, explaining that the reason I downloaded the white paper was to do research for one of my Backup Reminder columns.

Sometimes I’m doing research for a different purpose—on behalf of a client, say, or for my Podcast Asylum or Author-izer personas. But I’m a solo professional with a home office, and definitely not a prospective customer for enterprise software companies. I’m not usually even a good prospect for the SOHO backup companies, because I already have backups coming out of my ears.

So please—if your company publishes white papers, make sure you include “Media” or “Journalist/Blogger” when you ask what industry the person downloading your report is in. For that matter, you could include a checkbox that says “Just doing research.” Some companies do have a “No plans to purchase at this time” option, and in some cases it’s possible to un-check the “Contact me to follow up” option. But those are the exceptions, rather than the rules.

It’s a waste of money to have your salespeople calling people who will never become customers. You could refuse access to people who aren’t serious prospects, but that’s not good public relations. You want media coverage, because someone who does want to buy your product might be reading my blog.

But please. If you have someone call me, it should be your PR agency, not your sales staff.

What Archives Really Are and Why You Might Need Them: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-12-08

2008-09-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

Back in July when I put out my call for guest bloggers on HARO, a kind PR professional referred me to Casdex. I was initially a bit skeptical about their digital archiving service, or rather, I expected my readers to be skeptical because of the price tag. $99/month for 5 GB? Compared to online backup services, that’s an outrageously high price.

But archives are not the same thing as backups. You need backups to be up-to-the-minute and to keep up with changing data. The frequency with which your data changes determines the frequency with which you need to back up. (Boy, that sentence really demonstrates what a grammar-pedant I am.)

Archives are for the data that doesn’t change. More importantly, archives are for data that shouldn’t change. Data that you need to produce in the event of an audit, or a court case. Or something as simple as your will, or the contracts you have with your clients, where you want to be able to prove that this is exactly what the contract said on the date you signed it, and yes, you really are entitled to interest on late payments.

In most cases, you hope you never have to retrieve the data that’s in your archive. You keep all your supporting documents for your tax deductions for 7 years, but you want those years to pass without any IRS audits. You don’t want to get into disputes with your client where you have to prove that the contract said a particular thing and yes, they really did sign it. You don’t want to fight with your siblings over whether something really is the last will and testament of your parents.

But if something like this happens, you’d better be able to prove your side. And that’s where digital archiving comes in. To quote the Casdex website as it was in July (it’s just been redone), archiving

protects your business from identity theft by storing your information in pieces in separate locations, salvages your company from disaster situations like floods by preserving your data in a remote location that’s always accessible via an Internet line, and lets you be 100% compliant with SOX and all those other fun government regulations facing companies of all sizes today. You create your file and set your own file retention time—which means that the data can be entered, saved and even forgotten—but if and when it needs to be retrieved again, it will be there.

The new website also makes the point that many companies waste time making repeated backups of data that really belongs in archives. But David Barley, Casdex’s CTO, put it to me this way: spending $99/month for digital archiving is cheaper than paying an auditor $60/hr to go through the paper records in your storage unit. A large company that needs to be compliant with SOX might pay $5 million for an archiving solution.

Even small companies might be subject to those “fun government regulations.” A therapist in private practice still has to deal with HIPAA, which not only requires you to keep patient information for a certain period of time, but to destroy it within a certain period of time. Casdex lets you do that automatically by setting data retention policies, either for individual documents or for folders. You get a report that tells you that your file is about to expire and prompt you to do something about it.

Datasheets on the new website emphasize the simplicity of the interface: you just drag and drop the items you want into Casdex. It’s so intuitive that there’s no need for training, or a manual. (I think they might overestimate the IT-savvy of their potential customers: nothing is so simple that it requires no explanation at all. A step-by-step guide with screenshots, or a video tutorial, never hurts.) You can access your account from any computer, and share documents with clients or with branch offices. Casdex keeps track of who uploads a file and when, and maintains the history and lifecycle of the file.

Attorneys dealing with the 2006 changes in the way lawyers have to deal with electronic information will be particularly interested in Casdex’s hashing algorithm. For those not familiar with it (I wasn’t), hashing lets you apply a digital fingerprint to your files. You then get two keys that match to show that a file hasn’t been tampered with. LexisNexis has an authenticating service that charges $1200 to fingerprint just one PDF. $99/month starts to look a lot better when you know that.

And 5 GB starts to look a lot larger when you think about how little of your data is likely to need true archiving like this.

Those of us whose industries have so far escaped government regulations might choose to take our chances on that IRS audit, but among the professions Casdex lists on its new site are

Financial (SEC Rule 17a-4)
Legal (2006 rulings about what documents are acceptable in the courtroom)
Real estate (particularly if you’re a mortgage broker in the middle of the housing meltdown)
Architecture (if the building falls down, you don’t want to be the one getting sued)
Accounting (IRS requirements for electronic storage systems)
Medical (HIPAA. It’s designed to protect patient privacy, but it creates exponential paperwork for doctors, dentists, and therapists.)

If you think hard about your own business, you can probably imagine applications for digital archiving. Say you’re a software developer, or a graphic designer, and you need protection beyond filing a copyright form or just think that $99/month is a better deal that $35/document. Theft of intellectual property is at an all-time high because of the ease with which electronic documents can be copied. If you’ve worked hard to create speaking and training materials, you might need to prove that you had them first, before someone else found them online and got rich using them.

Gosh. Maybe Casdex should hire me to think up new applications. ;-)

Remember, though: archives are not a substitute for backups. You still need to be able to restore the files you work with every day. So even if you’re risk-tolerant and don’t want an archiving solution, make sure you back up early and often.

“Pirate” Backup Is Not for MP3 Downloads: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-05-08

2008-09-05T09:12:00.001-07:00

Before he went home to redesign the world’s most famous home office, the Ur-Guru and I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. In addition to watching a demonstration of Babbage’s Difference Engine #2 and sitting down to rest on a Cray supercomputer (and of course pointing out which of the early personal computers each of us had owned), we saw one of the first ever hard drives. It was bigger in diameter than the tires on my car. There’s actually a project to restore the IBM RAMAC, the computer that used it, over at the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center. (Before disk drives, computers used something called core memory. I was pleased to discover that the Ur-Guru didn’t know what that was, either.)

But while all that history is fascinating, and I recommend a trip to the museum if you get the chance to go, it won’t help you preserve your data today. So I’m introducing today’s guest blogger, Network World columnist James Gaskin, who offered me this article about “Pirate Backup” (originally published in 2007, but still relevant).

In honor of the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean movie, let me introduce the Pirate Backup System (ARR). ARR, besides a bit of pirate talk, stands for Automatic, Redundant, and Restorable. Meeting those three goals makes a good backup system. Meeting only two will lead to disappointment. Meeting only one describes about two thirds of small businesses today.

I'm working on a “How To Fix IT Manual” called Data Safety Using the Pirate Backup System (ARR). But focusing on backup sends the wrong message, because backing up files does nothing. Users only get value when they restore files. Backup is just the necessary pain to reach the gain of restoring important data files when they are lost, stolen, or mangled. Think of backup as the insurance premiums, and restoration as the replacement payment after a loss.

The first A in ARR, Automatic, forces businesses to take into account the point made in the previous paragraph: users get no value from backup. Hence, users don't back up. One may consider this short-sighted, but users will complain that participating in any backup procedures means they're doing the administrator’s job, not their own. Since data safety is our goal here, let's not argue with the users about this today, let's just work around those issues.

To be automatic your backup system must work without any user intervention. You can't even trust users to leave their computer turned on for a backup job to run at 3:00 a.m. You certainly can't trust them to click an icon to run a backup.

These restrictions leave two options: data must be saved somewhere besides PCs, or you must place software on each computer that works without user intervention.

The first option, the neatest, stores all user data files on some type of centralized file server or even a shared online workspace. That would be great, but realistically you will need to install software on each computer to back up data files on a schedule or immediately upon every file change. Almost every backup software application will schedule backups on at least an hourly basis. To grab file changes immediately you will need special software from the Continuous Data Protection (CDP) range of products.

Second, redundancy protects data files, and makes disaster recovery possible. Companies learn the hard way that backup tapes sitting beside the server burn up when the server burns up. They also learn backup network-attached storage devices get stolen when thieves steal their servers. You must keep copies of data files somewhere outside your business to recover from a wide variety of disasters small and large.

Back when tape cartridges led the backup media world, people developed offsite tape rotation schedules using a Tower of Hanoi algorithm to try and keep the right data on the right tapes at the right places. Those never worked, because people dropped the ball quickly.

Today you can send data offsite much more easily than before. Many service companies offer excellent prices to accept data files across the Internet at their remote data storage center. You can send data from one office to another office, or send data files to a hidden directory on your company Web server. You have multiple options, but you need to pick one or two and get started. If you try to carry USB hard drives back and forth from your servers, however, you will soon get tired and quit.

Finally, files must restore properly or you've wasted all your time. Good backup software makes it easy to restore files to their original location or other locations. Offsite services with file redirection make it easy to share files between remote locations, but be careful that file versions don't get changed by one user without the other users knowing. But a good restoration test is to pick a data file folder at random, restore it to another location, and check those files.

If you want “bare metal restore” capabilities to quickly rebuild a personal computer or server, you'll need special boot CD-ROM disks tied to the backup files. Each backup vendor offers different methods of bare metal restore, but you can keep those boot disks close at hand even if the data stays safe in an offsite location across the country. But this example points out the need for several options in your backup system, and why I call it a system with multiple parts rather than a backup method or backup process.

Remember, you can't trust users to help you perform any backup chores. You can trust the Pirate Backup System, however, especially if you put a parrot on your shoulder before you say ARR.

Copyright © 1994-2008 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.

Although I’m now minus one major source of distraction, I have a lot of client work to catch up on, and I got so many responses to my call for volunteers to write guest posts that I could go on for at least another month without contributing anything original. I promise to write at least one post per month for myself, however!

Technorati Tags: Computer History Museum,RAMAC,Difference Engine,Pirate Backup,James Gaskin

Saved by SuperDuper: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-22-08

2008-08-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

This week’s (very late) backup reminder is one for the Mac users. It comes from Dave, the founder of EAR/Rational Music. Dave also writes his own Music Blog.

I’m a SOHO owner and Mac user and I was saved by SuperDuper!, disk cloning software made by Shirt Pocket Software. (Not affiliated with them other than being a satisfied customer.) I have a separate building on my property from which I run the business. I use a small space heater in winter and a portable swamp cooler in the summer. As you might imagine, the barn, as I call it, isn’t exactly “climate controlled.” At the time of this story, I was using an eMac, an all-in-one computer which served me well. One Sunday afternoon in April, I went out there and found the computer off. I assumed we’d lost power, which happens occasionally, but to my chagrin I found that I was unable to boot the computer at all. The screen showed a flashing question-mark icon, which means the computer could not find a disk to boot from.

I have a 300GB external hard drive that I use for backups, and I keep it in the house, rather than in the barn, for two reasons. First off, the house is climate controlled, so the drive won’t be affected by extreme temperatures. Second, if there is a fire or other damage to the barn, the external drive will likely be protected in the house. Of course a hard drive isn’t a perfect backup solution, since it could fail, but it’s unlikely that both drives will fail at the same time, especially if the backup drive is unplugged when not in use.

After retrieving the drive from the house, I plugged it into the FireWire port of the eMac, and rebooted. Since this drive contained a clone of the internal hard drive of the eMac, I was up and running in 5 minutes. As it turned out, the clone had been made about a month prior to this incident, so not all files were up to date, but the one file I really needed, the data file for my invoicing/accounting program, had actually been copied to my wife’s laptop earlier in the day. At the time I did not have a laptop, and I would copy this file to my wife’s laptop when I wanted to work in the house instead of in the barn.

So the bottom line is that I was lucky. SuperDuper! got me most of the way there (and indeed, would have gotten my farther had I run it more often), and dumb luck got me the rest of the way. It turns out the hard drive in the eMac was completely fried, and not even visible to any recovery software. With a bit of work, I was able to install a new hard drive about a month later (as I said, it’s an all-in-one machine, and as such, it isn’t made to be upgraded), but prior to doing that, I was able to run just fine from the external drive.

Thanks to Dave for reminding us that the hard drive on a Mac is just as likely to fail as the hard drive on a Windows machine—and to his wife for letting him copy his financial data to her laptop.

Technorati Tags: Super Duper,eMac,EAR/Rational Music

Data Disasters: Did You Forget Your Mobile Workforce? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-15-08

2008-08-17T17:27:00.001-07:00

The Ur-Guru and I have just returned from a week of Extreme Tourism in Chicago. He took 28 GB of photos. Each night he copied them all from his camera’s 8 GB Compact Flash card onto the two portable hard drives he’d brought along. (One serves as the original, one as the backup, and then he clears off card so he can take more pictures.)

We also fixed my father’s wireless router, so there’s wi-fi in his 45th-floor apartment again, but I had to use webmail for outgoing messages because RCN (Dad’s cable Internet provider) appears to block any outgoing traffic from non-RCN senders.

Anyway, I’m back home with another guest post for you, this one from Ken Colburn of Data Doctors.

Data Disasters: did you forget your mobile workforce?

A hard drive crashes every 15 seconds…

2,000 laptops are stolen or lost every day…

1 in 5 computers suffers a fatal hard drive crash during their lifetime…
31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control…

60% of companies that lose all their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster…

The overall average failure rate of disk drives is 100% - all drives eventually fail…

And another hard drive just crashed while you were reading this.

Will one of yours be next? Are you prepared?

If you ask your IT department, they will assure you that the primary servers are being backed up every day and that an off-site data storage component is in place, so no matter what happens, the company is covered.

What most IT departments fail to recognize is that as much as 60% of a company’s mission critical data resides on hard drives that are not being backed up.

Your mobiles sales team, your CEO’s laptop, remote users or offices; the list can go on.

The assumption by the IT staff that all the users are following the company policy for backing up critical data is generally flawed.

In reality, getting 100% compliance from all users is virtually impossible because of a single hurdle; human nature. Everyone knows that a hard drive could fail at any moment, but no one thinks it’s going to happen to them, so they will do it tomorrow.

In providing data recovery services for over a decade, a pattern has emerged as more companies rely on computers; critical data is being lost on a regular basis.

The proliferation of the laptop computer as well as the increase in remote workers and even the digital camera (of all things) are primary drivers.

I regularly run into mobile salespeople throughout the country and in every discussion I hear the same thing: “I would be totally screwed if my laptop crashed or got stolen” and it’s usually followed by “my IT guys just don’t understand”.

Digital cameras have also increased the need for data recovery because digital images are not thought of as “data”… until they are gone! We routinely see a drive in for data recovery that has thousands of mission critical images on it that no one thought to backup or were so large that they did not fit into traditional backup procedures.

Even with the realization that their future is in jeopardy, statistically only 1 in 4 users will regularly back up their files. Why? It’s generally too technical or time consuming.

Another common mistake that some IT departments make is assume that if the critical data is being backed up and we can replace a laptop with an image of the corporate software, we have everything covered.

We routinely see customers pleading for help because they installed a special program that only they needed and no one took this into consideration during their disaster planning.

In a perfect IT world, everyone is using the exact same software on every remote or mobile system, but the reality for most is that no two computers are exactly the same.

Some of the biggest offenders of not following the IT department standards are upper management and they often times have some of the most mission critical data on their systems.

100% of all Data Loss is PREVENTABLE!

There are a number of personal backup solutions that IT departments should consider implementing as an additional layer for their mobile workforce.

We have been working with folks on backup procedures for long enough to understand some of the biggest roadblocks…users don’t know how to backup and even if they do, they don’t have any idea where on the hard drive this data resides, much less taking the time to actually do it.

The best chances for success and a huge time saver for the IT department for when (not if) a hard drive crashes is an automatic whole drive imaging system. (The expense of one data recovery will usually pay for 4 or 5 personal backup systems.)

If you can reduce the point of failure down to “can I get my users to plug this device in” your chances of success are much higher.

By eliminating all of the technical aspects of the backup process you can expect non-technical mobile and remote users to be much more successful in protecting themselves.

One solution is to install an automated imaging program that automatically fires whenever the external backup device is plugged in and/or setting a scheduler to automatically backup (and pester the user when it has not been done) to an external device.

Another great option for field personnel is an automated Internet based backup service. Once the client software is installed, it can automatically push copies of critical data up to a secured Internet server and be setup to pester users whenever it does not occur.

The bottom line on covering your bases is to really cover all your bases, so don’t forget your mobile and remote users!

External backup solution:
http://www.datadoctors.com/products/datavault

Online backup solution for businesses (Free 30-day trial): http://www.rdbup.com/partner/?id=datadrs

Cheers for Carbonite (and Some Vacation Musings): FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-08-08

2008-08-08T09:14:00.001-07:00

This week’s guest contributor is Confident Marketer Sue Painter, but first a brief update from Yours Truly.

The Ur-Guru and I have been traveling a lot over the past few weeks. As an incurable geek, I haul my laptop with me on all these trips, and I’ve been bringing Vesta (the Buffalo MiniStation DataVault) with me to make backups on. In fact, Vesta lives in my laptop case, since I don’t really use her when I’m at home.

While we were driving back from the Russian River Valley, the Ur-Guru noticed that his MP3 player was acting up. It insisted that every song was a bad track and wouldn’t play anything. (I considered connecting mine and forcing him to listen to podcasts, but I restrained myself.)

“You could try reformatting it,” I suggested, “but you’d lose all the music.”

He gave me his best “Do I look like an idiot?” stare and said “Who is it I’m marrying again? Did you think I wouldn’t have backups?”

So when we got home, he reformatted the player, copied the music back onto it, and all was well.

Now, on to Sue’s story about Carbonite.

I use and LOVE Carbonite for backup. No horror stories here, just really hated constantly backing up to CD’s which got disorganized and half the time didn’t work. Plus, I never got around to it in any scheduled fashion. Somehow I ran across an e-ad for Carbonite, checked it out, did a 30 day trial, then bought it. It’s a big, whopping $45 per YEAR and you can back up a second computer for $20 (or at least, that was the deal I was offered). It constantly runs in the background of your computer and gives you 24/7 backup.

Slight downside: it makes my computer run a bit slower, but I solve this by a quick click to put Carbonite on 24 hour pause, do my work, then “unpause” it before I go off to bed. Overnight, it backs anything up I’ve changed that day.

I have had to use it—my Palm Pilot died a horrible death, with all my appointments for the rest of the year, and the backup file on my computer got corrupted, too. Total panic (I am booked nearly a year out with client appointments so my Palm is my lifeblood) but I just clicked on the little icon and got everything restored to my new Palm, no problem.

I clicked on my Carbonite icon and it brought up my entire Palm calendar on the computer screen, same as I would do from my computer files. What I like is that Carbonite is for total non-techies like me—it brings up a screen that looks EXACTLY like your desktop, you click on what you want to restore, and boom, it’s done. Could not be simpler.

Once my calendar was there on my screen (stop, my heart!) I simply hot synced it back to my Palm. I could scarcely believe it was so easy! And yes, give me back floppies—I really hate CDs and can never make them work. (ARG...)

There you have it—another satisfied Carbonite customer. (David Jackson wrote about Carbonite in February 2008.) A backup is useless if you can’t restore your data, so it’s good to hear that it’s easy to get things back, and few professionals can afford to lose their business appointments.

Next week we’ll hear from the Data Doctors.

Technorati Tags: Carbonite,Sue Painter,David Jackson,Data Doctors,online backup,DataVault

In Praise of Tape Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-01-08

2008-08-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

This is a guest column by Jeff Mordkowitz, The Profit Coach. Jeff is the first person I’ve talked to who not only uses tape backup in a SOHO setting, but likes it. Most of what we hear about tape these days is unflattering, so I thought it was important to include the other side of the story.

None of the manufacturers listed below is paying me a commission for including them, and I don’t believe they’re paying Jeff, either.

I love the tape backup system I put together for my home office. I guess I learned about the necessity and convenience of a tape-based disaster recovery/business continuity system from my old days in the NYC world of finance (banking). It’s not hard to do and addresses the needs I have for professional protection for my small business.

I use a four week (daily, weekly and monthly) “progressive” tape backup system (only files that have changed since the last backup are copied). The tapes are labeled A, B, C and D (one for each week). Each Sunday I clean the drive and swap in the next tape. The software tells me if I’ve put in the wrong tape. Tapes B, C and D are completely overwritten with each usage. Tape A is pulled out of rotation every four weeks for approximately three months (to have a quarterly backup) and once a year (to have an annual backup).

The system is set up to read after write (compare what was written to the tape to what was on the disk, and as mentioned, it also backs up open files). When the backup is finished, it sends me a nightly email with the previous evening’s backup status.

