FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-31-04: Year-End Backups

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

Before you go out to ring in the New Year, take some time to prepare your year-end backups.

Why do you need a year-end backup? Primarily for tax purposes. Just in case you're faced with the dreaded audit, you want all your financial information readily available. (The more organized you are, the faster the IRS will go away.)

So the first candidate for a year-end backup is your accounting or personal finance software. Quicken has a built-in feature for making year-end copies. (Go to File|File Operations|Year-End Copy and follow the instructions.) If you use a different finance program, check the help file. At the very least you should be able to export a certain date-range.

Other candidates for year-end copies are any bills, receipts, or invoices that come to you in electronic form. If they arrive by e-mail, you can either save them as individual text files or make a special mailbox (Eudora) or archive .pst file (Outlook) for them.

You should also save any invoices that you send to your own clients. In fact, you may want to make a special copy of all your client files for the year. If you have clients who span several years, creating subfolders for each year within the client's folder can help make finding your current documents easier.

Once you've selected the files that need backing up, copy them onto a CD or DVD and put them with your tax files for 2004 or in your safe-deposit box. (If you want to know more about creating yearly tax archive files, check out the Organizer Extraordinaire's Tax Time Tune-Up tips in her book, How to Do Space age Work with a Stone Age Brain™.

And don't forget to make your regular weekly backups, as well.

Happy New Year to all, and may 2005 be a year of no data loss.

Sallie

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Remember, if are getting rid of an old computer and want to deduct it from your 2004 taxes, you need to drop it off by the end of the day today. The Alameda County Computer Recycling Center is open until 5 PM.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-24-04: He's making a list, he's backing it up

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

As any of you who have lost data in the past year will know, the best present you can give yourselves this holiday season is frequent, regular backups, now and in the year to come.

At this time of year, most of the Western world is thinking about lists. Lists of gifts to buy, lists of goals or resolutions for the New Year, lists of those to whom we need to send holiday or thank-you cards. (Not to mention all those "wish lists" that vendor sites like Amazon.com encourage you to create so other people can buy things for you.)

What would happen to you if you lost those lists? You could probably reconstruct your goals for the New Year. You probably know the addresses and phone numbers of your family members and closest friends by heart—or could get them from another family member.

But what about client contact information or newsletter subscribers? Those lists can easily run to hundreds, even thousands, of people. (Heck, I sent out 150 Solstice cards, and most of those were personal.)

Contact management programs like ACT! come with built-in backup options and reminders, and I encourage you to use them and to keep a copy of your contact backup on CD somewhere other than your office. (Like, say, a friend's house or a safe-deposit box.)

As for your marketing databases, take it from the E-zine Queen herself—no matter who manages it for you, you need to back up your list. (See her article "There Goes My List!" for more specifics.)

Right now, my Backup Reminder List is a small one. I run it through my own website's e-mail account feature. And even though my webhost has built-in redundancy and I can also create special website backups, I also keep a copy of it in a text file that gets saved along with all my other files, every time I start my computer. (That's generally several times a day.)

Before too long, however, I will need to move this list to a more sophisticated distribution system such as Constant Contact, Topica, Aweber, or Ecomincs (which is rated highly for providing shopping cart as well as e-mail campaign/ autoresponder capabilities.) These services allow people to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, and maintain the databases on their servers. (They also save you having to send massive numbers of messages out through your ISP, and they comply with the spam laws.)

All these companies probably have better backup systems than we do, but disaster can still strike them, and it's best to keep a copy of your own list. You may not need to make a new one every week (unless you have a constant subscriber turnover), but once a month would be a good idea.

You do this by means of the "Export" feature. For example, suppose you use Constant Contact to manage your e-mail campaigns and you want to back up your list. Log in, click "Subscribers & Lists," and then click "Export." This takes you to a page where you can choose which information to export and whether to export to Comma Separated Values or to text. (You will usually want CSV.) Your browser will download the file to your hard drive automatically.

To make your backup, just copy the file onto a disk or external drive. (You might want to rename it or put it in a special folder so you remember what it is.) Then if you ever need to re-import your list of subscribers, you can. (This is also handy if you decide to switch from one list provider to another.)

Next week I'll be talking about End of Year backups. Until then, go forth and back up!

Sallie

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Remember, if are getting rid of an old computer and want to deduct it from your 2004 taxes, you need to drop it off before the end of December. That means removing your data from it first!

And if you're getting a new computer and want to deduct it from your 2004 taxes, you have one week left to shop. Call me if you need help.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-17-04: Backup Madness in Europe

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

There was a time when it was difficult to find a new backup subject to write about every week. Thanks to the research I've been doing lately, however, it's become difficult to choose which backup talk about to write about this week. I'm drowning in white papers about enterprise storage solutions.

Today I want to talk about a data retention proposal in the European Union, just so you know that even I think backups can be taken to extremes.

The Justice Minister of the Netherlands, who is chair of the EU this year, wants police to be able to trace all telephone and internet activity for all individuals at all times. Therefore he has proposed a law requiring ISPs and telecom companies to retain copies of all their customer data (including e-mail, voice mail, SMS text messages, and web surfing) for one year.

