FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-24-04: Personal Folders Backup

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

It occurred to me earlier this week that you could all just create reminders for yourselves in Outlook or ACT! or whatever calendar program you use, and then your computer would automatically notify you to make your backups, and you wouldn't need me to send reminders to you.

In fact, it's probably a good idea to do this. It's easy for one e-mail message to get lost in a sea of others, but Outlook's reminders are determined to get your attention, popping up a dialog box and playing a noise. (You can actually turn off the sound.) Indeed, my handheld PC will turn itself on and chime dulcetly at me from across the room whenever it's someone's birthday or I have an appointment, and it will keep doing it until I get up, open the machine, and tap the appropriate dialog box.

If anybody doesn't know how to create a reminder, let me know. Otherwise I'll assume you can do this. (But you'll have to let me know if that means you want me to stop sending the newsletter.)

It's important to back up those reminders themselves. If you're making a full system backup, then your calendar files will be backed up along with everything else. But if you're just backing up your data, make sure you remember to copy all those reminders.

If you use Outlook, your calendar is stored in your outlook.pst (Personal Folders) file, along with your Inbox and your Contacts and all other Outlook information (like your mail sorting rules). To back up the calendar, you have to back up the .pst file.

The Personal Folders Backup tool for Outlook 2000, 2002/XP, and 2003 (available for free from Microsoft) allows you to back up your Outlook data without having to go digging through Windows Explorer to find and copy your .pst file by hand. (For detailed information about this tool and how to use it, see the Microsoft website).

Since Windows XP doesn't even want you to be able to find your .pst files, this is a definite advantage.

Once you install it, "backup" will appear as a choice on the File menu. The "Options" button lets you specify how often you want to be reminded to back up your personal folders, where to put the backup copy, and which of those folders (if you have more than one .pst file) you want to back up. My Personal Folders Backup is set for weekly reminders, and it saves the backups on my external hard drive.

Unlike archiving or exporting, the Backup Personal Folders tool makes a complete copy of your .pst file instead of moving only some of the information elsewhere.

If you need more help backing up Outlook—or anything else—just let me know.

More backup news next week,
Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-17-04: Hard Drive Warranties

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

In the past week, I've had one person report problems with her less-than-two-year-old external hard drive and another ask for recommendations on buying one, so I thought that it might be good to return to the topic of external hard drives for today's reminder.

First I should say that the difference between an internal and an external hard drive is the case you put it in. The actual drive is the same. In theory, I could open up both my computer and my XHD, take out the drives, and swap them around. In practice, I'm unlikely to do it, given that I have a laptop and my desire to mess around with its insides is very low. But the only difference between the drives themselves is the amount of storage space: the internal drive has 30 MB and the external drive has 80 MB.

So anything you read about hard drives applies pretty much equally to both internal and external drives. And you know, because I've warned you about it, that your chances of your internal hard drive failing you within the first two years are pretty high, because as hard drives have gotten less expensive, they've also gotten cheaper.

Rather than improve the quality of their products, drive manufacturers are now trying to get an edge over one another by offering longer warranties. The standard is one year, but warranties of up to 3 years are becoming more common.

Usually if a company offers a longer warranty, it's because they don't think their products will fail. (Otherwise, of course, they'd lose money.) In this case, that may not be true—it could just be an attempt to get a short-term edge over the competitors. But for you, the consumer, the important thing is to protect yourself as much as possible. So check the length of warranty when you start comparison-shopping for drives.

If an external drive fails, it probably is a flaw in the manufacturing, since they normally don't get as much use as internal drives do. On the other hand, an external drive might be more likely to be exposed to extremes of heat or cold (if you keep it in your car, for instance) or dropped. My guess is that the risks balance each other out, unless you treat one drive in a particularly harsh way and the other with much greater care.

But if both your internal drive and your backup drive could fail, where does that leave you?

First, it's not very likely that both will go at once. (I don't have enough actual numbers to work out more specific statistics than that.) I haven't yet heard of it happening, though it could, and somewhere on the planet no doubt it has.

Second, this is one reason it's a good idea to have at least one extra backup of your important files, e.g. a CD or DVD that you can put in a safe-deposit box or mail to a friend or even store at home. That way, even if your XHD fails and you can't restore, or create, a full-system backup, at least you'll have the part that's hardest to re-create: your own data.

Which is why my Quicken backup still goes onto ZIP disk as well as DVD, and why the files go onto DVD as well as XHD. It sounds like a pain, but once it's set up, it doesn't take that much extra time. The only drawback in my mind is that I have to be careful to compare dates when restoring something.

It can be enough to make you wish for the days when your whole computer could fit on a floppy disk.

Well, maybe not. But I don't blame anyone for being frustrated and wishing they didn't have to use a computer at all.

May your drives stay healthy—but let me know if they don't!

Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-10-04: Ghost 9

Dear FileSlinger™ clients, colleagues, and friends:

It's Friday again and time to back up your data.