I back up my DATA folder, a few small folders in Program Files that have key setup options, and Documents and Settings. FYI, don’t forget to run Office 2003 Save Settings Wizard every couple of weeks if you use Microsoft Office. You will lose almost all custom settings if you don’t .(Office 2007 doesn’t have this option yet.)

I also restore a few files weekly to test the system. The old cliché, “You don’t have a backup system until you’ve verified a restore,” rings true here too.

I keep my daily tapes in another room in a fire-proof, water-proof box and my “A” tapes go to a safe deposit box in a local bank periodically. Fires, floods, water main breaks, hurricanes, brush fires, gas leaks (and of course disk crashes) occur regularly in different parts of the country. How long will you have a business (or a happy spouse and family) without any or all of your data? And, without doing a rotation, you can’t retrieve multiple earlier versions of your files. (Oops!)

Equipment (Don’t let the list prices scare you off.)

Software: I use EMC’s Retrospect for Windows Single Server Edition (v7.5) with the Open File Backup add-on (a necessary add-on IMHO)

Hardware: Three Dellcomputers (one laptop and two desktops cabled (100MB CAT 5 wire) to a Linksys WRT300N Router)

Tape Drive: Seagate STT3401A 20/40GB TRAVAN Internal Tape Drive

Storage Media: Imation TRAVAN 40GB TR7 20/40GB Data Tape Cartridge

Drive Cleaning Media: Imation TRAVAN NS Dry Process Head Cleaning Cartridge, 30 Cleanings.

Protective Storage: Sentry Safe 1 hour Fire-Safe and Waterproof Chest, 0.36 Cubic Feet

If you have any questions, I work as a Business Coach and you can call me at 917-579-7652, email me at Jeff@TheProfitCoach.net or visit my website at www.TheProfitCoach.net. Here’s to protecting our data!

The one caveat I would add is that to make this work, you need to manage the tape rotation manually. For some people, that’s not a problem. I have a friend who’s never used backup software because she’s scrupulous about copying her data into backup folders and then transferring it into archive folders. (And she has a Mac, so creating a system image is fairly easy for her.)

Combined with the safe and the safe-deposit box, and the regular verification of backups, there’s no reason tape can’t be a workable solution. (And notice that it only takes one tape drive to back up three computers.)

Thanks again to Peter Shankman and Help A Reporter Out.

P.S. Be sure you bolt the safe to the wall or bury it in the ground if it’s small enough to be carried off by thieves.

Technorati Tags: HARO,TRAVAN,tape backup,Jeff Mordkowitz,Profit Coach,Imation

Backup with Room to Spare: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-25-08

2008-07-26T12:31:00.001-07:00

When I put out my request for backup stories on HARO, two of the first respondents were eager to tell me about Spare Backup. Maria-Christina Zajac of Avalanche Strategic Communications offered to set up an interview with Spare Backup CEO Cery Perle, and Heather Schroeder at Corporate Advocates wrote to me about the new Spare Mobile service.

Spare just announced last week its Spare Mobile service that may be of particular interest to your readers. The new service provides users with the benefits of real-time mobile access to their content without the risk of lost data due to a malfunctioning device. In addition, Spare users can remotely access photos, music and podcasts from their home computers anytime, anywhere from their mobile device.

Just in case I wasn’t sufficiently convinced of Spare Backup’s wonderfulness, she added:

Spare Backup doesn’t just back up your data, it can actually help you transfer all of your data from your old computer to your new one in 3 easy steps. I switched from a desktop to a notebook about a year ago and I still have things on CD because I didn’t know how else to transfer my files! It’s so easy my mom can do it. :-)

“Easy,” as I discovered when I interviewed Cery Perle on July 15th, has always been a priority for Spare Backup. Cery was motivated to get into the backup business after experiencing a data loss catastrophe. The company he worked for at the time did have a backup system, but someone had forgotten to insert the backup tape for the day he needed. (Shades of the Institute for Backup Trauma’s 2005 video with John Cleese, except that Spare Backup has actually went public in 2003.) Cery wanted a product easy enough for him to use, and the options available at the time didn’t fit that description.

The product I downloaded definitely does. Spare Backup has an attractive interface, dominated by a big green “Click here to Backup” button. (Pedant’s point of contention: “back up” as a verb should be two words.) A sidebar on the right offers tips for changing what to back up and where to store your backup. The default location is online, where you get 50 GB of storage space, but Spare Backup will also work with CDs and DVDs, external drives, and network drives.

The user interface is fairly self-explanatory, but there are detailed user guides with screenshots available, too. I did notice a few slightly odd things. Under “Settings,” you have the following options:

Select files for online backup
Online backup schedule
Select Files for local backup
Manually include/exclude files
Account Information
Advanced

Having the “manually include/exclude” separate from both the offline and online backup options seemed strange to me. Isn’t that part of selecting files for backup?

The default option for either online or offline backup is to back up everything. Since I didn’t want to wait all day for files to transfer, I instead opted to back up just my Microsoft Publisher files online. I then discovered that unlike many backup programs, which back up only your C drive unless you tell them otherwise (and are sometimes configured only to back up one internal drive no matter how many you have), Spare Backup automatically backs up all your internal and external drives, though not your network drives. So it went searching through my C drive, then the D drive where I keep fairly-recent data that isn’t part of current projects, then the F drive (my Free Agent Go). It didn’t copy anything from the M or P drive, but then again, the P drive wasn’t connected properly and the M drive only has a Safety Drill image on it right now, and no individual Publisher files.

Because I back up data from the C drive to both the D drive and the F drive automatically, there are now several duplicates in my Spare Backup storage area. (I’m not too worried: I’ve only used 1.26% of my online storage capacity.) If I adjusted this backup job to exclude the D and F drives (or at least one of them), then I could solve the duplication problem.

Spare Backup automatically pauses when it detects mouse or keyboard activity. The idea is to keep from slowing down your computer, but that can slow down your backup job instead. If your priority is finishing the backup job, you can adjust this under the advanced settings.

One feature Cery mentioned to me, which I haven’t tested, is the ability to restore individual e-mail messages to Outlook, and not just the whole PST file. I meant to test it, but since all my PST files are large, and you can’t back up individual e-mail messages (at least, I didn’t see that option), I decided to do the Outlook backup onto one of my external hard drives.

And so I discovered that while recovering files from online backups is fairly intuitive and done right through the regular Spare Backup interface, recovering from offline backups requires you to run a program called Local Launcher that gets put into the same location as your offline backup.

On the one hand, this makes sense. It means you can restore the data from the external drive even if all you have is the drive, and not the computer you installed Spare Backup on. But it’s a pretty crude interface by comparison with the main program, and it doesn’t let you restore individual messages.

Spare Backup’s best features are clearly reserved for the online backup service. And speaking of online backup, Cery told me that the Spare Key you get when you download the program (and which you need in order to recover your data; I had to enter it in Local Launcher) Is housed at a third company. That means none of Spare Backup’s employees can get to your data, and neither can anyone at the company holding the keys, because the only person with all the pieces is you.

Spare Backup does a private label business for bigger brands. For instance, if you buy a new Sony Vaio, the backup program you’ll find pre-installed on the machine is really Spare Backup. Offering online backup services helps hardware companies retain customers. If you have the customer’s data, you keep the customer. (Spare Backup has a 93% retention rate.) This is why the big enterprise backup companies like EMC and Symantec are buying small online backup companies like Mozy right and left.

Spare Backup is also working on an enterprise product for up to 500 users. (Disclosure: I may be writing a white paper about this for them, which would make them a client, which would at least potentially bias my opinion.)

Next week we’ll have another guest columnist for you.

Wait a Minute! Back Up! FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-18-08

2008-07-18T10:07:00.001-07:00

Our first guest columnist of the summer is Elizabeth Rodgers from Ben’s Ranch. (The original Ben did have a ranch and was really a cowboy, but the Ben’s Ranch that Elizabeth co-founded with Ben’s grandson is a tech support company based in Los Angeles.)

Elizabeth, as you’ll see is a big fan of Mozy’s online backup service. I’ve written about Mozy before, but it’s always nice to get a new perspective on a subject.

You know you should, and yet, you don't. No, I'm not talking about essential fatty acids, I'm talking about backing up your data.

Imagine this scenario:

Your hard drive fails. You haven’t backed up your data because

You were too lazy

You were too lazy

You have been meaning to do it

All of your financials, all of your emails, all of your contacts, all of your digital music and photos are lost forever. Oh, wait! You could pay a company $750 to get that data back. Oh. They say that it actually can’t be done. It’s gone. Now you have to buy a new hard drive and totally reconfigure your computer and…

It’s a nightmare. And it’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when. You can easily avoid this. There are many ways back up your data:

You can get an extra hard drive, put it in your computer, and transfer the data.

You can have the extra hard drive external to your computer, or

You could backup online.

The simplest solution for the external hard drive is SimpleTech SimpleDrive. The software (StorageSync Backup) leads you through the setup, and once you’ve backed up the first time, the following backups will go much faster as it will be backing up only what is new or changed since the last time you did it. Some people love SimpleTech; some hate it.

Let’s get to the good stuff…

My backup of choice is online backup. No more external hard drives, no more CDs and no more fiddling with backup software. If you have a .mac account, you can get 1 gig of storage for $50 or 3 gigs for $100 for the year.

Another company that backs up online elegantly and less expensively is Mozy. Mozy is an exciting (because it’s) FREE new service that lets you effortlessly, automatically and securely back up your data OFFSITE. The first 2 gigs are free, if you want unlimited gigs (um, that’s a lot of space!), it’s $5/month.

Good story: I told an acquaintance of mine about Mozy and she spent the five bucks a month for the big backup. TWO DAYS later, her hard drive failed! Kaput. Totally dead. No biggie, because she bought a new hard drive (for $80) and downloaded her backed up data from Mozy onto her new drive. This woman LOVES me. And I barely know her.

Here’s how Mozy works:

Go to Mozy.com and click on “Get Mozy free.” You will give them your email and create a password. In moments, you will receive an email from Mozy with a link to click. Once you’ve clicked on the link, you will be walked through a series of easy instructions to get backed up. That's it! If you choose, it can be a continuous backup, so when the software sees that you’re not active on the computer, it will backup your data securely because it’s encrypted. Aaaah, the magic and mystery of online backup!

One caveat: “unlimited” storage is like “unlimited” bandwidth. There are limits somewhere. One is the amount of time it would take to upload the contents of, say, my 1 TB network drive. Another is that the $5/month unlimited home user account really is supposed to be for personal use. If you have a home office, you’re supposed to get Mozy Pro, which costs $3.95/month plus fifty cents per gigabyte per month. So that 1 TB of data, even if I could upload it, would cost $503.95 per month. Not very practical for a sole proprietor.

But as a painless way to get your most critical documents backed up off site, it’s pretty good.

You’ll be hearing about some other online backup, storage, and archiving solutions as soon as I can finish testing them.

Technorati Tags: Mozy,SimpleTech,StorageSync,SimpleDrive,Ben's Ranch

Hurray for HARO

2008-07-16T13:15:00.001-07:00

The Ur-Guru is about to arrive for another visit, and in the interest of spending more time with him, I thought I would try to get some guest columnists for the Backup Reminder.

So I posted a query to Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out list.

I’d signed up for this thrice-daily e-mail full of queries from journalists in order to discover opportunities for me and my clients to get some media coverage. Some of the queries come from major mainstream media publications, but others come from bloggers and podcasters.

When I posted my request for stories of data loss disasters and pitches for SOHO backup products, I had a dozen responses—at least—in the first day. (Note to self: next time you do this, leave yourself more time to respond to the answers you get.) Wow!

Over the next few weeks, you’ll be hearing real-life stories from people who have learned about backup the hard way. (Some of them were so traumatized that they went on to start backup companies.) In fact, there’s so much material that I’ll be posting more often than usual, though the Backup Reminder e-zine will only appear once a week.

What’s more, I already have a new client as a result of this outreach, so thanks to HARO I’m finally going to be making some money from my blog.

Technorati Tags: HARO,Peter Shankman

Back Up Your Passport with Gmail

2008-07-15T07:01:00.001-07:00

In response to last week’s Backup Reminder, Loyal Reader MKR wrote:

I use a very simple approach to backup my files, unless they are very large. I have a Gmail account and I e-mail a message to myself with an attachment. The message and attachment are stored on the servers of Gmail.

Recently, when one of my friends was planning to travel abroad, I told him to scan the important pages of the passport and tickets and email them to himself. If ever they lose the passport and tickets anywhere in the world, they can retrieve a copy from anywhere so long there is access to Internet.

This is important since one of my friends lost the passport and other papers in Frankfurt on the way to India. On reaching India, the airport authorities needed some evidence before admitting her. Her husband faxed a copy of the passport to the airport in India and then only she was allowed to enter. The above simple solution would have easily solved the problem.

Back in the olden days, we used to make photocopies of our passports and carry them separately from the passports themselves. That still works, but I still like this solution as a supplement, if not necessarily a replacement, to the old-fashioned method of passport backup.

It’s not likely to be very helpful if you’re in the middle of the desert with no Internet access (and no printer), but then again, most people who check your passport probably won’t be in the wilderness.

If you’re not confident the documents will be private enough stored in your Gmail account, you can always put them on your own FTP server, but that requires a higher geek-score than just sending yourself an e-mail does.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-11-08

2008-07-12T08:53:00.001-07:00

I have a friend(?) whose chosen backup strategy is to e-mail me copies of her important files and BCC me on her important e-mail messages. I did not volunteer for this service, and I’m not recommending it to anyone as a particularly good approach to backing up your data. It beats having no backups at all, and it’s one of the few options available to my friend(?), whose own computer isn’t connected to the Internet and who does almost everything on a U3 data stick at public library computers (which tend to be designed not to let U3 data sticks work properly, or run any programs).

So she e-mails me files and I save them into a folder for her, where they get backed up with the rest of my documents. I then usually delete the attachments from Outlook, because my main PST file is big enough as it is.

And I don’t usually pay any more attention to the files themselves than any backup program would. They get scanned for viruses on the way into Outlook, and I don’t have the time or inclination to check the content or format of these files (usually Word documents).

But the other day I happened to notice something. My friend(?) was sending documents to some prospects, and one of the Microsoft Word files was only 150 bytes. When was the last time you saw a Microsoft Word doc that was less than 1K in size? Even a flat text file is longer than that if it has any content.

So I tried opening the file, and sure enough, there was nothing in it. I have no idea how this happened; some error in saving the file, perhaps. My friend(?) is kind of jinxed when it comes to computers, as if they weren’t capable of creating problems all by themselves.

I told her about the problem. Naturally, she freaked out. Then she asked me whether I had an earlier, uncorrupted version of that file. Fortunately for her, I did. (More fortunately, she had given it a different file name, so it didn’t get overwritten by the 1K file.) So I e-mailed that back to her.

But it got me to thinking about the first thing I ever learned about computers—from reading science fiction, before I’d ever touched a computer myself.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

If you make multiple backups of a corrupted file, then all you have is several useless files instead of one. Even backup software that verifies your data is only making sure that the copy is the same as the original. You’re the one who has to make sure the original is worth copying.

Now, most of us have no reason to think our files might be corrupt. If the file was fine the last time you used it, then there’s not likely to be anything to worry about. But if the document is critically important, you should check it before you either back it up or submit it to a client.

This is especially true if you’ve been having any kinds of problems with your computer, your software, or your storage. My friend(?) has been having lots of trouble with corrupted files lately. Whatever the cause (and I’m not really in a position to guess), that’s a sign that she needs to check her files before she sends them to me or anyone else—but especially before she sends them to me, if she’s counting on me to be able to provide her with intact files when she needs them.

Checking all your files before every backup job isn’t practical. But some files are more important to save than others. Before you take your jewelry over to the safe deposit box, you might want to be sure it’s not counterfeit.

And don’t even think about e-mailing me your documents for safekeeping.

The Drawbacks of Dell DataSafe: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-04-08

2008-07-06T11:16:00.001-07:00

Yep, this is late again. Sorry. I had a completely insane week last week. Part of the insanity gave me the topic for this week’s Backup Reminder, but I had to sleep for two days before I could write it.

I hardly do any computer consulting work anymore, but I have a few legacy clients (not to mention the occasional friend or family member) who can persuade me to wade into the trenches now and again. In this case, the client had temporary custody of my Maxtor OneTouch Plus drive (otherwise known as Mama Bear, but designated “P” for “Plus” in my drive lettering system), so I had an added motive.

In any case, most of the job was more than usually straightforward, and I was starting to feel pretty good about everything. The new machine is a perfectly decent piece of hardware, running XP with 2 GB RAM, which meant it was a lot speedier and easier to work with than the old one. (We will pass over all the problems the client had setting it up; I was spared involvement at that point.) Copying data from Mama Bear onto the new machine and the laptop—no problem. (It just needed a new USB cable, as someone had stepped on the connector for the old one and bent it into an interesting but non-useful shape.) Consolidating Outlook data into one file—easy. Replacing the expired trial anti-virus—made easier by recommendations from the LinkedIn community. Etc.

Then we came to setting up the Dell DataSafe™ online backup account that my client had purchased with her computer back in March. Supposedly, a free year’s subscription had been included in the package, but either she never received the username and password necessary to access the account, or it had gotten lost in the course of previous disputes with Dell Tech Support. The invoice listed the account as a line item, but provided no useful information.

My client ended up spending 90 minutes on the phone with Dell, bouncing back and forth between Customer Care and Tech Support, who insisted that she was supposed to activate her account within 30 days of purchase. That was after I’d led the Tech Support guy through all the appropriate screens and files to show him that no, really, we hadn’t been given any information and there wasn’t an option for “I already got a subscription with my computer” in the sign-up section.

Now, given that a one-year’s subscription for 3 GB storage costs all of $9, trying to get credit for what my client had already paid for was almost certainly not worth the cost of either my time or hers. But I wasn’t about to hand Dell her money without her permission, either.

I went through the process of setting up the free 30-day trial account, and that was easy enough to do. You enter your e-mail address and create a password, and then download some software. (You don’t have to provide credit card information at that time.) It’s no harder than setting up, say, Mozy.

But I ran into a problem fairly early on. Among the various files I’d copied onto the 500 GB hard drive of the new PC were several backups of Outlook data files, with varying dates on them. Even though none of the individual .pst files was unusually large (for a .pst file), the combination of those files with the ones already in the folder with the current file meant that there were more than 3 GB of .pst files alone.

I’ve run into the “over quota” problem with Mozy a few times—and I don’t even back up my .pst files online. It’s not that hard, in this day and age, to accumulate more than 2 (for Mozy’s free service) or 3 (for DataSafe’s free trial) gigabytes of data. Online backup always requires prioritizing your data.

With Mozy, I usually collect large files that push me over quota and don’t really need to be backed up offsite into a sub-folder and then exclude that sub-folder from the backup configuration.

I could not find a way to do this with Dell DataSafe. There are two options for selecting the files to be backed up: by overall type of file (documents, e-mail, financial, photos, music, video), or by file extension. So I could either tell it to back up all the Outlook data files, or none of them. “All” wouldn’t fit, and “none” isn’t such a good choice for someone who doesn’t have another backup system in place.

In the short term, my client’s options are either to increase the size of her account (10 GB is only $19/year) or to copy the older Outlook files onto a DVD and then delete them from her hard drive to keep her within her 3 GB.

In the longer term, however, the inability to tell DataSafe which specific documents are critical and need backing up is going to be a problem. Even with duplicates and archives cleared out, data will start to accumulate. Everything takes up more storage space these days, and with families owning multiple digital cameras and videocams, it starts to fill up. And those photos and videos are just the kind of thing people don’t want to lose, whether or not they have any intrinsic or business value.

Because online transfer speeds—particularly for uploading data—are inconveniently slow, backing up an entire 500 GB drive online isn’t likely to become feasible any time soon. So it would probably be a good idea for my client to get an external hard drive or a NAS drive as an offline backup method.

But as long as DataSafe doesn’t let you decide exactly which files and folders to back up, she’s also going to need a different online backup service.

I’ve already put Mozy onto her laptop.

Technorati Tags: Dell DataSafe,Mozy,Maxtor OneTouch Plus

My Wordle! A Tag Cloud for the Backup Blog

2008-07-04T11:02:00.001-07:00

There’s a new Web 2.0 tool out there called Wordle that creates pretty tag clouds from text or RSS feeds. Here’s the one I made for the Backup Blog. The most common words are largest.

There aren’t any real surprises in here “backup” and “drive” are the terms that appear most frequently.

Click on the thumbnail image to see a larger version.

Motivation to Back Up: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-27-08

2008-06-27T17:13:00.001-07:00

Hi, my name is Gavin Impett and I’m here to provide you with your weekly motivation to backup. I met Sallie just over a month ago at a Podcast Meetup. I’m starting a video kitty-match-making, used cat service, www.kittysingle.com for the San Francisco Animal Care and Control, Toni’s Kitty Rescue ,and anyone else who’s willing to show me their, ahem…adoptable—meaning ready for love—cat.