Think about that for a minute. It's like never deleting an e-mail message (even if it's spam), never clearing your browser cache, and never deleting your phone messages for a year. Oh, and leaving all those installer files, audio files, and multimedia greetings on your computer, too.

How fast would your hard drive fill up if you did that?
Multiplied by thousands, even millions, of customers, it's a logistical nightmare, guaranteed to drive costs through the roof--costs which would be passed on to the users. Most corporations already find it highly expensive to try to track down stored e-mail in the case of a lawsuit or other investigation.

And that's quite apart from the violation of the right to privacy.

Naturally, the ISPs are protesting, and the other members of the EU have not received the proposal with the enthusiasm that Minister Donner had hoped for. But it remains a possibility, and a classic example of the danger of having people who don't understand technology making laws about its use.

You can read more about this at http://tinyurl.com/47cv8 or by doing a Google search on the terms "isp," "europe," and "Donner" (the last is the name of the Dutch Justice Minister).

Meanwhile, if you have less than infinite storage space, be discriminate about what "data traffic" you save and back up. And once you have a backup of older files, such as those for projects you've closed out, you can remove them from your hard drive and make room for the new projects.

More backup news next week,
Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-10-04: What's all this about printable CDs?

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

Have you backed up your data this week? If not, make sure you do so before the end of the day.

I've devoted a few of these newsletters to CDs and DVDs (known collectively as "optical media") and backups. To recap briefly, for any "archival" backup that needs to last more than a year, it's best to use brand-name CDs and DVDs, and safest not to apply stick-on labels because of possible damage from the adhesive.

Lately I've been noticing more and more ads for "inkjet printable" CDs. On the face of it, that sounds very enticing, especially to those of us who are visually oriented and creative. I print my own business cards, brochures, greeting cards, and even bumper stickers, so why not CDs?

It's easy enough, and not very expensive, to get CDs with a special inkjet-printable coating. Try putting them in most inkjet printers, though, and neither the CD nor the printer is going to be usable thereafter.

In fact, only a few consumer inkjets (that means printers that normal people can afford) are capable of handling CDs. The Epson Stylus R300 M starts at about $179 and the Epson Stylus Photo R800 starts at about $325. Otherwise, you have to buy a dedicated CD printer, and that will run you easily $1000. (See CNET Shopper for a listing of models and prices.)

A somewhat less expensive alternative is to get a thermal inkjet printer. These start at about $70 and are more compact than their inkjet counterparts, but they print only CDs and not paper. Like inket CD printers, thermal printers require specially treated media.

Both methods of imprinting CDs are considered safe, though not as good for archival CDs as just writing on them with a CD marker (about $5 a pack). If you're planning to write on CDs with other pens, you might want to get the ones with the coated tops, just to be safe.

For a thorough treatment of the different options for labeling and printing CDs, see the article at CD-info.com. There's even a link to a service which will allow you to print customized blank CDs in small quantities. (Most CD-imprinting companies require a minimum order of 100.)

Remember—the important thing isn't to have backups that are pretty—it's to have backups, period. Don't put it off until tomorrow.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-3-04: Shopping for Storage

'Tis the season for making backups—at least according to PC Magazine, which included the new Maxtor One-Touch II on its list of recommended gifts, and the Transcend 1.8" portable hard drive among this week's Editors' Picks.

And then there was the ad I got in the mail for the Logicube OmniSCSI One to One, a stand-alone hard-drive copier which allows you to copy the contents of one SCSI drive to another at a rate of 2.3 GB/minute.

1.8" drives are at the heart of the iPod. Toshiba's latest model holds up to 60 GB. They are designed in much the same way as the 3.5" hard drives used in desktop computers or the 2.5" drives used in laptops—they're just smaller. More and more manufacturers are starting to produce them as portable backup tools, and they are being incorporated into MP3 stereos in new cars. The 40 GB Transcend model (review; company information) has a USB 2 connector, weighs 6 oz, and has a list price of $293. It includes built-in backup software and a leather carrying case.

If you want something even smaller—a true stocking-stuffer in the storage department, though not sufficient to back up your whole drive—there's always the USB Flash Drive. The most popular, according to those who use CNET's website, is the 512 MB SanDisk Cruzer Titanium (about $66), which the editors give a 9 out of 10 rating. (Full review; PC Magazine reviews 14 more.)

The 250 GB Maxtor One Touch II is probably your best bang for the buck in this lineup--at approximately $250 it holds as much as 6 of the Transcends--and weighs as much, too. It comes with Dantz Retrospect Express and DriveLock password protection, and it makes bootable copies of Mac systems. Automatic backups come pre-scheduled, though you can adjust the schedule. (Full CNET review.)

Though I am always suspicious of claims that you can just press one button and back your drive up, and the Maxtor drives of a few years ago seem to have had a high failure rate, it's still probably worth checking out.

And the Logicube? At 8 lbs and nearly $2000, it's a present for Professional Hardware Geeks from Very Rich Relatives. If you're curious, read all about it on the company's website.

But don't let all this shopping prevent you from making your own backups!