FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 4-29-05: Another Victim of the Click of Death

It finally happened—my ZIP Parallel drive fell victim to the infamous Click of Death. I’d heard tales of this phenomenon ever since buying the drive (1996, I think it was, though it might have been 1997), but I had never experienced it.

With an external hard drive and a CD/DVD-writer, I don’t really need a ZIP drive anymore, but it was a lifesaver back when I bought it. CD-writers were rare, slow, and expensive then, and anyway, I could fit the entire contents of my older PC’s hard drive onto one ZIP disk. I was able to get rid of stacks and stacks of floppies, and I could move larger files between my older and my newer machine (though not, alas, between my Mac and my PC; I still had to rely on floppies for that).

After all this time, and purchasing a new AC adapter so that I could use it when I moved back to the US from Britain, the ZIP drive has been a habit. I’ve kept my Quicken backups on it, and some of my other data backups, even though I’m also backing everything up to the XHD.

So when the Click of Death started, my problem was not the current data but the rows of ZIP disks sitting on a media shelf. I probably wouldn’t need what was on most of them, but I didn’t want to lose it, and without a working ZIP drive I wasn’t going to be able to put it onto CD or DVD. The Click of Death (a phenomenon whose symptom is an endless clicking noise from the drive) is a fatal hardware problem and means that the drive rather than the removable disk is damaged—beyond repair.

Fortunately, the same geek friend who was able to provide a Windows 98 laptop for a week while Keramat was in the shop happened to have a ZIP parallel drive sitting around, so I’m now in the process of transferring the contents of those disks (which contain a lot of the work I did when I was in academia, as well as some thoroughly obsolete programs and 10 years’ worth of e-mail correspondence with the Ur-Guru) onto a DVD via my hard drive, then erasing the disks so I can send them off to recycle. (All in the midst of installing a replacement computer and trying to nurse the fatally wounded Keramat along until the new machines are set up.)

And what should appear this week in PC Magazine but an article entitled “The Museum of Obsolete Disks, or Why I Hate Iomega.” The author’s problem is not the Click of Death (which also has websites dedicated to it, and special software to help repair ZIP disks that were damaged by a bad drive) but the fact that Iomega creates all these extremely useful but completely proprietary removable drives. The ZIP, JAZ, and now REV drives have all gotten great reviews from computer magazines—but they have one fatal flaw, which is that only someone else with an Iomega drive can read them. Unlike external hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and even floppy diskettes, Iomega’s disks are not part of the pretty-much universal media standards for PCs, Macs, and even Linux machines.

I don’t hate Iomega, myself. I’ve gotten more years of good use out of this ZIP drive than I probably will from my external hard drive, given the rate at which hard drives fail. But I probably won’t buy any more of their products, even though I’ll keep visiting their website for the useful information they collect about people’s backup and restore habits.

And if you want to see some real obsolescence, check out the Obsolete Computer Museum.

Everything but the kitchen sink

Looks like Victorinox decided that their standard Swiss Army Knife wasn't useful enough as it was, so they added a USB flash drive to the combo. Capacities range from 64 MB to 1 GB, and prices from just over $50 to just under $200. If that seems expensive for a USB drive, remember that you're also getting a knife, nail file, scissors, screwdriver, LED, key ring, and retractable pen along with your flash drive.

Check out the menu at Dynamism.com

If you thought the Tiki Drive was goofy, check out the Sushi Drives that Dynamism.com has for sale. Here's a whole plateful of USB flash drives cleverly disguised as different kinds of sushi. The plastic sushi exterior is handmade in Tokyo, and Dynamism.com will even ship them with dry-ice packs if you want to buy one for someone as a gag gift. At $59 for a 32 MB tuna or cucumber maki (far left) and $99 for the 128 MB futomaki, uni, uzura natto, maguro, salmon, and ebi (left to right) or the shuumai, tobiko, or takoyaki (not shown), they're a little pricier than standard drives of the same capacity—but a heck of a lot funnier!

Not a sushi fan? Try an iDuck instead—but I wouldn't recommend putting this rubber ducky in the bathtub!

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 4-22-05: John Cleese Does Backup...And So Does Microsoft

Here’s one for the backup bestseller list: John Cleese of Monty Python fame stars in “The Institute for Backup Trauma,” a web video advertising LiveVault’s disk-based backups. (And as if to illustrate what the video says about the drawbacks of tape backups, Ameritrade has had to admit to 200,000 customers that their financial data has gone missing along with a backup tape.)