This had the immediate effect of bringing my current web host to its knees, and I decided to find a new host, which meant I needed to not only find the “back up site” button on my cpanel, but also learn how to use it, since I’m packing up and moving on.

So I sent Sallie and email to Sallie, saying more or less, “Here I am, dutifully backing up my site. Golly, I wonder what this ‘destroy all data button’ does. I wonder if anyone I know knows anything about backing-up and stuff. You wouldn’t have any thoughts on that backing-up subject, would you Sallie? Help me, for the love of god, I’m on my knees here.” To which Sallie replied, “Hey, I have an idea: you could write this week’s reminder.” Maybe I was too subtle.

Fair enough and as it turns out, I am uniquely qualified on the subject of backing up. Some years ago, I attended a Wilderness Medicine with my Physician girlfriend in the mountains above Aspen. (There’s nothing like listening at 9,000 feet to a lecture on the symptoms of altitude sickness, checking off the symptoms, and saying, “Yep that’s me, I got that. I can die up here! Rockin’!”)

An Army doctor gave us his lecture to the troops, on the subject of the differences between frostbite and trench-foot. He made a joke about his medical title and what the Army really thinks of its soldiers. My sweetie leaned over and explained, “He’s a veterinarian.”

“You don’t see trench-foot too much these days,” he said, “that’s why the war in the Falklands was so great. This guy was in a water-filled fox hole for a week. When we took his shoe off, his whole foot came off. Next slide please. Now if that doesn’t make you change your socks, nothing will.”

Let's just say, the photo left an impression. The reason I mention this seeming digression is it comes to the subject of backing up, I am uniquely qualified on this subject, not unlike the Army doc dealing with something now rare, but once common and responsible for the loss of millions.

I was one of the first human beings to own a computer. No, not the Atari, but the now long-forgotten Apple IIc. When the San Francisco Museum of Modern art had a display on ancient computers, my IIc was older than anything on display. I remember laughing at people who wanted common monitors for their computers and attended the very first computer art class offered at San Francisco State University. While every other student was figuring out how to make squiggly lines move in random patterns in the class, I attempted to see if it was possible to write a short story on one of these computer things. With AppleWorks, you could write about 400 words before the Apple IIe ran out of ram.

In those days, you had to save the file to a floppy—a real floppy, mind you—and if you were smart, you backed up to a second floppy that you stored next to the original so it wouldn’t get lost (not so smart). Then someone pointed me to AppleWriter, which allowed me to have a forty-page file, and life was good. So I wrote, backed-up, tried to remember which was the original, which was the back-up, and so on. One great happy adventure, except when the power went out, or I hit the magic delete-the-only-record-of-these-forty-pages button, which happened on more than one occasion.

Since those happy, innocent days of floppies, I have learned the obsessive joy of backing-up to 5.25 disks, CDs, DVDs, MyBook. My current jones is for a Blu-Ray (50 gig a disk!) burner.

My obsession for back-up stems from the two simple facts. First, I can no longer have printed copies of everything. Video, photos, blogs, websites, are not printable in any functional way. Many of my files can now only exist on hard drives and servers.

The second reason dates back to when it was time to move on from my trusty IIc, which if you held the conversion box just right, could still print to the old dot-matrix. I needed a better quality printer and it was time. So I printed everything I had written on the IIc, walked into the Apple Store, money in hand, and asked a fateful question. “Mac supports IIc files, right? I will be able to convert these files over, right? Apple makes both products, right?”

So I walked out of the store, bought a PC and haven’t looked back. In fairness to Apple, many of their support people and Mac aficionados everywhere have assured me over the years that it is possible to convert IIc files to the Mac format. In my defense, I will say, no one I have ever spoken to or contacted on this subject has actually attempted or managed to accomplish this task. Apparently, the necessary hardware is stored in a secret mountain village in the Himalayas that appears only every eighty years or so, because next to Apple’s file conversion secret is the secret to eternal life and world peace and 90 per cent of the world’s computer users just aren’t worthy.

Now if the next slide doesn’t make you back up your files to a usable format, nothing will.

Technorati Tags: KittySingle,Apple IIc,file conversion

That’s Not a Hard Drive, It’s a Weapon: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-20-08

2008-06-20T10:45:00.001-07:00

The pre-release MiniStation DataVault seemed so light, so airy, so harmless, as Jay Pechek passed it to me in the Market Bar in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

“The Defense Department actually classified this as munitions because of the level of encryption,” he explained. Unlike many devices, where you can bypass a Windows password by accessing it through DOS, there is no backdoor on this drive. Either you know the password, or all but the first 150 MB of the drive is invisible to you. (So make sure enter that password into your password-storing program, because you will be in big trouble if you lose it.) When you copy data onto the drive, it gets encrypted on the fly.

Mind you, it was somewhat less than intuitively obvious how one went about changing the password. It turns out that if you click the “options” button, you’re prompted for the old password and then a new one, and can provide yourself a hint. But once you’ve logged in with the initial (woefully obvious) password, you can only get to the login screen by disconnecting and reconnecting the drive. Other attempts to get at the password program result in the following error message:

(Um, yes. Buffalo is a Japanese company. And yes, they’re the ones who had the WIDnows error message in the DriveStation Duo user interface. And yes, I’m an incurable pedant. Plus, of course, it just enhances my credibility immensely that I’m willing to point out mistakes made by people who bribe me. Right?)

The point of the encryption is not really military, despite the export restrictions. It probably wouldn’t take a whole lot of interrogation to make most of us reveal our passwords. What the super-security of the DataVault protects against is loss and theft. The thing about portable hard drives is that people carry them around. That means an increased likelihood of leaving them someplace. And if the drive you forget on the subway has confidential corporate information on it—or worse yet, confidential customer information—you’re probably out of a job, and your ex-employer’s PR staff is going to have a lot more to worry about than bloggers picking on their grammar and spelling.

So now that I have a new, stronger password on the drive, I can travel with it and use it to back up things like Quicken data and Outlook and client projects, and not worry that someone could pocket the drive and get me in trouble. (They’d have an easier time breaking into my laptop, but a much harder time fitting this 17-inch monster inconspicuously into a pocket.)

Another thing that makes the DataVault a good drive to travel with is its shockproof design. Rather than make the drive paper-thin, Buffalo put shock absorbers and plenty of air space around the drive. (I imagine that helps with cooling, too, though the drive does get warm to the touch.) It’s still less than an inch thick and seems fairly dainty to me, but can reportedly survive a fall of 50 inches. One presumes that’s while it’s not spinning; it seems unlikely anyone would be attaching it with a 50-inch USB cable in any case.

I have not tested this claim myself. Perhaps I should, for the sake of thoroughness, but I’m hesitant to mistreat equipment—or damage the wood floor, for that matter.

The DataVault mounts like a U3 stick: Windows interprets it as two separate drives, one of them a “CD drive.” I hadn’t thought about that when choosing a name for the drive, but it worked out anyway. Since the “CD” partition calls itself “Utility,” designating that as drive “U” and the data partition “V” was a fairly obvious move. I already have a “D” drive and an “M” drive, so it’s “V” for “vault” and into the Who’s Who in Classical Mythology for some inspiration on naming.

I ended up calling the drive Vesta, for the Roman goddess of the hearth. The Vestal Virgins not only had a small, charming temple in the middle of Rome, but they guarded wills and other important documents. Plus there are all those literary associations between virginity and unbreached walls.

As far as utilities go, I had expected something more like U3 or Ceedo, but this particular DataVault drive, at least, came with the SecureDisk Tool, TurboUSB for maximizing connection speed, a couple of PDF manuals and an Adobe Reader installation package, and Memeo AutoBackup.

Of course, the DataVault is designed to be plug-and-play with both Windows machines and Macs, and U3 only works on Windows. This could have something to do with the fairly primitive 1990s-style menu of options.

Since I had already installed Memeo along with the LinkStation Mini last week (and more on that in another post), I just created a new backup job. This time I decided to check out the “smart picks” backup option, which finds and backs up files by type. Even though I checked all the obvious types of files on my C drive, the total only came to about 6 GB, and Memeo found and copied them in sprightly fashion. (Maybe that TurboUSB stuff really works.)

I’d say that there’s a good likelihood I’ll bring Vesta with me on my next trip, instead of either of my other two portable drives. (Hmm. Maybe I should call that FreeAgent Go drive “Freya.” Somehow it escaped getting a proper name.) For one thing, Vesta only needs one USB port, and the others need one each for power and data transfer.

That’s all the time I have for playing with toys this morning, but I’ll be reporting back in with more details about Memeo and the LinkStation Mini.

Technorati Tags: Buffalo Technology,DataVault,LinkStation Mini,Memeo AutoBackup,Ceedo,U3,TurboUSB,FreeAgent Go

The World’s Cutest NAS Drive: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-13-08

2008-06-13T15:59:00.001-07:00

There are advantages to being a blogger. The main one is that people give you Free Stuff because you’re part of the media—and when you’re not actually a journalist, you don’t need to have any qualms about keeping said Free Stuff.

Last night I got to meet my BFF Jay Pechek (the man who sent me the free hard drives in ’06 and ’07) in person, along with his new boss at Buffalo Technologies. When your favorite tech PR guy changes jobs, it means new toys to play with.

Enter the charmingly petite LinkStation Mini. It’s a fraction of the size of my Maxtor Shared Storage II, and does the same thing. Admittedly, the one I got is only a 500 GB model, but there is a 1 TB model with just as much storage capacity as the MSS-II, which is approximately the size and weight of a cinderblock. You can see the two side by side for comparison here:

That’s the difference between starting with two 3.5” drives and starting with two 2.5” drives. And then there’s the fan, or rather the lack of one. Notebook drives rarely get as hot as desktop drives, because they don’t spin as fast. (These are 5400 RPM drives.) Instead of putting a fan into the LinkStation Mini’s case, Buffalo’s engineers designed the housing with a heat sink between the drives and plenty of ventilation on the sides and back.

Not having a fan means the LS Mini is quiet, and also that there’s nothing drawing dust and cat hair through those nice big ventilation grilles. (Theoretically. In actuality, nothing is proof against cat hair unless it’s airtight, and possibly not even then.)

The normal reason for using 2.5” hard drives is to allow for portability. It’s unlikely, however, that even I would pack a NAS drive along on my trips. However, I could fit six of the LS Mini into the space occupied by the MSS-II. That means people who don’t have room for a cinderblock on their desks can still use network storage.

I have seen Apple’s Time Capsule. (My stepmother has one.) It’s got that sleek white Apple look to it, and it doubles as a wireless router, which is a neat trick. But while more elegant than the MSS-II, it’s still substantially larger than the LinkStation Mini.

Buffalo hasn’t quite mastered idiot-proof simplicity the way Apple does. Basic setup of the LinkStation Mini is easy enough—plug it in, connect it to the router, turn the power switch to “on,” and insert the setup CD. But despite the fact that it told me it had installed the Memeo backup software, it didn’t; I had to go into the CD and manually install that. And I’m still working out the Web Access setup. (Heck, I’m still recovering from going out with the Buffalo PR team—and I don’t even drink.)

This was my first encounter with Memeo’s backup software. One thing I noticed right away was wide array of specific backup destinations, including iPods, USB keys, and Memeo’s own online backup service. In this case, I wanted my new network drive, L, and had no trouble choosing it as a destination.

Having a new NAS drive gives me the opportunity to back up my D drive: the second internal hard drive on my laptop, the one which contains recent backups of business files and a number of other things as well, like fonts, icons, and sound effects. While drives other than “C” are normally excluded from backups, it was easy enough to remove the exclusion and set up a backup from D to L. Backing that drive up is something I’ve done manually when I’ve done it at all, so this will be a good thing to have.

The initial backup of this nearly-full 80 GB drive is taking a long time, in part because it’s running in the background and in part because there are a lot of small files in there, and nothing slows down a network like hundreds of small files. (Except thousands of small files, I guess.) Plus, while the LinkStation Mini is equipped for gigabit network connections, I don’t have a gigabit network card in my laptop, so I’m restricted to ordinary 10/100 transfer speeds (slower than USB hi-speed).

And speaking of things that run in the background, my system tray is getting ridiculously crowded with all these assorted backup drives and utilities: NASNavigator, Memeo, Mozy, FreeAgent Launcher, and Maxtor Status Icon. It’s got to be safe to shut some of these down when backups aren’t actually running, though the biggest drain on functionality seems to come from AVG Free version 8, which puts tentacles into places previous versions kept themselves out of, like Firefox.

Stay tuned for future explorations of some of the more advanced features of the LinkStation Mini.

Technorati Tags: Buffalo Technology,LinkStation Mini,Memeo AutoBackup,Maxtor Shared Storage II

Back Up with Personality: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-06-08

2008-06-06T12:59:00.001-07:00

It’s been less than a year since I reviewed Universe Point’s ION backup—and more than a month, I confess, since CEO Jeff Snader asked me to check out the latest version.

ION’s big selling point is monitored backups: if something goes wrong with your backup job, ION will tell you about it. This is a good feature to have; it keeps you from learning the hard way that your backups are no good. Finding out about the error right away lets you fix the problem and re-run the job. And no, ION never sees your data.

Okay: monitoring is a great feature. Most SOHO backup programs don’t provide it. But that’s not what I want to write about here.

What strikes me most about ION—even more in version 2.5 than in the pre-release version I evaluated in 2007—is the user interface. Every screen contains prominent links to additional help, as well as clear instructions for every step in the process of creating and running backup jobs.

And not only was the documentation written in simple English, but the author clearly has a sense of humor. Error messages say “Uh-oh” and “You’re not listening!” Tabs have titles like “Name Time” and “The What.”

Of course, this did rather tempt me to name my test backup “Fred,” but I settled for “test.”

Under “The What” (that is, what to back up), the three options are “Common choices,” “Choose Files,” and “Outlook.” I opted for “Outlook” and found two very important options there: “Close Outlook before backup” and “Restart Outlook after backup.” This is because Outlook “locks” the PST files and it’s not possible to copy them when Outlook is running. (And Outlook has this pesky tendency to keep running even when you think you’ve shut it down, too.)

Checking these boxes not only saves you the trouble of closing Outlook down manually (something you’ll likely forget to do if you have automatic backups scheduled for times when you aren’t using the machine), it makes successful backups a lot more likely.

The first time I tried to run this job, I got the “license expired” warning above, but when I tried it again this morning, it worked with impressive speed. I’d selected my network drive as the destination for the backup, and ION copied 899.58 MB in two minutes and 37 seconds—which seems a lot faster than when I copy the same amount to a USB drive using Replicator. (I’ve never actually clocked that, though, so it might just be my perception.)

The shut-down and restart worked fine, too. I was in the middle of answering a message from Jeff Snader when I decided to test the backup, and Outlook saved my draft just as it would have if I’d shut the program down myself. It was simple and painless.

ION duplicated my file and folder structure when making the backups, which can be annoying to me as a human, given the places Outlook buries its information, but does make it clear where all those files should go when restored. (There’s also an option to store your backups as .zip files, but I presume the file structure is still preserved within that .zip file.)

ION seems like a great tool for the technophobe, while retaining enough features and options to be attractive to the geek. The available online support is tremendous, and the humor demonstrated throughout the website is a nice change from the humdrum tedium of most Windows programs.

I’ll be playing with ION a bit more over the next weeks, and I’ll report later on features like backing up your work data on your home computer (note: do not do this without your employer’s permission).

Technorati Tags: Universe Point,ION backup,monitored backups,Outlook backup

System Restore Can Save Your Skin, but Not Your Data: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-30-08

2008-05-30T07:37:00.001-07:00

Last week I did something impulsive: I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3. None of the problems I'd heard mentioned seemed to apply to anything I was running.

Microsoft does warn you to back up before installing SP3, but I didn't feel like taking the extra hours required for a complete drive image, and I knew all my data was already backed up. This was, of course, not the best time to start getting lazy, but it was well into the evening, which meant that not only would it have been very late by the time the drive image completed, but my brain had obviously shut down for the night already.

The first thing I noticed after rebooting was that StyleXP, a program I've used for years to manage the “theme” that determines what Windows looks like, no longer worked. I checked, and while there was an upgrade for StyleXP, it still wasn't compatible with SP3. Well, okay—I could live with using the Windows XP theme if I had to. It doesn't look too bad in silver. (But we will pass over the trouble I got myself into by trying to apply a theme that would no longer function, until I managed to fumble my way through uninstalling StyleXP.)

The kicker came the next morning when I went to update the podcasts on my MP3 player. I have a fairly old Sansa m230 that still works fine with the audio podcasts I listen to. I bought it in 2005, and since I haven't managed to destroy it yet, haven't seen a need to replace it.

After I installed SP3, Windows refused to admit that the Sansa existed. (Normally it shows up as drive S.)

That was enough for me. Time to ditch SP3.

This time, I made a drive image first. It took almost 3 hours, which the magic of blogging can compress into a single short sentence.

Then I started up System Restore. This handy program, which saves snapshots of your system state, lives in Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools (or does if you haven't rearranged your Start Menu). When you start it up, it gives you two choices: “Restore my computer to an earlier time” and “Create a restore point.” Windows automatically creates restore points once a day and when you install and remove software. I selected the restore point for the SP3 installation and away we went.

Presto! StyleXP was back, along with my preferred theme, and I could connect my MP3 player. All was well.

I realized, however, that I should probably clear out my old restore points; these get to taking up a lot of space, and can also harbor viruses if your computer has ever been infected.

In the course of doing this (go into My Computer | Properties | System Restore and turn off System Restore) I discovered that System Restore was in fact monitoring four drives: the C drive where my system lives, plus drive D (my second internal drive), Drive F (the FreeAgent Go) drive, and Drive M (the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini).

There is no earthly reason to have System Restore monitor a drive that has no operating system installed on it. (Or if there is, I never heard of it.) So I have now turned off monitoring for those drives, and freed up space there, too.

System Restore is a handy thing to have. You just can't rely on it to save your data. It's only interested in your system state, and doesn't do anything at all to protect your data.

Drive imaging software like Ghost, TrueImage, or Safety Drill (and now Time Machine for the Mac, which my stepmother has started using along with the Time Capsule I'm using to connect to the Internet while visiting Cleveland) preserves both system state information and data. If you want to be able to restore everything just the way it was, quickly, this kind of software is a good thing to have. Creating a drive image (at least in Windows) can be a lot more time-consuming than creating a system restore point.

But trying to re-create your data can be a lot more time-consuming than re-installing your software, too.

Wherever you go—back up. Even on vacation.

Technorati Tags: System Restore,TrueImage,Norton Ghost,Safety Drill,Time Machine,Time Capsule

Putting the Humor Back in Backups: FileSlinger(TM) Backup Reminder 05-23-08

2008-05-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

Is this the late-late-early show or the early-early-late show? Looking at my calendar and asking myself what the chances are that I'll manage to write a second column by Friday (when I have to get up at 4:30 AM to get ready for the BACN meeting at 7:30 AM), I decided just to post-date this and send it out now.

Last week TechTarget sent me a link to an “e-zine.” I don't know why they called it that; there's no sign that you can subscribe and get new issues. It's essentially a white paper and probably the reason I got a phone call and an e-mail message from a hapless salesperson at ASEMPRA whose marketing department doesn't know enough to put a “Don't contact me” checkbox on its download forms.

Anyway, the white paper is called “New Tools for Better Backups,” and, like most white papers, it focuses on enterprise technology: deduplication, storage resource management, VM (that's Virtual Machine) Backups. The kind of thing that gives most of the folks who read this blog a serious case of My Eyes Glaze Over.

But in the midst of these articles was a full-page ad for the latest installment from the Backup Trauma Institute:

“Are you looking to gain control of your company's digital information?

“Or maybe your sanity?

“Well, you're in luck because now you can get ‘Friendly’ advice from a professional who's truly passionate about helping you manage your data — Dr. Harold Twain Weck. That's right, John Cleese is at it again as Dr. Twain Weck to give you friendly advice on your most critical digital information protection and storage challenges.”

First, if you've never visited the Institute for Backup Trauma, go check it out. This award-winning campaign for LiveVault's Continuous Data Protection services appeared in April 2005. It makes two major points: how much trouble a company can be in without reliable backups, and how problematic tape is as a backup medium.

Three years later, Iron Mountain owns LiveVault and John Cleese is dispensing advice of dubious friendliness regarding some important questions about compliance, security, and whether there is, in fact, a mountain of iron. My favorite question is “How can I get our executives in trouble?” but my favorite answer is “How do I keep Mr. Wiggles from destroying electronic evidence?” That one expounds on some really creative ways to destroy a hard drive.

Even though Iron Mountain's solutions are aimed at the enterprise and may not be immediately useful to you, the Friendly Advice Machine is an entertaining diversion—and one that makes me glad I don't have to worry about compliance, discovery, and managing millions of e-mails.