I've made more backups than usual this week because of reinstalling my computer to put Windows XP Service Pack 2 on. I've saved copies of my drive at various states of installation, in case something goes wrong, so I don't have to go all the way back to the beginning and start over. These interim backups can save hours. If you have someone reinstall your operating system, or you do it yourself, make sure you, or the consultant, makes some of these on the way. That will mean less consultant time you have to pay for, or less of your own valuable time that you have to lose, the next time something goes wrong with your drive.

It's true, having even a very new computer is much like having a very old car—things just keep going wrong. This is in part because many software manufacturers (Micro$oft is not the only guilty party) charge us good money for products that aren't really finished and which interact with each other in unpredictable ways. This is very frustrating, but short of the entire planet refusing to use computers until they are more reliable, there is probably not much to be done about it.

Today I wanted to talk a bit about one of those unfinished programs. Symantec/Norton (makers of an antivirus program which can be worse for your computer than most viruses) has just released Norton Ghost 9.

I use Norton Ghost 8 for making my full-system backups, and I love it. Its only drawback is that it really isn't designed for computers without floppy drives, and the workarounds for that are a trifle clumsy.

Last year Symantec bought PowerQuest, makers of DriveImage, a highly-rated competitor of Ghost's and one which uses a CD rather than a floppy disk for recovery.

This year it appears Symantec has combined the worst of both programs to produce Ghost 9. The Ur-Guru tested it out and found huge problems. For one thing, it won't work on anything with less than 256 MB of RAM. For another, it's in such an unfinished state that Norton is shipping Ghost 8 along with it.

So if you use Ghost 8 and get an upgrade offer—DON'T.

On the other hand, if you don't have a backup system in place and do have a floppy drive, now would be a good time to buy Ghost 8, while you still can. It's likely to be moved to the discount remainder bin soon, so you'll get a good deal on a much better product.

Once again, if you're a Mac user, this information won't have been very useful to you. I need your help to provide Mac-friendly reviews, until I can get a Mac of my own and be a two-platform family again.

But whatever kind of computer you have and whatever kind of backup system you have—make frequent backups of your data. Replacing hard drives and software only takes time and money. Replacing your data can be impossible.

And remember—if you've got your backups automated or for some other reason don't want to receive these reminders, just e-mail me and let me know, and I'll take you off the list.

If someone you care about needs a backup system—don’t wait. Send them to me right away.

More backup news next week,
Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-3-04: Bits, Bytes, and Backups before SP2

Dear FileSlinger™ clients, colleagues, and friends:

I'm about to make some very major backups indeed, because I'm going to reinstall my computer from the ground up in order to put Windows XP Service Pack 2 on. (There are some 200+ programs known to function incorrectly after the installation of SP 2, mostly those which download automatic updates from the internet.)

For those of you using XP, you may not need to do a complete reinstall in order to be able to cope with SP 2, but it's certainly a good idea to make a complete drive mirror before doing so, just in case it causes some serious problems with your computer.

And whatever operating system you use, it's important to keep your data (those word-processing, database, spreadsheet, photo, and music files) backed up regularly.

Today's topic is numbers, and it's not strictly about backup. Numbers can be distinctly confusing when it comes to computers, depending on what you're using them to refer to. And in my editorial tidying-up zeal last week, I converted a lot of lower-case 'b's to upper-case 'B's without realizing the consequences.

A lower-case 'b' is a bit.

An upper-case 'B' is a byte.

A byte is 8 bits. (Your extra credit question: what is a nibble?)

Hence I was off by a factor of 8 in most of the numbers I reported.

Part of the problem was that we don't use bits at all anymore when we talk about storage capacity, e.g. the size of a hard drive. In fact, we rarely even use bytes, or even kilobytes (KB, or 1024 bytes, though it's usually considered 1000 bytes for convenience). Removable storage capacity is generally measured in megabytes (MB, 1000 KB or 1,000,000 bytes) and hard drives are usually measured in gigabytes (GB, 1000 MB or 1,000,000,000 [billion] bytes). If you are the Ur-Guru, then your hard drive size is measured in terabytes (TB 1,000,000,000,000 [trillion] bytes—numbers too big for the rational brain to handle but which Bill Gates' net worth probably approximates).

In Greek, mega means "big," giga means "giant," and tera means "monstrous." Personally, I think that's right on target.

But data transfer rates are measured in multiples of bits. And the "speed" of a network is its data transfer rate—the number of bits per second that can cross the cables or airwaves to their destination. Most home networks have a 100 Kbps (kilobits-per-second) rate. The Ur-Guru's network has a 1 Mbps (megabit-per-second) rate—so it's 10 times faster than mine, and it's likewise more than twice as fast as USB 2 or firewire.

That's probably more detail than anyone wanted to know, but I wanted to get it correct so that I'm not misinforming you. I won't get into why a kilobyte is 1024 bytes. It has to do with operating in the binary (base two) system instead of the decimal system, on which subject I commend to you Tom Lehrer's song "New Math."

My computer will be away for the weekend, but my mail server will still be operating, so send in any questions, comments, or SP2 horror stories you might have.

More backup news next week,
Sallie