“Viral video,” as this type of ad campaign is being called, could be the best thing that’s happened to the backup industry. It’s certainly the best thing that’s happened to LiveVault: they’d had 150,000 new product downloads as of Monday. I’m sure the folks from TapeSucks.com are cheering.

You can see the video, developed by Thunder Sky Pictures and the Captains of Industry, at www.backuptrauma.com. You’ll need Macromedia Flash Player to view it, but there is a version oriented toward dial-up connection speeds.

One does get the impression from the video that it’s only tape backups which fail, and this, of course, is not true. Hard disk failures are very common things—they’re the main reason that we need backups. In this respect, LiveVault may be dancing on the edge of truth in advertising.

Microsoft, too, is getting into the disk-based backup business with its Data Protection Manager for Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003. There’s a free 680 MB beta available for download and a press release on the subject on the Microsoft website. Unless you’re an IT manager for a large organization, though, you’re going to have much more fun with LiveVault.

And go ahead, click the third button. I dare you.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 4-15-05: Back up Your Taxes!

According to a 2003 article on the Iomega website, only 38% of people surveyed use a computer to prepare and file their taxes. I suspect that by 2005, that number is slightly higher—or maybe I’m confusing the ubiquitous tax software displays in grocery stores and everywhere else I seem to go with actual purchase and usage.

The higher your level of education and the higher your income, the more likely you are to use a computer to prepare your taxes. If you have an accountant prepare your taxes, your accountant is almost certainly using a computer to do it.

Prior to becoming self-employed, I’d never had to file anything but the 1040 EZ, so I didn’t have any need for tax preparation software. Once I was faced with my first Schedule C, I started using Intuit’s TurboTax. I’d been a Quicken user for years, and besides, TurboTax Web was free for those with a low Adjusted Gross Income, which was certainly me in my first year in business.

In addition to TurboTax, the major tax software programs are H&R Block's TaxCut and TaxAct by 2nd Story Software. These programs can import information from personal finance or accounting software such as Quicken, QuickBooks, and Microsoft Money. They calculate tricky things like depreciation for you, save you from mistakes in adding and subtracting, and walk you through fiendishly complex tax forms in simple steps.

You already know that you have to keep copies of your tax return and supporting documents (like all those deductible receipts) for seven years, in case the unthinkable happens and you get audited. The same holds true for your electronic tax information, but according to that same survey by Iomega, only 43% of the people who prepared their returns on their computer backed up their tax data externally, and only 53% even kept a copy on their hard drive.

If you buy tax software and install it on your computer, your completed forms will be saved in a proprietary format: .TAX for TurboTax, T (where is replaced with the last two digits of the year) for TaxCut, and .ta (where is replaced with the last digit of the year) for TaxAct. This means that for a backup to be effective, you also need to keep a copy of the software itself.

With TurboTax Web and TaxAct Online you can download your completed returns in PDF format. This has several advantages. One, you can read the files without having the program installed, so you don’t have to keep several years’ worth of tax software installed. Two, PDF has been around long enough as a format that it’s probably going to last out the seven years you have to keep the return for tax purposes. Three, if you have Acrobat or other PDF-creating software, you can password-protect or otherwise encrypt the files so that no one else can open them.

Security is definitely important where tax returns are concerned. They contain all the information anyone needs for identity theft, and much more detail about your finances than you’d want just anyone to be able to know even if they weren’t planning to impersonate you in order to apply for a credit card.

This is why storing your completed tax return on your hard drive is not necessarily a good idea. A good firewall should keep you safe from hackers, but it’s still better not to have those files in reach of anyone who can get to your computer—which might be a great many people even if you have a home office.

I recommend password-protecting any tax backups—either by using PDF security or by putting your tax software files into an encrypted ZIP file. Then copy them onto two non-rewritable CDs or DVDs (so they can’t be erased). Store one copy with your other tax records, and keep one in your safe deposit box or at some other offsite location. As always, before making any form of backup, be sure that the files are not infected or corrupted.

If you use an accountant, ask him or her to make you a CD to put in your safe deposit box. And don’t let taxes keep you from backing up the rest of your data this week. Remember, 80% of data loss is due to human error.