Technorati Tags: Iron Mountain,LiveVault. John Cleese,Friendly Advice Machine,Backup Trauma

Thanks, Mom: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-08-08

2008-05-12T19:41:00.001-07:00

Yes, this Backup Reminder is late. Sort of like my Mother's Day card. It's getting to be a habit, and not a good one. Part of the problem is that it seems to take me so much longer to write my own e-zine than to write a blog post for a client. Those rarely take more than half an hour, including research. The Backup Reminder rarely takes less than an hour, often not including research.

Not being entirely without filial piety, I phoned my mother yesterday afternoon. She got a computer a few months ago and has been faithfully reading my Backup Blog and discovering all kinds of things she never knew.

Mom had a great suggestion: to re-post earlier editions of the Backup Reminder when I was pressed for time or didn't have a good subject in mind. I've known podcasters to do this: just repeat the first season instead of recording a second season. It works fine for those who didn't start listening until near the end of the first season anyway. And there are only a handful of people who actually read the first year's backup reminders, because it's a small mailing list and I didn't start posting them on the blog until 2005.

There is one small problem, however. Technology changes fast. Recommendations I made in 2003 may be totally irrelevant now. Nevertheless, in looking over some of my earliest posts, I did get something of a sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same. (I usually prefer to say that in French, but I'm not going to attempt the diacritical marks here, and anyway, it is kind of pretentious.)

I thought what I'd do instead was look at some of the older posts and produce updated versions. Today we're going back to April of 2004, to talk about the Iomega REV drive.

So what did I say about the REV drive in 2004?

Iomega, the maker of my venerable 100-MB parallel ZIP drive, is now offering a Removable Hard Disk System (which it calls the REV). The drive (available either as an external USB 2 drive or an internal ATAPI drive for desktop PCs) takes 35 GB removable disks and claims to be 7 times faster than tape backups.

At $350 for the drive and $60/disk, it's not an inexpensive solution, though the drive ships both with Iomega Backup Pro and Norton Ghost. The REV system claims to be more cost-effective than DDS-4 tape backups, but if any of you are currently using, or considering investing in, tape backups, it's news to me. The REV system also suffers from the same problem that Iomega's ZIP and JAZ do: although you can transport a lot of data on one disk, only another REV drive can read it.

My 100 MB ZIP drive died years ago, and everything I used to have on ZIP disks in now on CD, DVD, my network drive, or all of the above. But Iomega has just announced the latest iteration of the REV: a 120 GB removable drive available with either an external or an internal enclosure, with Dantz Retrospect Express (not one of my favorites, last time I looked at it) pre-installed to help you make your backups.

The problem with the new REV drive, as Stephen Withers writes in ITWire, is the same as the problem with the old REV drive, and all of Iomega's proprietary storage solutions. It's expensive for what you get, and there's no obvious advantage over the alternatives. And unlike an ordinary external hard drive, you can't just connect it to any computer: you need a working REV drive to restore the data.

All of which makes it faintly amazing that Iomega continues to produce removable drives. They do also sell network drives and ordinary external hard drives (some of them rather cute), and even a drive designed to work with you Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. I liked my ZIP drive, mind you, but I like USB thumb drives and 2.5" external hard drives a lot better. They're more portable, more compatible, and less expensive.

Technorati Tags: Iomega,REV 120 GB,ZIP drive

I’m Crushed: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-02-08

2008-05-04T08:50:00.000-07:00

I thought I knew what I was going to write about for this week's reminder. A few days ago, someone contacted me (through the Podcast Asylum, natch—perhaps I need to make my FileSlinger™ e-mail address easier to find on the Backup Blog) to ask about online backup, which has been the theme of the past couple of weeks.

The specific problem, however, involved an intersection of factors I don't know enough about to explain: Vista x64, Office 2007's .docx format, and Mozy, or rather why Mozy didn't seem to want to back up .docx files from a Vista x64 PC.

I don't use Vista, and don't plan to, at least not for as long as I have this particular machine. The Ur-Guru says that the x64 version isn't bad now that Service Pack 1 is available, but the overall Vista adoption rate is so low that the only pressure to “upgrade” comes from Microsoft. (Even the Ur-Guru only has it installed on one system, and that's only because the software he develops has to work on it.)

As for Office 2007, while the Ur-Guru has been using it happily for some time, none of my clients use it, and I would be creating more problems than I was solving if I switched now. So I don't know much about the new .docx format for Word files which Office 2007 for Windows shares with Office 2008 for Mac, except that it's based on XML. And while I found a number of articles and blog posts talking about the difficulty people with older versions of Office have opening .docx files, I didn't find anything that would explain why uploading them through an online backup service should be a problem.

Likewise, I found some “don't use Mozy” stories from a few dissatisfied customers who had experienced file corruption or other problems, I didn't notice anything specific to Vista. So that was the end of that idea.

This morning, however, while catching up on my C|Net newsletters, I saw an item in Gearlog that I couldn't pass up mentioning: EDR's Hard Drive Crusher, billed as “a new spin on destruction.”

Though this is by no means a data security blog/e-zine (blogzine?), I have mentioned before that if you are giving away a computer or a hard drive, you want it thoroughly erased. There have been special shredders for CDs and DVDs at least since I wrote about destroying outdated backups in 2003. And computer recycling facilities have powerful electromagnets designed for completely wiping the data off any magnetic drive.

The Hard Drive Crusher is not a home-office solution. For one thing, it weighs 85 lbs. For another, it costs $11,500. Even the Ur-Guru doesn't go through enough disks in a year to make it a sensible purchase. But it's the kind of thing your local electronics recycling center or data protection service might want to invest in, and let you use for a small fee if you don't think a magnetic wipe or repeated overwriting of the drive is sufficient.

And it has to be a pile of fun to operate if you're suffering from computer-induced frustration.

Technorati Tags: Hard Drive Crusher,Mozy,Gearlog,Aleratec,Vista x64,docx

Jumping on the Online Backup Bandwagon: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-25-08

2008-04-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

Everyone seems to be jumping on the online backup bandwagon these days. Enterprise software giant EMC bought SOHO online backup provider Mozy a while back. Now EMC is flogging Mozy Enterprise for all it's worth. I've received links to no fewer than four white papers about Mozy Enterprise, the first of which boasts a provocative title: “You're Not as Backed Up as You Think.”

EMC is coming late to the online backup game, and has the likes of LiveVault (bought by Iron Mountain in 2005) to contend with for the enterprise market. (Though there's a difference between LiveVault's Continuous Data Protection, which updates files as they change, and Mozy's scheduled backups.)

Most of the new online backup providers seem to be targeting the consumer and home-office market, however. I've written before about Mozy Home, Carbonite, and other online backup providers. Do a search for “free online storage” in Google and you'll be overwhelmed with possibilities. (Tip: read the reviews, and the fine print of the license agreement, before signing up with any of these services.)

The amount of storage space you get for free is usually modest even for a home or home office user, and certainly not suitable for the enterprise. But there are more and more home users producing data that needs backing up, and more of them have high-speed connections, so everyone wants to be in on it.

There's Dell's DataSafe™, now offered free with the purchase of a new Inspiron or XPS notebook. The first two types of files they recommend backing up are photos and music, followed by Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slide shows. 100 GB of storage costs $119.00 per year, which doesn't dent the small-business budget too much. It isn't clear whether it's possible to back up more than one computer to a single DataSafe™ account, but I suspect it's not. (This is also true for Mozy Home.)

If you want to back up your network drive online, you probably need either an enterprise product or a geeky homemade hack to upload the files to a server. My own network drive, to which all three of the computers in my household (my two laptops and my housemate's desktop) back up automatically, backs up to a USB drive. I shudder to think how clogged our cable connection would get if I tried to send 617GB up that 6Mbps connection every week.

But I digress. (Gosh, how unusual.)

Not to be outdone by its rival, HP has also launched an online backup service, HP Upline, complete with glossy website. It even offers multi-user options. Unfortunately for HP, Upline suffered a week of downtime, with security issues for good measure. TechCrunch and its readers had some fairly pungent things to say about that, and one wonders whether the service will survive the bad publicity long enough to establish credibility. I can't see myself signing up for the one-year limited-storage free trial.

Computer Technology Review provides a good overview of what an organization should look for in an online backup service. While not all the same considerations apply to home and home office users, it's still worth reading the article before signing up with a service provider.

Online backup is a good supplement to your other backup methods. Unless you can guarantee that you'll always be able to connect to the Internet in the middle of a data loss crisis, however, I wouldn't rely on it exclusively. Especially if it's free.

Technorati Tags: DataSafe,HP Upline,Mozy Enterprise,LiveVault. Carbonite

More about the Cloud

2008-04-20T10:53:00.000-07:00

The Ur-Guru has kindly pitched in with some sources for the use of “the cloud” to mean the Internet. (He had the sense to look in more places than Wikipedia, which has a pretty confusing entry.)

PC Magazine has a dictionary entry defining cloud as a network infrastructure and showing a diagram using a cloud symbol, while Infovark describes the Internet as a cloud of clouds, with a pretty CGI rendering that looks like nothing so much as a star cluster. Certainly it's not a nice, neat, geometric shape.

Just as you always suspected, the Internet is unruly, chaotic, and not particularly linear.

Is Your Data Safer in the Cloud? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-18-08

2008-04-20T09:38:00.001-07:00

The other day I attended a presentation by someone who works for Google Sites, the new incarnation of JotSpot. He told a story about how he'd dropped his laptop and had to replace it, but it didn't matter, because the presentation was “in the cloud” and he could get to it from any computer that had an Internet connection.

In this case, “in the cloud” means that it's on servers at Google. More generally, the phrase refers to data stored on hosted applications. I'm not sure where clouds come into it; somehow I think of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and probability clouds, but that's probably me mis-remembering high school math and science. Naturally, if you're sitting at a computer in your home or office and your data lives on a server at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wordpress.com, Typepad, or somewhere like that, then there's a lot of information moving back and forth whenever you edit those documents, and some of it gets transmitted by satellite through literal clouds.

Anyway, the etymology doesn't matter for the purposes of this backup reminder. What matters is that even the storage and processing capacity of personal computers increases, hosted services proliferate, meaning that more and more people keep quite a bit of data “in the cloud.”

We talked a few Reminders ago about how hard it can be to back up your data if some of it is in Facebook and some on TypePad and some in your Google Reader account and some in your Yahoo! Mail account and so on. But there's also a positive side to not storing data on your own computer. The server rooms at Google, Yahoo!, and your own web hosting company are almost always better designed to resist theft, fire, and hardware failure than what you have at home. Data centers have security guards, sprinkler systems, and Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks locked into air-conditioned cages—much tougher for someone to walk off with than your laptop.

On the other hand, if you get cut off from your Internet connection for some reason, you can't get to any of your data. Back when I was in college, I used the university mainframe for word-processing, e-mail, and chat. (Swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, anyone?) The computer center was full of “dumb terminals:” screens and keyboards designed to let you log into the mainframe, wherever it was, and use the programs it ran. If you wanted your own copy of anything from the mainframe, you had to ask for a tape of it. (I never did, which I sometimes regret, except that I doubt I could ever have gotten the data off it.) If you wanted to print something, you sent a command to the laser printer and then went to the print window to pick it up in an hour or so.

And if the mainframe went down, there would be a few dozen students sitting around in the computer center, and more scattered across the campus, who were unable to do any work at all. (The first thing to do when walking into the computer center was to look at the handwritten status board to see whether it said "Up and Running.")

Some of today's hosted services do let you work offline, and then sync up as soon as they have a connection. But before you decide to keep all your data online, you need to be sure you can get to it when you need to. That almost certainly means having more than one way to get online.

And, of course, you have to be willing to expose that data to the people who work for Google, Yahoo!, and the like. Google probably knows more about us than we know about ourselves already, but that doesn't mean we want to turn everything over to them. (Are they reading your mail? Probably not, but they're sharing a lot of information about your online behavior.)

It can be a sensible precaution to keep very little data on any device that's at frequent risk of being lost, stolen, dropped, or having coffee spilled on it, but that's not the same as putting all of your data online and using your $3000 Vaio as a dumb terminal. If you're going to do that, you might as well get a $300 ASUS Eee instead.

Technorati Tags: Google Sites,cloud computing,Asus Eee,hosted applications

Why It’s Worth Writing About Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-11-08

2008-04-13T11:49:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I upgraded several of my blogs/sites to WordPress 2.5. (If you're a WordPress user, I recommend that you do this also. Be sure to back up your blog first—the whole thing, not just the database.)

One thing I noticed in the course of doing this was that I really have very few posts/articles about writing. Indeed, many of the posts that started out on the Author-ized Articles blog were actually about podcasting, and I've moved them over to the Podcast Asylum site. Fifty-odd posts about writing and publishing versus more than 300 on backup is a pretty dramatic ratio. If it's as a writer and not a computer consultant that I want to establish myself, shouldn't the proportions be reversed?

The answer to that would be “absolutely,” but for a few points:

There are many e-zines and blogs about different aspects of writing and publishing.
Almost no one writes about backup.
I didn't actually start writing this Backup Reminder in order to make money.
It's useful to demonstrate that I can write about a boring technical subject in an accessible way.

I started reading Podcasting for Profit the other day. One of the first points author Leesa Barnes makes is that you need specific, measurable goals for creating a podcast. Reading that reminded me that this Backup Reminder didn't come about because of any kind of strategic planning on my part. I started without having very clear goals, which makes it kind of difficult to tell whether it's worth continuing. How do you know whether you're successful if you don't know what success looks like?

Though I heard a lot about the value of e-zines for marketing in the first few years (before I had the blog to host the archives), I didn't start the Backup Reminder as a way to market my services. My motive in writing about backup every week was to spare my clients the trauma of data loss. I was still masochistic enough to do tech support work in those days, but I ran into one too many situations where I couldn't save the client's data. It's heartbreaking when that happens. And even when you can get the data back, it's back-breaking labor. Much easier to help people set up their backup systems than to attempt data recovery.

So I suppose one way to define success would be “When all my friends and clients have (and use) working backup systems.” If I achieved that goal, then maybe I could move on to doing something else.

And, indeed, many of my past and present friends and clients do now have backup systems in place, whether or not I was involved in creating them. (I just sent out a message asking them.) But what about future friends and clients? And what about the fact that we all have more types of data to back up, and more options for doing so, than we did five years ago? I still hear tales of woe from people who thought they had backups and people who never knew they needed them.

There's always going to be a need for someone to spread the word, and no one else seems to be volunteering. Sure, there are tons of white papers about enterprise backup, storage, and data protection systems. And there are increasing numbers of products available for the small office/home office computer user, plus at least one site dedicated to reviewing backup products. But nothing quite like this.

Am I really providing a valuable enough public service to make it worth putting in so much time and effort? I usually enjoy it, but there's no question there are other things I could be writing which would bring me greater financial rewards (like a couple of post's for a client's blog, which need to be done today). I'm not arrogant enough to think that writing an e-zine with a small subscriber list and a 20% open rate is going to make the world safe from data loss.

But it might mean fewer tales of heartbreak from the people I know personally. And it does mean that if my readers lose their data, it won't be because they didn't know they were supposed to make backups.

We’re Number 205

2008-04-13T10:17:00.001-07:00

I got a message yesterday saying that the Backup Blog ranks #205 on Wikio's list of top business blogs. (That means if you go to their top blog list, you won't see it, because that only shows the first 100.)

Even to rank 205th among business blogs is pretty good when your topic is something as un-sexy as backup, so I figured I'd go ahead and add the code for the Wikio vote button to the blog template. It's always nice to get some recognition. (Of course, they didn't say what the total number of blogs is, so it could be that this one is number 205 out of 206.)

The message explained the Wikio ranking system as follows:

“The position of blogs in their Wikio ranking depends on the number and value of links that other blogs point toward them. The value of these links depends on the ranking of the blog publishing them. So in our algorithm, the value of a link published on a highly ranked blog is more important than a posted link on a blog with a lower ranking. This way, we hope to produce a ranking more representative of blogs' influence.”

That would suggest that there are at least a few influential blogs that link to this site. Blogger doesn't provide a nice list of those the way WordPress does (one reason I'm considering switching platforms), so I'm not sure which ones (apart from TechDispenser and TechTarget, anyway). Personally, I'm happy to get links from anyone who thinks the site is useful.

Technorati Tags: Wikio,TechTarget,TechDispenser

A Backup Battery for the Battery Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-04-08

2008-04-03T20:23:00.001-07:00

I've mentioned battery backups—that is, Uninterrupted Power Supplies which provide electricity when PG&E decides to stage a rolling blackout—once or twice in the past. This past week the Ur-Guru had an adventure with his, so I've asked him to write about it.

###

One of the things often overlooked when thinking about backups is an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). We back up our data (don't we?) but usually don't have to think about providing backup power to the computer system itself. Because I use a set of two systems to provide both frequent automated backups as well as several key services such as e-mail, web domains, etc., it's essential that these systems do not suddenly lose their power.

Loss of power on a system has the possibility of corrupting data. If a system is actively writing data to disk, a loss of power can not only corrupt the data it was writing but even the entire file system. Bad news if it happens to a “mission critical” system.

To prevent that from happening I had both the (relatively small) systems powered by APC Back-UPS ES battery powered power strips. Heavy and bulky as they are these things are essential in allowing the systems to run on battery power during a black-out or other power/current malfunction while being protected from power surges. The 10 minutes these UPS'es provide the two systems is more than sufficient for the systems to shut down properly and wait for the main current to come back on (at which point they would power themselves back up again).

However, a UPS can break down. More importantly, the batteries in these things do not last. They need replacement every 2-3 years (3-5 if you believe the manufacturer, though I suspect those numbers are not based on 24/7 use).

A few days ago one of the APC Back-UPS devices decided it no longer liked me and started yelling at me through its audible alarm. Adding insult to injury it then decided to start flashing its little lights at me to express its utter dismay of me having completely forgotten to replace the battery that decided it had been worn out. Then in a final attempt at letting me know about its unhappy state it decided to just completely break down on me (a slight tap on the device being enough to turn the power on or off, definitely not an APC Back-UPS feature!).

Two days later the second one decided that the battery needed to be replaced (not even 3 years after initially buying and installing them). Except this UPS decided it wasn't just unhappy but angry at me because instead of just sounding the beeping alarm and flashing the error lights it decided to temporarily, for about 5 seconds, pull the power from the server it was providing with current. Needless to say I'm not amused by devices that misbehave like that and considered it an attempt at intentional sabotage. I consider the act of pulling the current from my server and sending it into a straight reboot without a proper shutdown to be an act of war.

Since I had decided I wanted to start using a different machine as the main server it was a good time to get a completely new, different, and bigger UPS so I ended up ordering the APC SC1500i model (1500VA, 865 Watts), which arrived at my dealer within a few days. At close to 22kg in weight this was not the kind of device you happily carry back home. But after running some tests it is showing that it can power both of the servers for about 30-35 minutes before instructing them to shutdown. I hope this UPS behaves better than the previous two.

I would have expected the APC software, or the units themselves, to inform me when a battery would need to be replaced but alas, that never happened (even though it should), and as a result I was lucky to get away with a scare instead of a corruption on the system. But it's a good idea to not rely on software notifications and just mark down and keep track of approximately when you will need to order a replacement battery. Having one as a backup long before you're going to use it would be a waste since they'd only end up running out of warranty but getting a replacement when needed is no luxury either.

The problem, of course, with automated backups is that they run unattended and always cause disk read/write activity that could suffer horribly when the power is taken off unexpectedly. Another thing, if you're in the US and suffer from what I call “third world cabling” then you may really want to consider a backup for your power. You very likely wouldn't have to get something that you can't reasonably carry but a simple and reliable UPS that will allow your system to shutdown properly might not be a luxury item depending on your area (or in anticipation of the return of Enron). Pulling the power from a system that is writing to disk can often be harmless but it's like playing Russian Roulette with your ongoing file activity because for every dozen times it's harmless there's a decent chance of the next power loss being fatal to your data.

And don't forget about those replacement batteries when it's time!

###

Technorati Tags: APC,UPS,battery backup

Backing Up Social Networks, Part 2: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-28-08

2008-03-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Last week I talked about backups for two different Web 2.0 services: del.icio.us and LinkedIn. I chose those two because they're the ones I use the most often.

This week I'm going to start by talking about Flickr, a popular photo-sharing service that doubles as a social network. I don't post photos to Flickr myself, but the Ur-Guru does. (Yes, lots of them are pictures of me. What did you expect?)

I first noticed the existence of Flickr backup tools a couple of years ago. I had a bit of trouble understanding why you would need them. After all, the photos can't get to Flickr unless you first have them on your computer (or a camera connected to the Internet). Surely if they're worth sharing with the world, you're going to save them on your hard drive or a CD, and they'll get backed up with the rest of your data.

On the other hand, if something happened and you needed to re-upload your photos, remembering which ones you'd had there and which tags you'd used to identify each image could get to be a real challenge. That's why there are programs like Flickredit, a Java-based program for editing, tagging, uploading, and backing up your photos and their associated metadata (copyright info, title, description, tags). If you've put hours into creating this metadata for your Flickr photos, I'd recommend checking it out.

Photobucket, another popular photo-sharing site, lets its pro users back up via FTP download. Regular users can order backup CDs or DVDs from the Photobucket Store.

Enough people who belong to multiple social networking sites have expressed a desire to import their profiles without typing everything over again that there's now a Data Portability Project. There's a long list of the benefits of data portability over on the Use Cases page. They look particularly useful for people who use a lot of job-search or social networking sites.

Interestingly, however, while the list mentions transferring, aggregating, and exporting contacts and other data, it doesn't specifically address backup. If your data is that portable, however, it should be possible to port it onto your hard drive and back it up. And, of course, having the same information duplicated across several sites can also act as a backup, though if you delete something by accident, the deletion might propagate across all the sites. Which leads me to wonder whether there's an “Undo Portability Project” in the making. (Repeat after me: synchronization is not backup.)

It will take a while before the Data Portability Project produces useful results, so remember to check out the possibilities for backing up your profile information and other data before you sign up. If you need to keep your profile info in a Word doc in order to keep from having to re-type it, then that's probably what you should do. And if you can get new messages, photos, and the like from your friends as an RSS feed, remember to subscribe to your own feed in order to keep a copy.

In most cases, anything you post on these sites goes up there at your own risk, and it may well become the property of the social networking site once you put it there.

If you're an avid user of MySpace, Facebook, or other social networks, why not share your method for backing up your profile and other data—or your reason for not bothering.

Technorati Tags: social networks,MySpace,Facebook,Flickr,Photobucket,data portability

New Backup Resources from Tech Target

2008-03-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

How could anyone fail to read an article entitled “Five Signs that You Are Headed for a Backup Disaster”? Like most of TechTarget's material, this piece focuses on enterprise backup, but it's still worth reading—in particular, I'd say, the point about keeping your offsite backups up to date.

And speaking of getting your backups offsite, there's also a special report about online backup. This comes in three parts: “Online Backup is a Matter of Trust”, an “Online Backup Product Roundup”, and a podcast featuring a Forrester researcher entitled “Online Backup Addresses Specific SMB, Enterprise Needs.”

Happy reading.

Backing Up Social Networks, Part 1: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-21-08

2008-03-21T11:29:00.001-07:00

I've been using del.icio.us profligately in the last six months or so. It's a handy way to keep track of things I want to read, and things I want other people to read. But it suddenly occurred to me yesterday that whereas my Firefox bookmarks get backed up along with the rest of my critical data thanks to Karen’s Replicator, I had no backup of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

It turns out that it's just as easy to export bookmarks from del.icio.us as to import them: just go to “Settings” and check “export/backup” under “Bookmarks.”

Admittedly, the resulting HTML file is just a long list of links, rather than having the formatting provided by del.icio.us tags, but it beats losing the links altogether if you're still in the middle of using them for research. (Not that I've ever experienced a del.icio.us outage, but it's always possible.)

You can also export your del.icio.us bookmarks to an XML file by pasting the following link into your browser and entering your del.icio.us username and password: http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all. But unless you know what to do with an unformatted XML file, I'd recommend the first method.

Once I had my bookmarks backed up, I started to think about other “social” sites. I've been spending a lot of time answering (and occasionally asking) questions on LinkedIn. A few months ago I asked my network about their backup practices and got enough information to fill up a Reminder column. For today's column, I searched the existing LinkedIn Answers for information about backing up LinkedIn itself.

The easy part is backing up your connections: you can export them to a .csv (that stands for “comma-separated values,” if you wanted to pick up some additional jargon today) file and then import them into Outlook or pretty well any other contact-management program. If you go to your Connections page in LinkedIn and scroll to the bottom, you'll see an “Export Connections” button. This takes you to a page with instructions for exporting to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Mail, or Max OS X Address Book.

That's all well and good, but anyone I'm connected to on LinkedIn is pretty much guaranteed to be in my Outlook contacts already, because I'm scrupulous about not connecting to people I don't know well enough to recommend in some capacity, and if I know you that well, chances are I have your e-mail and phone number already. (And LinkedIn doesn't include phone numbers in their contact info anyway.)

I was more interested in whether I could back up my profile, my recommendations, and my answers to questions. It turns out that it's possible to back up your profile, after a fashion, by saving it as a PDF file. This includes recommendations people have written for you, though not recommendations you have written for others. You can do this with other people's profiles, as well, which may be more useful than just exporting their contact info, if also more cumbersome.

It's possible to copy and paste text out of this PDF, so having it would spare you from re-typing everything if something happened and you had to re-create your profile from scratch. And it would save you some typing if you wanted to re-use the information for another social network.

Curiously, this handy convert-to-PDF feature is not available for your recommendations or your answers. My recommendations page at least shows the full text of the recommendations I've written, so I can use the “print” function to create a PDF version. But the tab with my answers doesn't show the full text (perhaps because I'm inclined to give long answers), and if there's an option to subscribe to your own answers, I haven't seen it. (Besides, the feeds you get from LinkedIn aren't full-text feeds, anyway.) And it only shows the 30 most recent answers.

I guess I know what new features I'll be requesting from LinkedIn!

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn,del.icio.us,social networks,data portability

A Real Live Backup Scam: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-14-08

2008-03-14T15:19:00.001-07:00

It was only a few days after publishing last week's “Are You Paranoid Enough?” Backup Reminder that I heard the sorry tale of G-Archiver, a program designed to back up your Gmail account. Or allegedly designed to back up your Gmail account, anyway. A programmer named Dustin Brooks discovered that G-Archiver did something else: it sent the Gmail IDs and passwords of everyone who had downloaded it to the Gmail account of one John Terry.

The G-Archiver website claims that this was a “coding mishap” and urges users to remove the old version and replace it with a new one. This strikes me as lame both as an apology and as an explanation (I have trouble imagining how such a “feature” could find its way into a program by mistake), but at least it's better than pretending the problem never existed.

Still, I suspect that very few people who have read about said “mishap” are going to take a chance on G-Archiver again. They're probably too busy changing the passwords for their Google accounts.

Neither flaws nor deliberate scams are necessarily obvious. If Dustin Brooks hadn't decided to examine the source code using Reflector, we might all still be ignorant of the problem with G-Archiver. It takes a programmer to discover a problem at that level.

But it doesn't take a programmer to run a product name through Google and Technorati and see whether someone else has found problems. And it doesn't take a programmer to look for (or ask about) alternative ways to back up the specific data you're looking to copy.

One commenter on the original post in Coding Horror made the following sensible point:

Why would anyone pay $30 to get a backup copy of their Gmail account when Thunderbird is free? Just connect to Gmail's IMAP server, set TB to save all downloaded messages, and do a complete sync. Not only would you then have a complete backup, but you would also be able to read and send email from TB while having it synced with Gmail.

Just about any other mail client with IMAP support should also work.

Since I don't use my Gmail account for mail, I've never bothered downloading the tiny handful of messages there into Outlook, but that's probably what I'd do, since my Outlook .PST file already gets backed up at least once a day.

It seems obvious to me that an offline mail client would be the obvious way to backup an online e-mail account, but that might not occur to everyone. But if you type “backup Gmail” into Google's search box, you'll find lots of possibilities, including instructions from Google about backing up your mail with POP. (You'll also find instructions for using your Gmail storage space to back up data from your hard drive, which brings it all full circle.)

So once again, the moral of the story is, don't hand out your passwords to anyone you don't have some reason to trust, and do your homework on new products before trying them. Backups are supposed to make your data safer, not more vulnerable.

Technorati Tags: G-Archiver,Coding Horror,Gmail

Beginner’s Guide to Backup in Milpitas

2008-03-12T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Internet Wealth Group in Milpitas is hosting an Evault seminar entitled “A Beginner’s Guide to Backing Up Critical Data” on March 19th.

Given that it appears primarily to be an infomercial about Evault offerings, I'm surprised they're charging money for it, but perhaps the money goes to cover the cost of renting the space, which one doesn't have with the more typical webinars used to present such offerings.

Given the list of topics, the seminar focuses on issues for slightly larger businesses than the ones I usually address in this blog:

What critical data needs to be backed up
Challenges facing small businesses today (increase data growth, limited IT resources…)
Traditional tape backup method (steps and risks involved, data breaches in the news)
How EVault’s online backup works (simplified overview, show how easy it is to set-up, easy to restore data)
Other EVault product offerings (ProMail, ArcWare, EVaultReports)

Evault is a subsidiary of Seagate, but I have no experience with them. I do, however, feel somewhat suspicious about the Internet Wealth Group. It's not so much the 1990s logo (which suggests they can't afford a designer, a bit peculiar in a “wealth group”) as the fact that they can't spell the word “calendar.”

But hey, I'm all in favor of any kind of education about backup, so if you want to go, you can sign up here.

Are You Paranoid Enough? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-07-08

2008-03-07T12:39:00.001-08:00

Now and again I talk about aspects of data security that aren't directly related to backups. I don't do it often, because I'm not a security expert, but there's more than one way to lose your data, and stories about backup tapes stolen from financial institutions and missing laptops with confidential information on them show up in the news pretty often.

The security of your backups can be an issue for everyone. If someone broke in and stole your external hard drive, would they get everything? Most small and home office users have at least some information that shouldn't be available to anyone who finds a USB key lying on a taxi seat. So we should all take basic precautions and not make it easy for those with harmful intent.

I saw an announcement about a new service called BlogBackupr the other day and flagged it as something to investigate. As a backup blogger, I'm certainly in favor of backing up your blog. (I'm not at all in favor of that awkward name; even "Blog Backer-Upper" would be more euphonious.) Before I could check the service out, however, I saw a post from Ike Pigott warning readers about a the way any provider of such a service could abuse the login and password information for your blog.

And just in case I wasn't feeling paranoid enough after reading Ike's post, I got a link to a new white paper from Bitpipe this morning: “How to Fully Protect Your Storage Environment.” (You'll have to register to download it, if you're interested.) The section that caught my eye was “Why and How Your Storage Environment Will Be Attacked,” by Kevin Beaver.

While the guide addresses enterprise storage, a few points apply to smaller businesses and home users as well:

Storage security does not equal redundant systems and good backups. These two elements are only part of what’s going to keep your data safe and sound, so it’s important not to solely rely on them as has been done in the past.
Storage encryption is not the silver bullet. Not for data at rest and not for data in transit.

The truth is, we all have to trust someone with our data sometime. Even if you run your own web and mail servers, even if you avoid online backup services, the only way to protect your data against fire, flood, and theft onsite is to move copies of the data offsite—which means it's vulnerable in transit and at its destination. And most companies providing backup and storage solutions limit their liability pretty severely.

The malicious hackers are way ahead of most of us, too. They know more ways to attack than we're aware we should defend.

So what's a sensible person to do?

If you work with really sensitive data, it's probably worth hiring a security expert. Otherwise, take the obvious precautions. If it's small and portable (and even my twelve-ton, 17-inch laptop qualifies for that category), put a password on it. And store your passwords in a password-protected program. Don't leave your data unattended. Do provide someone in your company or family with your master password in the event you are injured or killed and they need access to your data, but make sure that person knows how important it is not to hand out that information.

Check out any storage services you're thinking of using before you sign up: search on Technorati and in places like Yelp to find out what people are saying about them. One or two negative reviews is normal, but if you find pages and pages of complaints, stay away. If a storage company is making headlines because of lost or stolen data, choose someone else.

At least most of us SOHO users can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we are just too insignificant for serious hackers to bother with. The payoff for stealing your PIN number is fairly small. The payoff for stealing millions of credit card numbers from a bank is a lot higher.

But don't let that make you careless.

Technorati Tags: BlogBackupr,Ike Pigott,data loss,security

The Hard Drive in the Sky: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-29-08

2008-02-29T07:03:00.001-08:00

Seems like everyone's talking about backup these days. Last week it was Marketing Over Coffee; this week it's Morning Announcements from Dave Jackson's School of Podcasting.

Dave had a sudden realization: if he didn't save the uncompressed (WAV) version of his audio files, he would never be able to re-edit the episodes into an audio book and sell it the way Grammar Girl is. The problem with uncompressed audio—or uncompressed anything else, for that matter—is that it takes up a lot of space.

Now Dave has seen the light when it comes to online backup:

“So I found this tool. It's called Carbonite. I've talked about it on all my podcasts because I think it's so cool. I have backed up 52,609 files on my computer—13 Gigs—for fifty bucks a year.

Here's how this works. What I'm gonna do is save this as a WAV file. Carbonite will back it up and move it offline to this great hard drive in the sky. So if not only does my computer burn down, but my CD backups and my office burn down, my podcast files are off in this hard drive in the sky. If a publisher says ‘Hey, can we take some of this and turn it into a book’ all I have to do is use their Easy Restore function and download it to my hard drive.

All you have to do is save it as a WAV file. Probably overnight, Carbonite will upload that WAV file to the hard drive in the sky, and then you can delete it off your hard drive. You've already got it saved out there in Carbonite-land.

I've never been totally sucked into a product like this one, just because it's so easy. And in my opinion, five bucks—less than five bucks—a month is affordable, because I do website design, I help people with their podcasts, I have all my customer files, and I don't have to worry about if my hard drive crashes.

My girlfriend's computer crashed about a week ago, and it just wouldn't boot up. She had all these family photos, she had the wireless router settings on there, things like that. We eventually got it back. It was kind of costly, kind of time-consuming, but if she had backed up her computer, we wouldn't have had that problem.”

(You can listen to Dave tell the story in his own voice (starting at 15:23). Quotation used with permission.)

Dave even recorded a Camtasia video demonstrating how to use Carbonite.

There are a few points to note here:

If you want unlimited online backup (which you will for those large media files), you generally have to pay, but you don't necessarily have to pay very much.
Right now, Carbonite is only available for PCs running Windows XP or Vista, but a Mac version is due out in mid-2008. You can try MozyHome Unlimited in the meantime; it's $4.95/month, so pricing is comparable.
Don't even think about using an online backup solution unless you have high-speed Internet.

Technorati Tags: Carbonite,Mozy,School of Podcasting

Backing Up Over Coffee: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-22-08

2008-02-24T12:00:00.001-08:00

It wasn't until I was listening to Marketing Over Coffee last night that the subject for this week's Backup Reminder crystallized, but the idea started with a question from Loyal Reader and Mac user Mike Van Horn:

When we buy a new Mac, the first thing we do is to “clone” the old model we are replacing. Makes an exact copy of whatever we select on the old computer, including applications with needed registration codes. Is this an example of a “hardware independent restore?” We've never done this with an intervening hard drive. It may have to go from one start up disk to another.

(It's actually not me who does this, but Matthew my Mac guru. But there's just a simple keyboard command he uses upon initial startup of the new computer.)

It's been a while since I owned a Mac (System 7.1), but John Wall and Christopher S. Penn reminded me that it's easy for Mac developers to create “hardware independent” products, because there are so few possible hardware variations in Mac land. Apple makes all the hardware and determines all the specifications. If you're developing something for the Mac, you know pretty much all the possible combinations of hardware that your software might have to deal with. Apple strenuously discourages people from running the Mac OS on anything but a Mac.

Windows, on the other hand, does not have “native” hardware. Anyone can manufacture computers for the Windows operating system, and darn near everyone does. That means people who develop disk imaging software have a real challenge in creating a product that works reliably for everyone. As the Ur-Guru said in his comment on last week's post:

The problem with restoring an image is drivers. Anything with specific drivers can/will fail. However, sometimes you get lucky and Windows sorts half of it out. You end up with a semi messed up OS with drivers failing left and right and being replaced but it does sometimes work.

Hence the differing experiences of Mac and PC users in this area. The Mac owners can gloat about it, but it's simply a fringe benefit of Apple's hardware monopoly.

So how do you clone a Mac? I found some instructions online in (of all places) the theoretical biophysics department at Urbana-Champaign. Apparently all you need is a FireWire cable and Carbon Copy Cloner, a freeware product for the Mac. You start the target Mac in FireWire Target Disk Mode, hook up the cable, mount and reformat the target disk with Disk Utility, run Carbon Copy Cloner, unmount the target disk, and reboot the machine. Voila! Your new Mac is now a duplicate of your old Mac.

For bootable Mac backups, you can also use Super Duper (extolled by Christopher S. Penn in MOC 48 as a digression from a discussion on backing up your “house list”). You can get a free version with limited functions or pay $27.95 for the full version. This is chump change in comparison to most Windows disk cloning programs.

I'm in no position to tell you which of these two options is better, since I don't have a Mac to test them with. (Anybody who wanted to provide me with one would, of course, be welcome. Bloggers are allowed to accept bribes.) If you're a Mac user, I recommend you download them both and try them out. When it's that easy to make workable drive images, you really have no excuse not to.

Technorati Tags: Carbon Copy Cloner,Super Duper,Marketing Over Coffee

Throttling ShadowProtect: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-15-08

2008-02-16T09:57:00.001-08:00

PC Magazine raved about ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1. They called it “the fastest and smoothest backups and restores of any drive-image utility on the market,” so of course I went over to StorageCraft’s website and downloaded the demo.

The demo version doesn't let you test ShadowProtect's most interesting feature, “Hardware Independent Restore,” because that requires the StorageCraft Recovery Environment CD.

What's Hardware Independent Restore? Only the Holy Grail of drive imaging: the ability to restore the image of one drive onto completely different hardware, or to a virtual machine. Most drive images, like the ones I make using Ghost 8, require identical hardware—and preferably the exact same machine you made the image from. Not just the same model of hard drive, mind you, but the same processor, monitor, optical drive, and what-have-you. Which is fine if you just had to replace a dead drive with an identical model, or if you want a quick reinstall, but not so good if your two-year-old computer just got destroyed in a fire.

The truth is, however, I'm not in a position to test Hardware Independent Restore, because I don't have enough hardware. My secondary laptop has too small a drive to fit the image of my main laptop, and I'm not about to overwrite the main laptop's drive just for the sake of testing a product. (Sallie, you have no confidence.) And though I am pretty geeky in my way, I don't keep a spare test system. So I will either have to take StorageCraft (and PC Magazine) at their word about Hardware Independent Restore, or wait until the Ur-Guru can check it out on his multiple VMs.

So what about ShadowProtect's other features? Once installed, the program presents you with a series of wizards and a fairly intuitive user interface. (At least, it seems to work and look a lot like other backup programs, and by comparison with Ghost 8, a preschooler could use it.)

One particularly cool thing about ShadowProtect is that it lets you include multiple drives in a single image. I have two internal hard drives on my main laptop, and other drive-imaging programs I've worked with can only back up one drive at a time.

For some reason, the first time I tried the Backup Wizard, it only showed me local drives as possible destinations for the backup. When I tried editing the backup job, I could find my network drive, but not connect to it. But I tried creating a new backup job just now and was able to connect to the network drive with no problem.

It was not quite as easy to make a successful backup as PC Mag's review made out, though the first error was my own fault: since I couldn't get to the network drive, I chose one of my external drives as the destination for the image, and it turned out I picked the one without any room left! (I need to go back through that drive and see what's sucking up all the space in it, besides my Safety Drill backups.)

And the error message I came back to (I had set the program to run while I ate lunch) said “failed for unknown reason,” so I had to figure out what had gone wrong myself. (The User Guide says that the log files will give the exact reason, but I'm not sure anyone non-technical would even realize there was a log file, much less check it. I'm a geek manquee and I didn't think to.)

So I started again with a new backup destination and headed off to my appointment. I got back several hours later to find the computer hibernating and another “backup failed” message. Puzzled, I tried again.

This time I noticed that the estimated time to completion was almost two days. That baffled me—especially given what the PC Mag reviewer said about fast backups. No wonder the backup failed, if the computer shut itself off for inactivity before it could finish! I canceled the backup and took a look at the advanced options to see what I might have missed.

The problem turns out to be something called “I/O throttling.” Neither the help file nor the user guide explains this terminology, but if I understand Wikipedia's article on bandwidth throttling correctly, it means restricting the amount of data that can go out at any one time, in order to prevent “traffic jams.” (I/O, by the way, stands for Input/Output.)

In ShadowProtect, not only is I/O throttling turned on by default, but it's set to 100%. As far as I can tell, what that means is that 100% of resources are devoted to moving any data besides what you're trying to back up. Small surprise, then, if it was going to take more than a day to back up my C drive.

I set the throttle to 50% and got a much more reasonable backup time: 1 hour, 30 minutes, and 9 seconds at an average of 8.86 MB/second. And this time, the backup actually completed, and I could browse through it. Everything looked fine to me, but an attempt to verify the image failed—perhaps because verification is set to 100% throttle. (And I couldn't find a control to turn it off, the way you can when making the image.)