And speaking of Hitachi...

In my tour of network drives yesterday I encountered the Cute Storage Product of the Week: the Pocketec DataStor Mini, a 1.8" USB 2.0 hard drive with a capacity of up to 40 GB. That's bigger than the hard drive on my laptop, in a package just under 3/4 the size. In fact, on my screen, the picture to the left is "actual size."

The Pocketec website displays a large red logo saying "Hard drive by Hitachi" next to this photo. No doubt all the bits inside are getting perpendicular even as I type.

MSRP is $259.95, but CNET Shopper quotes $188-$216.

Hitachi Gets Perpendicular

Bet you never thought you'd find backup news you can dance to. Hitachi has created a hilarious musical animation to talk about their new perpendicular storage technique, which would allow a single 3.5" drive to store 1 TB (that's a trillion bytes) of data. You'll need the Macromedia Flash Player to view the cartoon.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 4-8-05: Network Storage for the Rest of Us

I’ve been deluged with possible backup topics this week, including the fact that travelers in Holland were left stranded for hours when the computers controlling the train systems went down and the backup system didn’t work. (Best quote: “It’s computers failing, they say, but, well, computers are people too…”)

As I was swept along in this flood, however, I fetched up against a headline from Computer Technology Review which caught my eye: “TRITTON Simplifies Network Attached Storage for SOHO Users.”

According to the Webopedia, a Network Attached Storage (commonly known as NAS) device is “a server that is dedicated to nothing more than file sharing…NAS allows more storage space to be added to a network that already utilizes servers without shutting them down for maintenance and upgrades. With a NAS device, storage is not an integral part of the server. Instead, in this storage-centric design, the server still handles all of the processing of data but a NAS device delivers the data to the user. A NAS device does not need to be located within the server but can exist anywhere in a LAN and can be made up of multiple networked NAS devices.”

Got that? Let’s try it once more in English. What it means is that if you’re already running one kind of server, you can slap one of these babies onto your network and get more storage.

For most independent professionals and other small or home office users, traditional NAS is not just too complicated, but too expensive. An individual NAS appliance (like “device,” that’s a favorite geek buzzword for “piece of computer hardware”) can set you back $1000 at the low end—and you need a $10,000 server system to plug it into. Not to mention a place to put the server, and a security guard to watch over it.

But while traditional NAS is out of our range, consultants and other sole proprietors might still have networks, even if only to share an internet connection between two computers, or in order to provide ourselves with a hardware firewall by means of a router. Having more than one computer might mean having to have more than one backup solution, and that can become confusing, unwieldy, or both. It’s not that hard to carry your jumbo external hard drive from one room to another and back up your computers in sequence, but it could be just inconvenient enough to make you skimp on backups for one or the other machine.

Storage manufacturers have not been slow to recognize this need for a new kind of NAS. It turns out that TRITTON Technologies’ Simple Network Attached Storage enclosure (sold with or without a drive of up to 300GB) is not alone on the market. SimpleTech has its SimpleShare Office Storage Server, Iomega the 160GB and 250GB Network Hard Drive High Speed Ethernet (there’s a cumbersome name for you), Ximeta its NetDisk and the rather charming 40GB NetDisk Mini 2.5” drive, and Buffalo Technology its LinkStation Network Storage Center.

These drives are all designed to be plugged into the back of your router and to allow automated backups over the network. Most can also be connected directly to your computer like standard USB 2.0 external hard drives. Iomega’s version is wireless-compatible: “Beam me that backup, Scotty!” They take up about the same amount of space as a 3.5" external drive and are designed to stand on their narrow side. They all cost around $250-$350, depending on the drive’s capacity, which is pretty similar to comparable non-ethernet-capable XHDs. They're available from major online and offline dealers like Tiger Direct.

For those who already have an external hard drive, or more than one, there’s another possibility: a network storage adapter. You plug the adapter into your network and then plug the drives into the adapter. These too come with network backup software, and are manufactured by your friendly neighborhood network hardware companies, D-Link (the DNS-120 Express EtherNetwork Network Storage Adapter) and Linksys (the Network Storage Link), and cost about $100 each. (In Europe, you can also get them from Sitecom.)