On the basis of this very cursory examination (the program does a number of things I haven't checked out), I would recommend ShadowProtect Desktop 3.1. But watch out for that throttle!

Technorati Tags: ShadowProtect,throttling,PC Magazine,StorageCraft,drive imaging

Shampooing Your Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-08-08

2008-02-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

I don't write a lot about CDs and DVDs these days. For most things, they're kind of a nuisance as a backup medium. They've never had the drag-and-drop simplicity of floppy diskettes, and not all discs are compatible with all drives, either. My laptop can burn dual-layer DVDs, but I've never used one, and the whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle leaves me cold. I can't really blame Apple for leaving out the optical drive when they built the MacBook Air.

Nevertheless, optical discs are a good ways from obsolete. (Why “optical”? Because the data gets burned onto a disc using a laser. Hard drives, and tape on the other hand, use magnets to record data.) So when PC Magazine announced that they were giving away the full version of Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 (the newest-but-one version of the software) to registered users of their site, I decided to check it out.

At first it seemed that none of the logins I already had for PC Magazine and Ziff-Davis sites worked, but apparently the site just wanted me to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. In any case, it's easy enough to register as a user, and it's free. I registered initially because I sometimes download white papers about backup technology (and then have to explain to hapless salespeople that I only wanted them for my column).

I didn't really need Ashampoo, as I already have Nero Burning ROM. (And I blush to admit how long it took me to get that pun in spite of the logo with the Colosseum in flames—an anachronism, by the way, as the Colosseum wasn't built until after Nero died.) I haven't done a detailed comparison of the two programs, though one would expect Nero to have a few extra features to go with its much heftier price tag.

I don't use nearly all of Nero's features, and unless you're a dedicated disc creator, you probably wouldn't, either. In any case, while Nero has a backup utility, it doesn't jump out at you when you start the program. I'm not sure I even installed it when I put Nero back on my computer after the latest reinstall.

Ashampoo, on the other hand, touts the following among the hot new features of Burning Studio 6:

Multi-disc file backup and restore on CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs
Create compressed backup archives with powerful password protection
Restore archive contents to their original locations

(Curiously, the hot features for Burning Studio 7 are all to do with video DVDs and bootable discs; they don't appear to have upgraded the backup capabilities significantly from version 6.)

“Backup or Restore Files and Folders” is the second option on the main splash screen, and it's certainly easy to do. I selected the whole Podcast Asylum folder (4.5 GB, just the right size for a DVD) and clicked “continue,” and the backup proceeded along its merry way.

Not speedily, I might say. Burning the data to the DVD wasn't that time-consuming; it must have been the conversion to the proprietary .ashbak format and the data verification. The result is four .ashbak files of just about 1 GB each, and I imagine that if I'd been backing up a larger quantity of data, I'd have had several DVDs full of these 1 GB .ashbak files, rather the way my Ghost backups are made up of numerous 2 GB .ghs files.

The good and bad news about proprietary formats like this is that you have to have the Ashampoo Burning Studio software in order to restore the files. That can actually be a help, if you don't want everyone and his brother to be able to get at your data. (Ashampoo lets you password-protect the files as well as compressing them, too.) Restoring is straightforward: you can choose the backup that's on the disc in your drive or a backup from another location (Ashampoo will back up to other media than CDs and DVDs). Beyond that, your options are to restore data to the original location or to a custom location, and to overwrite files already in that location, or not.

The verdict: it works, you can get it free while the offer lasts, and if you prefer optical discs for backup, it's probably a good choice. It doesn't make complete drive images, and you can't automate or schedule it, two limitations which mean it would be a bad idea to rely solely on Burning Studio 6 for your backups. But for those end-of-year archives, it's got possibilities.

Of course, you can use Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 to make ordinary copies of files onto CDs and DVDs. To do that, you use the “Burn Files and Folders” option instead of the Backup utility. And you can do all the other usual things one gets a program like this for: copy discs, make audio CDs, burn disc images, and make video DVDs. Judging by the ratings it gets at Download.com, it does these things pretty well. I'll have to try it the next time I need to make a CD for my mother.

Technorati Tags: Ashampoo,Burning Studio 6,Nero Burning ROM

Why Ted Loves Western Digital: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-01-08

2008-02-01T07:53:00.001-08:00

This week we have a guest column from my colleague Ted Prodromou of Net Biz Experts. Ted and I are both members of the Executive Team for the Bay Area Consultants Network. For those who are interested, he's leading a series of free webinars about Web 2.0, and on February 8th, I'll be presenting about podcasting.

I thought my non-geek readers would appreciate a story that demonstrates that even IT experts suffer from computer disasters.

I'm sure you've heard it a million times, BACKUP YOUR DATA! I've heard it a million times and I've been telling my clients to back up their data for almost 30 years (am I really that old?) My friend Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch") is a backup evangelist. She is the queen of backups and constantly reminds everyone she meets to back up your data at least once a week.

Of course I backup my data occasionally. I have backup programs installed on my computer but I don't run them regularly because they take too long to run. I have tons of data on 3 computers and most of it isn't backed up regularly even though I know better.

I was running out of disk space on 2 of my computers so I ventured down to Best Buy to check out the fancy new external USB hard drives. For almost nothing I could add more disk space than I can even fill up. I ended up purchasing 2 new hard drives, one portable 320 GB drive for my laptop and a 1 TB (yes that's terabyte) drive so I could back up all 3 computers to one drive.

I ended up purchasing the Western Digital Passport portable drive that constantly syncs my data as it's created. I also purchased the Western Digital MyBook terabyte hard drive so I could back up data from all 3 computers to a central location.

I ran home and plugged in my new Western Digital Passport and instantly it appeared on My Computer. No installation hassles. Nothing to configure. Presto I had more disk space instantly. I installed the Memeo backup software that comes installed on the drive and I was syncing my data with the Western Digital Passport in less than 5 minutes.

Next I installed the Western Digital MyBook on my other computer and instantly I had an entire terabyte of disk space to play with. I configured a backup with the Memeo software and I was backing up 3 computers to my Western Digital MyBook in no time. In less than one hour I had all 3 computers backing up to my Western Digital MyBook and my primary computer syncing data to my Western Digital Passport. Unbelievable!

And as fate would have it, today I turned on my computer and Outlook wouldn't open. The PST database file was corrupt and the repair program could only salvage part of my data. I would have lost most of my email archive, my contact database and my calendar. Well I simply found the backup file on my Western Digital MyBook and I was back in business!

Thank you Sallie and thank you Western Digital. You are lifesavers!!

Reposted from Ted's Blog.

Technorati Tags: Western Digital,MyBook,Memeo AutoBackup,NetBizExperts,Ted Prodromou

Backing Up to...Paper? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-25-08

2008-01-25T16:47:00.001-08:00

After last week’s discussion about the relative merits of paper and electronic storage for text and photos, I was particularly intrigued to come across a blog post about paper as a backup medium. Someone has actually gone and invented a program that will back your data up in the form of zillions of squares of tiny black dots (90,000 per square inch of paper at 300 DPI). You can get all of about 5 KB of uncompressed data on a page if you’ve got a 600 DPI laser printer. (Inkjets don’t work as well for this.) To restore data, you need a high-resolution scanner.

Now, I can remember when a Mac’s entire operating system ran on a 4 KB diskette. And I’m sure some of you remember the days when computers were the size of a building and ran on punch cards or punch tape. But given the size of even a short Microsoft Word document these days (last week’s Backup Reminder is 57 KB), you’d be well advised just to print the file, then scan it into an Optical Character Recognition program.

So you won’t be too surprised that this program, PaperBack, was created as “an open-source joke.” But it’s a real program, and Karl Gechlik over at Ask the Admin went and tested it. He backed up a 13.7 MB program called PC Tools AntiVirus Free Edition to an 88-page, 100 MB PDF file. Is there an antonym for “data compression”?

I passed this link along to the Ur-Guru with the comment “Now that is weird.” His response (as so often) made me feel slightly foolish:

No it’s not, actually.

Do you remember how my exit-slip looked, the one I got not the last time but the one before, when I left the US? That paper thing with all those weird dots like a mashed up barcode in blocks? Same thing.

Various of those things have been used to store data as “print,” so extending it to full sheets makes sense.

Sure enough, as soon as he mentioned his travel documents, I realized that I’d seen something similar when printing my own Southwest boarding passes. (You can do a Google image search for “print boarding pass” if you’ve never seen one.)

But the next comment really surprised me:

I once wrote a tool that did something similar, trying to compress actual data into color bitmap images. The idea was to print in color and scan them back in as a backup but scanners and color reproduction was not good enough [in 1997] for the full 0-255 range of integers and as a result it wasn’t viable or practical for large amounts of data.

It was, however, very viable at 0-32 ranges of color (RGB per pixel or dot printed at up to 600 dpi) as a means of encryption and to travel with data that would not appear to be data. :-)

I’ve talked about encrypting backups occasionally, but I’ve never thought about attempting to disguise my data as something other than data. Though I will say that if I were a customs inspector and someone had a heavy suitcase full of paper printed all over with tiny black dots, I’d start to suspect that something funny was going on.

If you have a funny story about backup—or a tragic one—and would like to write a guest column for this newsletter, just e-mail me.

Technorati Tags: PaperBack,Ask the Admin

Upgrading Your Archives: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-18-08

2008-01-18T10:56:00.001-08:00

After last week's column about creating annual archives, one Loyal Reader wrote in with the following question:

Old codgers have old archives on old disks. I have disks and files going back into the 1980s. I have no computer that can read these disks. (Anyone have an operational Mac Classic that can read 256k disks?)

But even files from the late 90s sometimes come up with a "This file is unreadable" message.

What is a strategy for keeping your archives recoverable? Of course you could go back every few years and re-record them on up-to-date media. But that's a lot of trouble compared to keeping a shoebox full of old photos under the bed for decades.

And even then, sometimes you get the "unreadable" message that brooks no appeal.

What does one do? What does your panel of gurus suggest?

Before the twentieth century, there were very few ways to record data, and they didn't change often or quickly. These days, file formats and storage media become obsolete with breathtaking speed.

I'd love to hear suggestions and recommendations from readers, but I'll tell you what I've always done, and that's transfer my data onto new media once it became clear the old media were going to disappear—and sometimes just to save storage space.

For example, when I got a ZIP-100 drive back in the mid-1990s, I transferred a lot of things from floppy diskette onto ZIP disks. Some ten years later, when ZIP disks became obsolete (and my old ZIP drive started suffering the Click of Death), I transferred that data onto CDs. By that time, floppies were also nearing extinction, so anything I still had on floppy diskette also went onto CDs. Much of that data, if it's important to me, is also on one or more external drives.

And speaking of floppy diskettes: I had some of those 256K Mac diskettes, myself. And my PowerBook 145B (the first and so far only Mac I owned) no longer hand a functioning floppy drive. However, I had a friend who had a PowerBook only a little newer than mine, and she was able to put the data on high-density floppies that my PC laptop could read. Those files, too, got copied onto CD.

A few of them did get corrupted and lost along the way; I just checked one file that now lives on my NAS drive and got a warning message from Microsoft Word that I'd never seen before, about opening files in earlier versions being prohibited by my registry settings. Curiously, I can open the file with WordPad, though the formatting is messed up. This is a reminder that if the files are important, it can be a good idea to re-save them as newer versions, or to keep a copy of the older version of the software with them.

That's the strategy I have. It takes a bit of effort, but I'm not at all sure that I'd call it "a lot of trouble." Trying to do it years after the time you should have does make it more trouble, of course. (It is possible to find people with functioning "antique" computers; Charles Lee at McTek in Berkeley is one of them.) If you no longer need the data that's on the about-to-be obsolete media or in an about-to-be-unreadable file format, then don't bother.

But let's look at the ways used to preserve data prior to the era of computers. For centuries, the only way to produce even one copy of something was to write it by hand on papyrus, parchment, or clay. In the right conditions, papyrus lasts a long time, but most places don't have the right conditions. Fired ceramic is pretty near indestructible (you can break it, but not dissolve it, and the glaze doesn't fade), but not practical for long documents. Parchment, which is made from animal hide, is subject to various forms of rot. None of them is especially compact and easy to store, and all are limited in terms of the type of data they can contain.

Does anyone remember the Xerox commercial where the two monks are saved from their laborious work in the scriptorium by the photocopier? The ancient literature that remains to us today had to be painstakingly copied letter by letter (often by scribes who didn't really understand what they were writing), again and again over the centuries. Not surprisingly, these scribes frequently made mistakes; part of the job of more modern scholars is comparing these early manuscripts and trying to decide which one is correct in cases where they disagree.

If you remember that commercial, you probably also remember re-typing things on a typewriter because you made a mistake. Then came typewriters with correction keys, and those with single-line displays and memories. For all of my high school and undergraduate years, I wrote out all my student essays—and three or four novels—by hand before typing them up on whatever the technology to hand was: "programmable" typewriters in my high school days, and the campus mainframe when I was in college. (Oh, yeah, and my 160-page undergraduate honors thesis, too. I used to post the empty pens on my dorm room door. You can imagine how popular I was with my hallmates.)

Due to my own oversight, I never collected a computer tape with that work; I have only paper copies of some of it. But then, the only thing I really need it for now is nostalgia. It's true that it's easier for a human to read the printout of that thesis than it would be for my HP Pavilion laptop to read the tapes they would have given me of the mainframe data if I'd gotten them before I left Providence.

If all you want to do is look at something occasionally yourself, you may just want to print it, and then try to keep the printout in a waterproof, fireproof location. I've got a bunch of handwritten journals in a metal filing cabinet downstairs. I haven't looked at them for years, though I'm starting to be a bit curious (and to realize I no longer remember those years as clearly as I once did), so I might pull a few out. I can only hope that the paper hasn't gone moldy and the ink faded. Mildew is a terrible book killer, but so is too much dry heat. And in this case there's also handwriting to contend with. Unlike the monks in the scriptorium, I don't write in a gorgeous calligraphic hand.

And then there are photos. My paternal grandmother gave me some family photos back in 2000 when I visited her. Many of the ones of her parents when they were young were in remarkable condition. The photos of my own childhood—from the early days of color photography—were almost all badly faded. I've been able to scan them and touch up the color some, but at the time they were taken, the only way to make new copies would be to have the negatives. Negatives are rather fragile things and need to be stored carefully. The negatives for these photos were long gone. The photos themselves might be faded almost to invisibility by the time I'm a great-aunt.

You'll find that there are a lot of things you have no need or desire to keep beyond the time the IRS requires you to have them. But if there's something you want preserved for posterity, make a point of transferring it onto new media whenever you see that the old media are on the way out.

The Backup Blog Gets a Compliment

2008-01-16T16:36:00.001-08:00

Nic Darling from ION Backup, who just started writing a new backup blog in the persona of Howie Hard Drive, gave the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog a nice compliment a few days ago:

Unfortunately the topic of backup is a somewhat dry one, and it takes a talented writer to hold the attention of any reader, even those of us with a vested interest. Fortunately, my first fellow backup blogger to be recognized, is just such a writer.

According to her archives, Sallie Goetsch has been writing the FileSlinger Backup Blog since 2003. Throughout she has dedicated the blog to a weekly “backup reminder” intended to encourage readers to attend to their backups at least once a week. In this reminder Sallie gives us insights on software, hardware, maintenance, recovery and much more.

I have been reading her blog for almost a year now and have been impressed, entertained and educated. Though I myself work for a backup software company, I am constantly gaining new insights and finding new information to explore through reading her weekly posts.

Thanks, Nic!

Technorati Tags: ION backup,Howie the Hard Drive

HP Offers Course in How to Back Up

2008-01-12T14:41:00.000-08:00

Hewlett Packard is offering a course entitled Protect Your Data: Back Up to Tape, Disk, and the Network. The class is aimed at small and medium businesses. You can enroll at any time by clicking the link above.

It's Time for the Annual Archive: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-11-08

2008-01-11T14:45:00.001-08:00

This is the post I was planning to write last week, your annual reminder that you need to archive your data at the end of each year. (If your fiscal year is different from the calendar year, you should create these archives then.)

I've written about year-end backups on several occasions before. Because (as I pointed out in December 2005) these aren't really backups, I'm going to stop talking about "year-end backups" and start talking about "annual archives." At the end of 2004, and again in December 2006, I described the kinds of data that goes into one of these archives. My focus up to this point has been on archiving your data for tax purposes, so those posts address primarily financial and business data.

The need to back up--and archive--all supporting documents relating to your business income and expenses has not gone away. I've just made 4 DVDs to add to the tax box. There's one for each of my business personas (the FileSlinger, the Author-izer, and the Podcast Asylum) and one with the new promo photos the Ur-Guru took this year. (You can see some of them on Flickr.) The most time-consuming thing about making them was isolating 2007 data. In some cases I had already done this, but I haven't been completely consistent.

Once it was done, I removed all finished projects from 2007 from my C drive to make room for 2008 projects. I'm not that pressed for storage space on my machine, but it's annoying to have to look through folders for clients I'm finished with, or previous versions of documents I'm working on, when I want to get to my current work. So I use making the annual archive as an opportunity to tidy up my hard drive.

That's all business as usual. But more and more people are using computers to do more and more things. You might well want to make an annual archive even if you don't have to worry about tax audits. Here are a few examples of data that it pays to be able to save each year even if you're a student, a stay-at-home parent, or retired.

Coursework and Student Records

You might want to go back and use that essay or project for something else one day, and chances are you're going to remember it by what class you had to do it for. You might need your grades and transcripts in order to pursue an advanced degree or get a job. And you might need to provide someone with evidence that you really did take such-and-such a class. But you're probably not going to need it all on your main hard drive, and you may not even need it on your main backup drive. Burn it to a CD or DVD, label it with the year, and archive it. (Preferably off site.)

Some class projects take up more space than others. If you're studying video, you'll probably need more than one DVD per year. You might consider using an external drive to store your annual archives. Toshiba has just announced 1.8-inch hard drives with capacities up to 120 GB. I wonder how long it will take before someone comes out with a tray, rack, or box designed to store them safely.

And Speaking of Photos and Video...

Film cameras have all but disappeared. Digital cameras mean we take more pictures, because we don't have to worry about running out of film, and if they don't come out, you can always delete them. How are your photos organized? In some cases, it might make sense to sort them by subject, but if you archive each year's photos into a folder with the date, you'll have a much easier time when it comes to showing your grandchildren what you looked like in high school, or embarrassing your child by showing his baby pictures to his first girlfriend.

Also, if you take a lot of photos, your hard drive starts to fill up. Keep the best ones on your hard drive and store the rest on DVDs or an external drive. Then you won't have to look through 1000 photos to find the two you actually wanted to print.

If you use a photo-sharing service like Flickr or Photobucket, those can act as backups of the pictures you upload, as well as helping you organize them and letting you show them to other people. There are even programs to back up your Flickr photos.

E-mail and Contacts

Even if all your correspondence is personal, you might want to save it--and to save the e-mail or postal addresses of the friends and family members you write to. If you make a copy for each year, it will save you a lot of time and trouble when you decide to write your memoir or family history. Your calendar information can be useful there, too. Even if you never write a memoir, your children or grandchildren might want to know what your life was like back when. If you're like me, you forget a lot of the details.

Your Blog

Most of the blogs I read are business blogs, but many people do use blogs to write personal journals. If you think you're going to want to read what you wrote on LiveJournal or MySpace or Blogger, better make a copy of what you've posted. It's good to back these things up regularly, but even if that's too much trouble, save your blog onto a CD or DVD at least once a year. (Most blogs don't take up a lot of storage space.) If you want more details about backing up your blog, see my previous posts on the subject or do a Google search for "backup <name of blogging platform>." There are even tools like Blurb BookSmart to let you back up your blog in hardcopy format by turning it into a book, though they don't work with all blogs.

That should be enough to keep you busy for a while. Remember to store your annual archives somewhere other than the place you keep your working files: in another room, at a friend's house, in your safe deposit box.

Technorati Tags: Flickr,BookSmart,LiveJournal,MySpace,Blogger

Backups Are Del.icio.us: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-04-08

2008-01-05T09:20:00.001-08:00

I had a different post in mind for starting off the New Year, but that one is going to have to wait until next week, because I'm sick enough to have very limited brain function at the moment.

For those of you not familiar with it, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. That means that instead of creating bookmarks (a.k.a. favorites for those of you using Internet Exploder) that live in your browser, you create bookmarks that you can share with other people, and you "tag" (label) them according to subject or any other scheme that makes sense to you.

I started using del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) a couple of months ago, though I had known about it for years. (You just have to memorize that wacky URL--or bookmark it in the old-fashioned way.) One thing I've been using it for is collecting useful articles about backup that turn up in my Google alerts. So far I've tagged 74 items as potential source material for this column, and made use of a handful of them.

Today I'm going to send you over to my del.icio.us account to read some of those articles for yourself. (They're public, so you don't have to create an account or log in to see them.) If you're curious, you can do a search of the site to see who else is tagging items "backup." If you're not curious, just get on with backing up your data, and I'll see you next week.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us,tagging

Note to Buffalo: Hire a Proofreader

2008-01-03T08:27:00.001-08:00

A client of the Ur-Guru's just bought a Buffalo DriveStation Duo USB drive. Kudos to him for taking care of backups, but when he installed the software, he found something a bit less than reassuring in the dialog boxes:

In case you didn't catch it (I didn't, the first time), the RAID setup utility is asking the user to restart WiDNows instead of WiNDows. This is doubtless a typo, and while it probably doesn't indicate anything about the RAID software, it's not encouraging.

Badly written user interfaces and documentation suggest that the manufacturer is cutting corners and the product may not be reliable. If you're using free software downloaded from a small start-up site, that may not be such a big deal, but Buffalo Technology is a major corporation and the DriveStation Duo is not a cheap piece of equipment.

Hiring one editor/proofreader to polish the documentation is probably more cost-efficient than employing only programmers with fluent English, but however you choose to do it, make sure your software is literate.

Technorati Tags: DriveStation Duo,Buffalo Technology

How do YOU Back up Your Computer? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-28-07

2007-12-28T13:02:00.001-08:00

Here it is the end of another year of backups—almost time to make those special year-end copies of your important data to store with your tax records. I thought I’d do something a bit different for today’s column, so I put a question out to my LinkedIn network asking the people I know what they do for backups. (And no, this is not what “networked backups” means.)

Most of the answers came as private messages, so I won’t quote them in their entirety here, but I’ll list the different tools people are using and write a bit about each, so you can decide which ones might be good for you.

Amazon S3. The person who mentioned this isn’t using it yet; he’s got a couple of 250 GB external drives. S3 stands for “Simple Storage Service.” It’s fairly inexpensive: $0.15 per GB per month for storage, plus similar rates for data transfer in and out. Jeremy Zawdny has made a list of S3-compatible backup software, since otherwise S3 isn’t really a backup solution, just a storage solution.

Buffalo TeraStation. This is network storage for people who have serious data to back up. It supports full RAID 5 configuration, which offers protection from disk failure (unless something kills off all the disks at once), and comes in capacities up to 4 TB. It’s big, solid, and expensive: about $700 for the 1 TB version. The TeraStation comes with automated backup software called Memeo AutoBackup, about which I know nothing, but will try to find out more. If you’re a photographer, musician, or videographer, or just run an office that generates masses of data, this could be the product for you.
Carbonite got two recommendations—or was it three? It’s been around longer than Mozy, and costs $50/year for unlimited online backup. They’re working on a Mac version, but it’s not available yet. Instead of backing up on a schedule, it backs up files as they change. That’s known as “continuous data protection” and has advantages and disadvantages. One potential disadvantage is slowing down your computer; another is backing up changes that you didn’t want to make. The advantage is that you’ll never lose a whole day’s data. Also, unless you’re working on several large files simultaneously, you won’t have to wait through endless uploads after the first backup is finished.
Cobian Backup. This was a new one on me, but it turns out it’s been around for a long time. Cobian is free open-source backup software for Windows. It allows scheduling, encryption, and backup online via FTP. The user interface looks fairly similar to that for SyncBack SE and for Backup4All. I guess there are only so many ways to configure setting up a backup program. There’s a tutorial for version 7 online. (You need Internet Explorer to view it, though.)
EMC Retrospect for tape backup. Retrospect comes in a lot of flavors and is compatible with both Vista and Leopard—or so their website claims. The Express version that used to come bundled with external drives is easy enough to use, but stores your data in a proprietary format and doesn’t let you browse through the backed up files. (Norton Ghost stores files in a proprietary format, but at least there’s the Ghost Explorer to let you retrieve individual files.) The Professional version supports tape drives, which most consumer backup products don’t. I’m not a huge fan of tape, but it does provide a way to get your data off-site, and it’s still common in enterprises.
Genie Backup Manager comes with two recommendations, one from the owner of the TeraStation and one from a respected IT colleague. It comes in Home and Pro versions. Both of them seem to be pretty comprehensive tools for backing up everything on your computer to just about any medium you could imagine. The site also features a backup encyclopedia. The Home version is $50; the Pro version is $70, and the server version is $400—which is probably a good deal if you have 50 computers to back up. Windows only.
Karen’s Replicator. Yes, there is someone besides me in the world who’s a big fan of this free program for Windows file backup and synchronization. I suppose I might be slightly biased in its favor because it was created by a woman, but it’s been doing a great job of backing up my files for years now, and it’s easy to use. Very handy for copying files onto one of those USB external drives mentioned above. It’s less sophisticated than Cobian, so which you use depends on your needs.
Mozy. I’ve written about this online backup service before, and it seems it, too, has other fans out there. The free version gives you 2 GB of storage and is available for Vista, XP, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X. The Pro version is available for all flavors of Windows (including servers), but not for Mac. Pro licenses are $3.95/month plus a $0.50/GB/month charge.
USB External Drive. Given all I’ve written about such drives already, I don’t think that needs a lot of explaining. But if you have an older machine with USB 1.1, consider getting an XHD with a FireWire connection instead. (Assuming you have a FireWire port, that is. You can use an external drive for manual drag-and-drop backups or with automated backup software.
Windows Home Server. This is network storage and then some. I have read good things about WHS, and the person who uses it says it rocks. In addition to doing automatic backups of multiple computers, it acts as a media server. (Sort of like my Maxtor Shared Storage II, but more so; the interface on the MSS-II is designed for simplicity rather than flexibility.) You can install it on a not-too-old computer yourself, if you’re on the geeky side, or you can buy it pre-installed on something like the HP MediaSmart Server. The software costs about $189; the full rig about $600. There’s a good description with screenshots over at Tiger Direct. Best for those with multiple computers and lots of audio and video files.

If you use a backup service or program not listed here, feel free to post it in the comments to the blog or e-mail it to me. I’ll be happy to produce a second list. Indeed, I might try to twist the arms of my Mac-using friends to get a list of different Mac-compatible backup products that people actually use.

Meanwhile, try not to spill champagne on your hard drive when celebrating the New Year, and I’ll see you again in 2008.

Technorati Tags: Cobian,Genie Backup Manager,Windows Home Server,EMC Retrospect,TeraStation,Carbonite,Mozy,Karen's Replicator,Amazon S3,Memeo AutoBackup

We Wish You a Merry Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-21-07

2007-12-21T11:44:00.001-08:00

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, I'd like to wish you a very merry backup. As I did last year at about this time, I want to urge you to give your friends, family, co-workers, employees, clients (check all that apply), and most of all yourself the gift of backups.

Free Online Backup

If you're strapped for cash, try sitting down with your loved ones and setting up accounts for them on Mozy. Of course, the ones who just got new digital video cameras for Christmas are going to need more than the 2GB of storage that comes with a free account, but for many people, it's plenty. And it has the advantage that once you've set it up, it runs automatically and you don't have to think about it again unless you use up your storage quota or need to retrieve a file. (There are other online backup services, and I'll mention some of them next week, but Mozy is the one I have the most experience with.)

Bear in mind that the first backup with any online service will take several hours, and it's definitely not suitable for people with dial-up connections.

Free Backup Software

I remain a fan of Karen's Replicator for file backups, and also use SyncBack Free, which can be set to copy data from one drive to another whenever the computer is idle. I just recommended DriveImage XML to a client to replace his outmoded version of the now-extinct Drive Image 7. If you've got a little bit of technical know-how, you can download one of these and set it up for someone as a present.

USB Flash Drives

USB sticks (also known as key drives or thumb drives) are ubiquitous and cheap. They don't make good long-term storage, but they're still better than having no second copy of your data at all, and you can easily store them in a safe deposit box away from your office. You can also get them branded with your company logo. Your employees and customers are sure to find them more useful than pens or key chains.

External Hard Drives

Capacities are going up and prices are coming down. Large-capacity external drives make good gifts for people who take thousands of digital photos, have massive music collections, and make videos of every event in their children's lives. (For these people you might even want something that acts as a media server.) All those things can take up a lot of space.

If the intended recipient travels a lot, one of the smaller external drives like the Western Digital Passport, Maxtor OneTouch Mini, or Seagate FreeAgent Go is probably a better choice. The Ur-guru has a good half-dozen of the Passports, all in shiny (fingerprint-attracting) black. I've got one each of the Seagate and Maxtor drives. All of them come with backup software pre-installed.

Rebit

If you have technophobes with new laptops on your list, it could be worth investing in a Rebit. They're pricier than ordinary external hard drives, but they're very simple and they run continuously in the background without noticeably hindering performance. And they're cute. Like the online services, though, Rebit takes a long time to create the initial backup.

Network Drives

If you have multiple computers in one home or office, a network drive may be the way to go. I've written extensively about my Maxtor Shared Storage II (also pictured above--it's the one that looks like a cinder block). Other options include the Buffalo Linkstation and Western Digital's My Book World Edition. The My Book has a little problem with multimedia files, though: it doesn't want you to upload them to the Internet, even if you made them yourself and own the copyright.

Network drives tend to be on the expensive side, not to mention being a bit large to fit in stockings, but they can be very useful.

Merry Backup to all, and to all a good night.

Technorati Tags: Maxtor,Rebit,Western Digital,Seagate,Buffalo Linkstation,Karen's Replicator,SyncBack,DriveImage XML

What the Top 10 Data Disasters of 2007 Teach Us: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-14-07

2007-12-14T09:54:00.001-08:00

Every year Ontrack Data Recovery posts a list of the top 10 data disasters they've had to clean up after, and every year I write something about them. I noticed a big difference between the 2006 and 2007 lists, though. Four of the 2006 Top 10 disasters were damaged laptops, two were external hard drives, and three were internal hard drives from desktop machines. Only one of last year's dramatic tales involved data stored on something other than your typical spinning-platters hard drive: the SD card in a camera that wasn't as waterproof as advertised.

In 2007, only one dropped laptop made it onto the list. Instead, Ontrack was busy rescuing data stored on USB sticks and inside of cameras. There were also three external drives, up from last year, and one set of nearly-melted CDs.

So what can we learn from this change, apart from the fact that Ontrack can recover data from all kinds of storage media?

The first lesson is that data is easier to lose than ever before, because it's more portable. USB sticks are extremely handy devices, but because they're small, they're easy to lose--or to put through the wash or drop into the baby's applesauce.

The SD cards used by digital cameras and other portable devices are even smaller, so easier to misplace. (The 1 GB card that the Ur-Guru got for his MP3 player was so small it practically required tweezers to insert.) At least people are in the habit of thinking about cameras as fragile, and there are probably a lot of ways to seriously damage a camera without actually doing any harm to the data on the card.

USB sticks, on the other hand, often take the form of key chains, and people drop or throw their keys all the time, when not actually sitting on them or tossing them to the bottom of a bag. Flash drives are far better equipped to survive being dropped than drives with moving parts, but that doesn't make them invulnerable.

As for ordinary hard drives, their lives are full of danger. ION Backup's Howie Hard Drive series of videos shows a human-sized hard drive dodging traffic at rush hour, hanging out with the punks after school, and escaping the office. In 2007, Ontrack rescued data from drives that were infested with ants, dunked in acid baths, and soaked in WD-40. (No, that was not all the same drive.)

The moral of the story is, as always, treat your data with care. In particular, be kind to your backup drives. Carry external hard drives in padded cases. Consider keeping USB sticks on lanyards or clips so they can't fall onto the pavement or into the sink. (Come to think of it, this might be a good idea for your cell phone, too--my mother dropped hers in the dishwater once.) And always check your pockets before doing the laundry!

Read the complete 2007 Data Disaster List.

Technorati Tags: Ontrack,data disasters,USB sticks,SD cards,Howie the Hard Drive,ION backup

Visual Guide to RAID

2007-12-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

The Ur-Guru mailed me a copy of this image, which I've cut into chunks to fit onto the blog. It's a visual demonstration of the different RAID configurations, using water coolers. You can get the original photo on Zachary Tirell's Flickr Page.

I Can Has Backup? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-07-07

2007-12-07T09:44:00.001-08:00

You know what they say about bloggers: all we write about is our cats. This cat actually belongs to my housemate, but she's fond of sitting on my wrists while I type—which is what she's doing right now. Just in case you were wondering, cat hair is not good for your computer.

I first discovered "lolcats" about six months ago, via the online postcard service Delivr.net. If you want to waste a few hours and get some laughs, type "lolcat" into Flickr or Google image search. Most lolcats want cheeseburgers, but my lolcat, of course, wants a nice warm hard drive to sleep on. The drive in question is the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini, and it wasn't all that warm, actually, until she put her furry chin on it. Perhaps she was enjoying the gentle vibrations from the spinning drive.

I wanted to stay on the lighter side in today's backup reminder. This can be a bit challenging, because there's nothing inherently funny about backups, and nothing funny about data loss, either--at least, not when it happens to you. It took John Cleese to make lost or damaged backup tapes funny.

A while ago, the Ur-Guru sent me a link to a site called Computer Stupidities. The site collects stories about "clueless computer users." Some of them do appear to have been pretty clueless, but the mean-spiritedness of the site bothers me. The one good thing about the stories, for those who are not geeks, is that whatever stupid thing you've done, someone else has probably done something worse.

You could look at the backup stories as cautionary tales, many of them amounting to "Read the *#%@!! manual," except for one thing. Very often, there isn't a manual, or the manual is useless, or the manual is written in gibberish by someone illiterate, or the manual is written by programmers for programmers. Most people who use computers these days are not programmers.

Ignorance on a particular subject is not stupidity. The Ur-Guru is brilliant with computers, math, and physics (you have to know math and physics to develop 3D visualization software), but you should have seen his first attempts at cooking. I had to show the man how to wash carrots.

What's obvious to me isn't obvious to him, and vice versa. I remember well my mortification when he asked me why I wasn't using keyboard shortcuts on Windows, since I used them on my Mac. I hadn't known that Windows had keyboard shortcuts. I'd only started using PCs a few months before that, and then only because that's what they had in the department I was working in. So I absolutely sympathize with those people who thought all you had to do was stick the tape in, and the backup would happen automatically.

These days, many backups do happen automatically. The point of the Rebit is that you plug it in and it starts backing up your computer, and keeps doing so as long as it's connected. Many other backup programs only need you to tell them what to back up before they start taking care of business for you. As I've been composing this reminder, my Mozy backup and the backup to my Maxtor Shared Storage II have both run. There's a little green icon in my system tray telling me the Shared Storage backup was successful, and if I mouse over the Mozy icon, it tells me my files were backed up one hour ago. (Yes, I am taking way too long to write this.)

When I switched to the Mac from the university mainframe, back in the late '80s, I described it as "The world's only user-patronizing computer." I was young, snotty, and arrogant, and had developed a certain macho attitude after learning to use the decidedly user-hostile word-processing program on the mainframe. Contrary to America's Protestant work-ethic heritage, however, there's no moral value in difficulty.

Most people are using computers to help them do something else. There's no reason they should have to become computer experts. Software should not make us feel like idiots. (Kathy Sierra has written some great stuff about this.) And computer consultants shouldn't treat us like idiots. I've talked to a few tech support people in my time who took a "You shouldn't worry your pretty head about that" approach to my difficulties, and I was not amused.

Fortunately, there are also a lot of helpful, supportive, hardworking IT guys (and gals) out there. You can "has backup," and you deserve to be treated with respect and to get explanations that you can actually understand. If what you need is the product that's easiest to use, you don't have to be ashamed of it. And if what you want is the product with the most features, you should be able to get that, too. But they probably won't be the same product.

Technorati Tags: Rebit,Mozy,OneTouch 4,Shared Storage II,automatic backup,usability,lolcat

Free Chapter from O’Reilly Backup Book

2007-12-06T08:39:00.001-08:00

SearchStorage.com (which gave this blog an award last year, to my considerable surprise) is offering a free chapter from W. Curtis Preston's book Backup and Recovery, published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Though the book is aimed at IT pros working in large organizations, the basic steps Preston covers in Chapter 24 (“It's All About Data Protection”) apply to small businesses as well. For instance, everyone needs to distinguish between backup and archive and decide which data falls into each category. “Backups are the secondary copy of primary data,” according to Preston, and “Archives are the primary copy of secondary data.”

In other words, archives do not live on your main hard drive, because you need that space for your active files. But it's a good idea to have a second copy of your archives, especially if you need them for tax purposes.

So hop on over and download the file. For the geekier among you, there's a wiki to go with the book at Backup Central.

Technorati Tags: O'Reilly,Backup Central,Backup and Recovery

Finally Restored: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-30-07

2007-12-01T12:15:00.001-08:00

When I told the Ur-Guru what I was planning to write about today, his response was: “Seagate sure is getting a lot of exposure through you. :-) Hate to think what you'd write and how much if they sent you a full 100TB RAID rack.”

I'd hate to think where I'd put a 100 TB RAID rack, myself. Never mind what I'd do with it. I'm already running out of room for external drives, and I had to buy a new USB hub to keep them all connected and powered. I'm the wrong blogger for enterprise-level hardware and software, and most of my readers—the ones who send feedback, anyway—wouldn't know what to do with it, either.

But a Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive was something I did know what to do with, so when Jay Pechek (that's pronounced like “paycheck,” for those who care) of Seagate offered me one back in 2006, I jumped at it. And it worked perfectly for a year, whereupon it died rather dramatically. (You can read all about it in my “Sounds You Never Want to Hear” post from 9/21/07.)

Jay sent me a new Maxtor Shared Storage II drive (and a couple of OneTouch 4 drives for good measure) and I sent the dead one back to him so he could have the engineers see whether they could get my data back.

The inside of the MSS-II is actually two 500GB drives, and you have two options for formatting them: “spanning,” which gives you a 1 TB drive, and “mirroring,” which gives you a 500 GB drive in duplicate. I had set the old MSS-II to mirror, because I thought the extra protection against drive failure was more important than the extra storage space, and while you can back the MSS-II up onto a USB drive, I didn't have a USB drive big enough to back it up.

It turned out I'd made a good decision, since one of those drives did die, and the purpose of using RAID (which is what “spanning” and “mirroring” really are) is to protect against physical failure of the disk.

Except there was a little problem, notably the complete impossibility of opening up the MSS-II in order to switch the drives around. What's supposed to happen when the first drive fails is an automatic fail-over to the second drive and a few warning lights to let you know that one of your drives isn't working. But before that can happen, the software that controls the boot sequence of the drives has to get a signal that the drive is dead, and it couldn't get any signal at all from the drive. (That's why it was making those nasty clicking noises.) So it didn't work.

Because of that, and because I now had a 500 GB OneTouch 4 drive I could use to back up the new MSS-II, I have set the new MSS-II to span. And this was a good thing, too, because the Seagate lab was able to retrieve my data from one of the drives. Jay shipped it back to me as a shared folders backup file on a 750 GB OneTouch 4 Basic, which is black plastic all over instead of black plastic with brushed aluminum.

My first attempt at restoring the data didn't get anywhere, because the MSS-II wouldn't recognize the drive, even though it was properly formatted. A second attempt, made with some coaching from Jay, worked perfectly. It seems that even though the administration interface for the MSS-II has an equivalent to the Windows “Safely remove hardware” button, you have to power it down and restart it before it will recognize a new USB drive.

Anyway, once we'd done that, I clicked the “Shared Folder Backup” button, selected “restore,” and then chose the backup set I wanted. (In this case there was only one, which Jay had called "BackupBlog.") I then had the choice to restore the items to their original locations or to a temporary folder in the “public” share on the drive. (Each computer connected to the MSS-II has its own "share," which is accessible only to that computer, but all of them can use the "public" share.) I chose the temporary folder, and away we went.

Jay advised me to close the web-admin interface for the MSS-II and just wait until the light on the OneTouch Basic stopped blinking, because copying almost 350 GB of data takes a long time, even over a high-speed USB connection, because shared folder backups are compressed and each file has to be, as it were, re-inflated, before it's copied.

It was finished by the next day, though, so I was able to start consolidating the data. The fastest part was moving things that belonged in the “Public” folder into their proper places. As it happened, I'd had many of those things backed up elsewhere, but there were a few I was missing. I filled in the blanks and deleted the duplicates.

Restoring data to the different private shares is more time-consuming, because that data has to be copied over the network even though it's all staying on the same physical drive. (Jay may be able to explain why this is; I can't.) In addition to that, I have to go to my housemate's computer to copy data back into her share, and start up Star, my more-portable laptop, to copy data back into her share. And while the MSS-II is capable of transferring data at 1000 kbps, my router can only do 100 kbps—and Star's wireless card can only manage 11kbps. That's considerably slower than USB 2.0 hi-speed, which does about 360 kbps.