For some reason these network adapters don’t support FireWire. USB 2.0 is just as fast, but if you have a FireWire only drive, you won’t be able to it with them.

If any of you are already using any of these drives or adapters, I’d love to hear about your experience with them. Post your comments here on the FileSlinger Backup Blog.

If you’ve got a backup and recovery horror (or success) story to tell, send it to me and I’ll be glad to publish it. But first, grab those disks, connect those cables, and back up your data!

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 4-1-05: Clean Up Before You Back Up

My apologies to those of you who received a newsletter full of strange ASCII code strings where the apostrophes were supposed to be. Blame Windows 98—I did exactly what I normally do to publish this, with different results—and didn’t find out what happened until too late.

I now have my own computer back and in working order, thanks to Charles Lee of McTek Systems in Berkeley (510-525-5129). After carefully disassembling my machine, Charles soldered the power connector back onto the CPU. If you’re in the East Bay and your laptop needs surgery, go to McTek. (You’ll also get a chance to see some amazing working antique computers while in the shop.)

In addition to a loose power connector, Charles found lots and lots of cat hair in my computer. Even if the Furry Fiendette didn’t like to actually sit on top of the computer, there might well have been cat hair in it—cat hair is good at getting into things. (So is dog hair, for that matter.)

While it doesn’t hurt to have your computer physically cleaned once in a while, that’s not actually the kind of cleaning I want to talk about doing. I’m talking about removing viruses, spyware, and adware—not to mention temporary files and other unecessary items.

If your hard drive is infected when you back it up, then it will be infected when you restore it. If the files you copy onto a disk or another drive are infected, then you don’t really have a useful backup (and you may be spreading a virus to another computer). And why waste space backing up files that you don’t use?

You can avoid most viruses and a lot of other “malware” (“mal” meaning “bad”) by not opening unexpected attachments and by reading all your mail in plain text format. (You can avoid even more of them by using a Mac, but that isn’t an option for everyone.) You can avoid most adware and spyware—programs which send information about your browsing and spending habits to marketers, and which can slow your computer to a crawl when enough of them accumulate—by not using the Internet Explorer browser. (My preference is Firefox .)

Even if you’re careful, you can still pick up some stowaways, which is why it’s good to have some basic protections in place. First, a firewall. Best is a hardware firewall such as a router, which you’ll need anyway if you have more than one computer. Direct connections to DSL and cable are an invitation to invasion, and routers are only $50-$75, depending on the model. You can buy special hardware firewall “appliances,” but those are expensive, and most of us don’t need them.

As for software firewalls, the one in Windows XP Service Pack 2 is very basic, but sufficient if you’re using it to supplement a hardware firewall. Otherwise, try ZoneAlarm, which is free for personal use.

Then there are viruses. I’ve become a convert of the free home version of Grisoft’s AVG anti-virus. It does insert little “no viruses found in this message” notices on your outgoing mail.

If you think your computer might already be infected, try McAfee Avert Stinger, a handy free download that fits on a floppy. Run this before installing a regular anti-virus program. If you use Windows ME or XP, make sure you turn off System Restore before using Stinger or any other special virus-removal tool, or the virus will lurk hidden inside your restore points.

While viruses are spread substantially through e-mail and transfer of infected documents and media, adware and spyware attack through your web browser. Internet Explorer is particularly vulnerable to these, but Netscape, Mozilla, and Firefox are not completely immune, either. The bad news is that no single program seems to eliminate all adware or spyware. The good news is that there are free programs which do a good enough job for most of us. These are Spybot Search & Destroy, Spyware Blaster, and Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware SE Personal.

There’s also Microsoft’s AntiSpyware tool, but I’m hesitant to try that after an editor colleague told me how badly it trashed her system. I’ve been refusing the downloads ever since.

Once you’ve got these downloaded and installed, run Ad-Aware and Spybot once a week—say, right before you make your backups. (If your anti-virus program is doing its job, it should be protecting you on an ongoing basis and you shouldn’t need to run it specially.)

Finally, to get rid of accumulated temporary files, try running the Disk Cleanup utility, which can be found in Start|Programs|Accessories|System Tools. This will clean out at least the most obvious of the files which accumulate unnecessarily.

Then make your backups. And don’t worry—all this takes longer to write about than to do, once you have it set up. Questions? E-mail me or post a comment.