To make the job more finicky yet, unless I want to keep everything in a lump called “restored,” I have to copy files into their appropriate locations and decide whether I want to use the restored version (dating back to August of this year) or the current version. I'm discovering that as time goes on, my enthusiasm for tidily consolidating all of this data decreases, and I can see why automatic “de-duplication” is such a selling point in enterprise backup solutions.

On the positive side, doing the consolidating frees up space and means that I only have to look in one place if I need to restore a file. On the negative side, it takes a lot of time, and because there's still a ton of room left on the MSS-II, I don't have to do it. I probably will, though, even if I don't do it right now, because I tend to be compulsively tidy about my data and file folder structures.

Besides, I now have a spare OneTouch drive, but I can't convert the original OneTouch Plus (Mama Bear) for use as a Windows drive until I've restored all the data that was backed up there and go through this consolidation process again. Not that I'm really sure what I'm going to use Mama Bear for, but it makes sense to use the Basic drive to back up the MSS-II, because of its larger capacity.

So I'd probably better stop writing and get back to consolidating my data.

Technorati Tags: Seagate,Maxtor,OneTouch 4,Shared Storage II,deduplication

Revelations from a Reinstall: FileSlinger(TM) Backup Reminder 11-23-07

2007-11-26T17:24:00.001-08:00

No, I was not sleeping off Thanksgiving overindulgence instead of writing this backup reminder on Friday morning. I was just absorbed in completing my delayed-and-necessary reinstall before heading to work. I thought a late reminder would be better than none, and now that I'm finished with all but those last little tweaks that drag on for a week or two, I can pass on the backup-related lessons I've learned as a result of this adventure.

1. Set Aside at Least 3 Days

I realize that for many of my readers, reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling your operating system falls into the “Kids, don't try this at home” category. But even those who leave these things to someone else should be aware of just how time-consuming and tedious a job it is.

It took me most of one day to make a list of the software I'd need to put back on the machine when I was finished, make sure I had the most recent versions of Audacity, Firefox, Skype, Karen's Replicator, and all the other freeware programs I use regularly, download all the most recent drivers from HP (the manufacturer of my computer), Epson (the manufacturer of my printer and scanner), and Wacom (the manufacturer of my pen tablet)—and, of course, to back up all my data in as many ways as I could think of. If you're a computer owner preparing to have someone else reinstall your machine, you may be able to do this part yourself and save some money.

The second day was devoted to reformatting the C drive and reinstalling Windows XP Pro. A full format on an 80-GB drive takes about 40 minutes, with about 40 minutes more to install Windows. Except I ended up doing it twice, because the first time around I forgot to delete the restore partition that CompUSA had put onto the drive and which I'd failed to notice and eliminate during my last install. (I'm one of those people who thinks putting your system restore onto the same drive as your system makes no sense. Think about it a bit.)

But even if I hadn't had to do the formatting twice, there are all those Windows updates to download, many of them requiring restarts. And then there are the drivers. Without the correct display driver, for instance, everything on my widescreen laptop looks weirdly stretched out.

Once all the updates were finished and the drivers installed, I had to make a Ghost image so I wouldn't need to do that part over if something went wrong later on.

I also got quite a bit of the software installed on the second day, but not all of it. That put the main focus of the third day onto restoring my data--once I'd made a Ghost image of the installed programs.

Copying documents back onto the C drive was straightforward enough, though it takes a bit of time. Other things have to go back into specific places: the settings for Replicator, for instance, or my Outlook data file. (And I discovered that if I also copy my Outlook Extend.dat file along with the .pst file, Outlook magically remembers all my rules and other settings.) I'm still finding little details of program options that I need to set—that's part of the ongoing tweaking.

The other part of the third day I spent re-configuring backups, in the course of which I made some other discoveries.

2. Don't Get a Rebit if You Have Multiple Internal Drives

I understand from the Rebit people that they're working on this issue, but while I'd known Rebit would only back up my C drive, I hadn't realized that the presence of two internal drives would cause their bare-metal recovery option to fail.

Since I was about to reinstall the machine anyway, I figured I had nothing at all to lose by testing Rebit's PC Recovery CD. So I inserted the CD and rebooted my machine, which brought me into a friendly-looking non-Windows interface designed to lead me through what they call a bare-metal restore. (That means it restores your operating system and software as well as your data.)

Unfortunately, it didn't lead me very far, because it couldn't tell which of my internal drives was which. They are the same make and size, so I probably couldn't tell which was which if you put them in front of me, but there are ways for other programs to tell them apart, because one is set as the “master” drive and one as the “slave” drive. (The operating system goes on the “master” drive, which is Drive0, and if you try to put it anywhere else, you'll have no end of trouble.)

I imagine that Rebit's engineers will be able to fix this problem fairly easily. Not that many laptops have two internal drives, so it's possible none of their users have run into the problem before. But meanwhile, I can't use their restore CD.

3. Some (Backup) Programs Won't Recognize Your Computer after a Reinstall

I had suspected that Rebit might not recognize my newly-reinstalled computer as the same one it had been protecting before, since the log information it had installed before was now gone, along with any recognition signals that go into the registry. (The registry is where Windows keeps all the really important information about how to operate. Don't mess with it. Especially don't mess with it without backing up your whole system first.) And, indeed, when I connected the Rebit, it offered to start protecting my computer. (I said no, not having enough time right then for it to go through that lengthy initial backup sequence.)

What I hadn't expected was problems with Mozy, the free online backup service I use. While I could log into Mozy and see or restore my previous backups, creating a new backup set was a problem. I didn't really want to create a new backup set at all, but to use the old one, but Mozy isn't set up to recognize that even I wouldn't have two computers named “Enheduanna.” Instead of adding new files to the existing backup, it wanted to create an entirely new backup from scratch. (I only discovered this because I kept getting "over quota" warnings that didn't make sense when I did the math on the files in the folders I wanted backed up.) I ended up deleting the old Mozy backup file and starting over—which means that my slow initial Mozy backup is still running. (Though I trust the current prediction of 1 week and 4 days to back up 2 GB is only a product of wildly fluctuating upload speeds, and not an accurate estimate.)

4. Some Drive Problems are Beyond Baffling

More or less immediately after reinstalling Windows, I ran Chkdsk to see whether the reformat had cured my drive problems. The answer: apparently not, as Chkdsk thinks I have 4 KB in bad sectors. This despite the fact that I haven't seen any other sign of drive errors--or not in the C drive, anyway. (I've had some error messages relating to controllers and other problems with my external drives, which may be a matter of their built-in software not being entirely compatible; I'm not sure and need to investigate further.)

A geek friend let me use his copy of SpinRite, a handy tool meant to find and fix problems like bad sectors. It has a good reputation, and my erstwhile colleagues at Kickstartnews.com like it. Since I wasn't feeling well enough to actually do anything with my computer yesterday afternoon, I put the CD in as soon as I'd finished the data transfer and made my final (for this reinstall) Ghost image.

Nine hours and six minutes later, SpinRite woke me out of a sound sleep to tell me it had finished. I looked over its graphical display of all the sectors on my C drive (SpinRite had no trouble at all telling which drive was which, but prompted me to choose the correct drive to test). Every single one was the nice blue color that indicated it had passed the test and was fine. Not one was marked "recovered," much less "defective" or "unrecovered." In other words, my drive is fine. (And it didn't even get all that hot while spinning continuously for 9 hours.)

So what did I find when I started Windows again (at a more civilized hour of the morning) and ran Chkdsk again? I still have 4 K in bad sectors. Except they seem to be illusionary bad sectors. The Ur-Guru is just as baffled as I am, but says that any serious problems with either the drive or the electronics that control it should have shown up in the course of that 9 hours. So maybe I can ignore Chkdsk's 4K.

On the other hand, maybe there really is a strange and subtle problem with my drive. So I have to be even more diligent about creating Ghost images and file backups than usual.

Technorati Tags: SpinRite,Rebit,Mozy,chkdsk

Rebit: Worth Waiting for, After All: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-16-07

2007-11-15T18:16:00.001-08:00

The good people at Rebit—notably Dennis Batchelor of Tech Support and Product Manager David Schwaab—were fairly well horrified to read last week's post about Rebit and how slowly this particular frog was hopping. It took Rebit more than 48 hours to back up my housemate's computer (over USB 1.1, remember), but it did succeed in making a backup of her drive.

In fairness to Rebit, I uninstalled the device from my housemate's machine and connected it to my own laptop, which has USB 2.0 hi-speed ports. Progress was significantly faster, yet it still took 20 hours to complete. Even taking into account that I have twice as much data on my drive as my housemate has on hers, this was well outside the normal range of backup times for Rebit.

Dennis and I exchanged several e-mails and looked at the Rebit log files to try to figure out why the backup should take so long, particularly since I left it running overnight. Rebit is designed to pause whenever you use your mouse or keyboard, in order not to interfere with your ability to use your computer. Overall, that's a good thing: file synchronization and continuous backup programs can slow down the function of a machine and get annoying. It does mean, however, that if you plug your Rebit in for the first time at the beginning of a busy day, it may not get very far toward protecting you until you leave the office at night--and then only if you leave your machine on.

We still don't know why my Rebit initialization took 20 hours instead of the normal 5 or 6. Screensavers and Skype shouldn't be a problem, and my anti-virus program (AVG) only scans incoming files, so that shouldn't be an issue, either. The logs appeared to indicate a lot of activity, but not any other problems—there were no errors in Rebit's own function.

So at this point—which would have been Tuesday—what I was prepared to write was that it's only users familiar with other backup programs who are likely even to notice that Rebit takes a long time to make its first copy of your drive. It isn't people like me, who already have 5 automated backup systems in place, that Rebit is designed for. Rebit is meant for people who have no backup system and don't know, or want to know, very much about their computers. The people who, when told "Just plug it in," will plug it in, click "Accept" at the prompt, and then ignore it until they need to recover a lost file.

But then a funny thing happened, and it may prove to be the case that Rebit will be worth the wait for me, as well.

I was preparing to test the "bare-metal restore" function with the Rebit CD, but being a cautious sort, I wanted to make a Ghost backup of my drive first. I've used Ghost successfully for years, so I knew that if for some reason the Rebit restore didn't work, I could always restore from the Ghost image.

Except I couldn't make a Ghost image. I tried three times and got the same "Read sector failure" error message. Ghost was unable to find a file which I had no trouble finding in Windows. I tried running a disk check to find and repair errors, but a second disk check still showed errors, notably problems with the MFT Volume Bitmap.

And this, according to the Ur-Guru, is not a trivial problem: "If it keeps saying there's errors in the MFT, only a full clean format and reinstall may (or may not) show whether the HD is really going bad."

Argh. Yes, all right, I was planning to reinstall my machine anyway. I'd have preferred not to do it while in the middle of several client projects, because it takes time. And I'd certainly prefer to be able to make a Ghost backup before I do it. But I can't. And I can't make a SafetyDrill copy, either. Both of them run into the same problem.

Which makes me wonder: was it the disk error which caused the slow Rebit backup? I made a Ghost image with no problem at the end of September, so whatever went wrong has happened recently, but it could easily have happened before I got the Rebit.

I'm not noticing any problems using the computer, but a lot of nasty red disk error messages are coming up in the Event Viewer (for both the C drive and the D drive). This is not something to mess around with. I'm going to have to do that reinstall this weekend. And if the drives are still showing errors after I reformat them, I'm going to need new hard drives. (Hello, Seagate?)

Meanwhile, the most complete backup I have, including all the icons and fonts and stray files that don't get included in my regular backups of my data and documents...is on the Rebit. Which tells me it's backed up as of 2 minutes ago.

Technorati Tags: Rebit, Ghost 8, SafetyDrill

Seagate “Spy Scare” a Tempest in a Taipei Teapot: All They Want is Your Warcraft Password

2007-11-12T16:36:00.001-08:00

The Ur-Guru sent me a link this morning to an article in The Inquirer entitled "Seagate Hard Drives Turn into Spy Machines." Now, you have to expect overblown headlines from a paper whose purpose is to spread controversy, so I passed the link on to Jason Pecheck at Seagate and asked him what was up.

Jay phoned back within about 10 seconds of my pressing the "send" button, which suggested that Seagate is taking its bad press pretty seriously. Yes, some of the drives made by one of Seagate's Taiwanese subcontractors were infected with a virus brought in by an employee. And no, you probably don't own one, because almost all of them were sold in Southeast Asia. There's already an update to your anti-virus software that should deal with it; if for some reason you haven't updated your virus definitions lately, you can do so, or install a special version of Kaspersky from the Seagate website.

But dude, let's get real here about the level of the threat involved and the possibility of spying. The virus wanted one thing and one thing only from those it infected: passwords to online games. So unless you not only have a Maxtor Basics 3200 but also play World of Warcraft, WSGame, 91.com, QQ, Woool, rxjh.17game.com, TianLongBaBu, AskTao, or Perfect World (Wanmei Shijie), you were never in any danger.

Of course, if you are a gamer and bought one of these drives in Southeast Asia, better update your virus definitions quick. But I don't think the Chinese are going to get any government secrets out of Taiwan with this one.

Technorati Tags: Seagate, World of Warcraft, viruses

Rebit: Ridiculously Simple, but Ridiculously Slow: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-09-07

2007-11-09T12:25:00.001-08:00

A few days ago I received a review copy of the new Rebit backup device. Rebit (not to be confused with reByte, which I wrote about back in 2004)claims to be "ridiculously simple backup" for Windows computers. (The XP version is available now, with Vista coming soon.) It comes in a cute green box with a frog logo and the tagline "Retrieve. Restore. Relax." In the box are the device (basically a 2.5" hard drive), a cable, a carrying case, a recovery CD, and a very thin booklet with instructions and information.

The Rebit website describes backup with Rebit as "Easy as 1," which echoes the recent claim about Time Machine not needing a Step 3. In this case, it's a slight exaggeration, because you do have to do more than plug it in--though not much.

I decided that the best way to discover whether Rebit was in fact "ridiculously simple" was to have my less-technically-ept housemate test it on her computer. She's more than capable of plugging in a USB cable, so that part went fine. But her PC guy must have disabled autorun for USB devices, because she didn't get the expected dialog box inviting her to start protecting her computer with Rebit.

We found the drive easily enough in Windows Explorer and clicked on "setup.exe." At that point, we got the license agreement. ("It's all right, click yes," I said.) Then we got a warning message from Windows that drive F was no longer available, which was a bit confusing, even alarming. But the little frog icon appeared in the system tray with a notification bubble explaining that Rebit was preparing to back up the drive.

"Okay," I said. "You can ignore it now."

"Can I still use my computer?"

"Sure."

This was at roughly noon on Thursday. By the time I went to bed, Rebit had only reached "1% completed." By the time I got up this morning, the initial backup was 6% complete.

Now, admittedly, my housemate's computer only has USB 1.1, so making a drive image (which is essentially what Rebit is doing) takes a good while. But her 80 GB drive only has 25 GB filled, and making a Ghost image of that drive definitely does not require 14 hours. Indeed, it's now just about 24 hours since we connected the Rebit, and it's only at 9%. That's not just slow, it's ridiculously slow.

I've got a call in to Rebit to find out what might be causing this problem. I'm quite sure this isn't the way the system is meant to work, that the process has been faster than this in their internal tests. They, and we, need to know about anything that might interfere with the effectiveness of the Rebit, in order to find ways to work around the problems and keep things simple for the user.

So I'll keep you posted. With any luck, by this time next week, not only will the backup be complete, but we'll be able to test out the file restoring function, as well.

Technorati Tags: Rebit

Time Travelers Wanted: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-02-07

2007-11-02T09:43:00.001-07:00

People have been asking me about Time Machine, the backup program built into Mac OSX Leopard. I'd be more than happy to write about it, except for one small problem: I don't have a Mac. (I realize some of you may think that's a big problem, not a small one. You are invited to buy me one. Laptops only, please.) That means that the closest I can get to firsthand experience of Time Machine is to go to the local Apple Store and ask for a demonstration, and I haven't had a chance to do that. Besides, in-store demonstrations never run into the same kinds of issues people have in real life.

What I can do is collect a few other people's (and publications') opinions, and I'll share some of those here. But what I'd like to do is have a real Mac user, preferably one of my regular readers, write about his or her experience configuring and using Time Machine. Any volunteers?

Those without Macs may want to stop reading here and just go run your backup programs for this week. On the other hand, I know some of my Mac-owning readers faithfully read the column even when I'm writing about Windows software, so you're certainly welcome to keep reading.

What Time Machine does is create snapshots of your drive, pretty much the way other drive imaging programs do, except that once you set it up, it operates continually and automatically, making hourly, daily, and weekly backups. And then, to quote MacWorld's Rob Griffiths,

When the day comes when you need something back, you launch the Time Machine application and simply move backward through time to find the files or folders you wish to restore. [...] A Restore button copies the selected files from the backup drive.

Another MacWorld writer, Andy Ihnatko, describes Time Machine as a "freak app."

It’s a specific service that implements a single (but attractive) backup scheme: “infinite undo” for your whole drive. You desperately need a spreadsheet that you deleted months ago? No sweat: open the folder it was in, activate Time Machine, “rewind” the folder until the missing spreadsheet re-appears, and then drag it from the Folder of Yesteryear into the Folder of Today.
Cool.
Definitely.
But I can’t think of the last time I actually needed to do that.

No? Well, I can. Or, at least, I can think of several occasions when I've needed an earlier version of a file because I did something monumentally stupid with the later version, or overwritten or deleted something I shouldn't. Or perhaps someone else who was also working on the document did. Or I needed to know just which parts of a project I completed when, and the project is one long document that I didn't bother re-saving with edit dates on it. "Infinite undo" is a feature that can be extremely (if perhaps not infinitely) useful.

Nevertheless, Ihnatko considers Super Duper more useful, and it's quite possible some of you will, as well. The only problem with that? Well, according to Mitch Wagner at Information Week, the current version of Super Duper isn't compatible with Leopard, though an upgrade is expected soon.

Wagner also points out that Time Machine won't make wireless backups via Airport, and even Griffiths' rave review in MacWorld mentions a few other drawbacks, like the need for an external drive connected directly to your Mac or another Mac that runs Leopard, and the fact that the hourly backups get collapsed into a daily backup at the end of the day (which saves space, but may not save documents), and the length of time required for making the initial "snapshot."

That last is an issue with every drive imaging program I've ever used, though, and anything else that makes full backups to begin with and incremental backups thereafter. (With Ghost, in fact, every image takes a long time, since each image copies the drive in its entirety.) You just have to prepare for that and leave a couple of hours (or less, depending on the size of your drive and how full it is) for the initial backup to run.

The most detailed analysis of Time Machine that I've seen so far is in ComputerWorld, and it's worth reading their review before deciding whether this is the program you want to rely on.

I have heard, however, that there have been some problems with upgrades to Leopard. It might be safest to wait until those have been resolved, or, if you were thinking about getting a new Mac soon anyway, just wait to get a new machine which comes pre-installed with Leopard.

Since Time Machine isn't a stand-alone application, the real question isn't so much whether you want Time Machine as whether you want to (or can) upgrade to Leopard. And that's something that depends as much on the specs of your existing Mac, and the compatibility of the software you depend on, as on any features Leopard has to offer.

Technorati Tags: Time Machine, OSX Leopard, Super Duper

Special Offer on ION Backup through November 2nd

2007-10-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

You may remember that I reviewed/beta tested Universe Point's ION backup service back in August. ION's unique selling proposition is monitored backup: they check to be sure your backup jobs have completed successfully.

Today I got the following e-mail from the ION sales department:

Dear Sallie,

Universe Point is currently running an amazing special on ION, the first monitored backup software. You will receive your ION Server or Workstation license for free (up to a $700 value) when you sign up for our monitoring service.

We have salesmen waiting by the phones to help you so give us a call (610-352-1150) or send an email to sales@universepoint.com. This offer ends on Friday, November 2nd, so don't miss this opportunity to protect and secure your data for as little as $30/month.

This special is only available if you call in or email our sales team.

I thought ION was a good product, and Universe Point provides good support (or did for me), so if you're in the market for monitored backup, you might want to take advantage of the special.

And no, I don't get a percentage. (Pity, that.)

Software:	I use EMC’s Retrospect for Windows Single Server Edition (v7.5) with the Open File Backup add-on (a necessary add-on IMHO)
Hardware:	Three Dellcomputers (one laptop and two desktops cabled (100MB CAT 5 wire) to a Linksys WRT300N Router)
Tape Drive:	Seagate STT3401A 20/40GB TRAVAN Internal Tape Drive
Storage Media:	Imation TRAVAN 40GB TR7 20/40GB Data Tape Cartridge
Drive Cleaning Media:	Imation TRAVAN NS Dry Process Head Cleaning Cartridge, 30 Cleanings.
Protective Storage:	Sentry Safe 1 hour Fire-Safe and Waterproof Chest, 0.36 Cubic Feet