Show your school spirit with a flash drive from Staples

When I saw this in Tech Republic's newsletter, I couldn't resist passing it on. Office-supply chain Staples and a manufacturer I've never heard of called PNY (apparently known for manufacturing video cards) have teamed up to create flash drives displaying the colors and emblems of 100 different US colleges and universities. Aimed at both current students and sentimental alums, these key drives are white with the logo on the cap and the college name on the side.

I notice that the University of Michigan, where I spent five years in gradual school, is among the participating colleges, but not Brown University where I did my undergrad. And Stanford has a PNY key drive, but not Cal.

You can order the whole range from Staples.com at $39.99 apiece, but expect 7-14 days' delivery time rather than the usual overnight service.

Just for the record, though—key drives are great for transporting data, but they don't make good backup devices when it comes to longer-term storage.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-23-06: Celebrate Backup Awareness Month

June is Backup Awareness Month. Hard-drive manufacturer Maxtor (now Seagate) added this holiday to a calendar already crowded with such little-known gems as National Punctuation Day (September 24th) in 2005. I only wish I’d thought of it first.

Then again, I work to raise awareness about backups every week, not just one month out of the year. If you only backed up for one month out of the year, your backups wouldn’t be very helpful during the other 11 months.

But hey, let’s enjoy it while we have it. Maxtor is trying to make Backup Awareness Month entertaining. Go to www.backupawareness.com, click on your location/language, and play the save-the-data superhero video game. (I am not making this up.) How this will improve your actual backup practices, I’m not sure.

There’s nothing wrong with their list of best practices, though there’s nothing new in it, either. And “back up everything,” while it can be a good idea, is definitely a self-serving policy for a hard-drive manufacturer.

Maxtor is sponsoring a drive-a-day giveaway. In exchange for all your contact information, you get a chance to win a One Touch III Mini Edition (that’s the 2.5” external drive) every day for the month of June. (Hurry--there's not much time left.)

Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus has an entertaining article in the Mac Observer about the Backup Awareness promo package he got. You could subtitle it “I was hoping for a new hard drive, but all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” Gosh, Bob. They didn’t even send me a T-shirt. Not that I wear T-shirts, but I’d’ve liked to see the “How much stuff can I store” calculator.

You can also listen to “Dr. Mac” discussing Mac backups and the peculiarities of Dantz Retrospect on the Mac Geek Gab podcast (free MP3 download). Then you can read Dr. Mac’s Guide to Backing Up Your Mac online or pay $3.99 for the PDF version.

Windows users won’t be too excited about that prospect, but remember, the Mac-using readers have to read a lot of articles about Windows-only backup software.

How will you celebrate Backup Awareness Month?

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-16-06: You Can Lead a Horse to Water...

As I write this, the Ur-Guru is running TrueImage on his laptop. The new version looks pretty good; I’m going to install it and test it next week.

Meanwhile, I want to report some shocking statistics about backups. Maybe they shouldn’t shock me, because they’re not so different from last year’s statistics, but my jaw still drops when I read these things.

Hard-drive manufacturer Maxtor (the creaters of Backup Awareness Month) sponsored a survey by Harris Interactive. The results: 46% of the respondents don’t make backups, even though 43% of them have lost data to viruses, system crashes, and drive failures, and 55% consider their data worth at least $1000.

I haven’t seen the survey, so I don’t know whether the people who don’t back up are also the people who value their data highly and/or the people who have lost data before, but the E-commerce Times article I read certainly implies it.

It doesn’t surprise me that much that average computer users don’t back up. If everyone backed up regularly, I wouldn’t have started writing these reminders. What shocks me is that people who have lost data still don’t back up.

Iron Mountain, which recently purchased LiveVault, conducted a survey of laptop users. An astonishing 64% of laptop owners whose machines have been stolen still don’t make daily backups. If you’re carrying all your data around with you, daily is probably better than weekly, because the machine could get dropped or spilled on as easily as stolen.

And the effect of data loss on these laptop users? Eighteen percent of them didn’t get back up and running for weeks or months. Another 64% were out of action for several days. That’s money down the drain for anyone in business, particularly if your laptop is your main machine.

Storage vendors are finding disk-based backup systems, virtual tape libraries, and continuous data protection a hard sell when it comes to small and medium businesses. In addition to the usual resistance to change, there’s the cost of replacing existing tape systems, and/or the monthly fees for CDP and other online backup systems.

Yet expense can’t be the only issue for consumers and home-office users. There are more online backup providers every day. They offer “set it and forget it” solutions for $10/month—or less. External hard drives cost very little per gigabyte, and many come with backup software to automate the process. Somehow, stubbornly, people persist in not backing up.

Naturally, storage vendors and data protection companies have a vested interest in getting more people to back up, so they’re working hard to raise awareness and educate people about what constitutes a real backup. (An extra copy of a file on the same disk as the original is not a real backup.) They’re also trying to make backup simpler to use, so that even technophobes have no excuse. Yet there doesn’t seem to be much impact so far: Maxtor’s 2004 backup survey statistics were almost exactly the same as those for 2005.

I try to educate people about their options for backup, but all I can really do is remind people who are already making backups that it’s time for another one. If losing data isn’t enough to convince a person to back up, nothing I can say is going to make a difference.

I would like to know, though: if you don’t back up, what’s your excuse? What excuses have you heard your colleagues, clients, friends, or family make for not backing up their computers? I’m willing to bet there’s a counter for all of them, but it’s just barely possible that somewhere in the universe someone actually has a valid excuse for not backing up.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-09-06: Passport to Backups

I’ve talked about backing up while on the road once or twice before. One of the reasons I got a 2.5-inch external hard drive instead of a less-expensive 3.5-inch drive was so it wouldn’t need its own luggage when I traveled.

Last time the Ur-Guru came to visit, he just backed up his laptop by sending everything to the server back in his home office.

This time he has a new laptop and a handful of drives, each with a different purpose.

First, there are two Western Digital Passport drives, an 80 GB and a 120 GB. The name seems particularly appropriate, since he bought them specifically for traveling overseas. The 80 GB drive contains several TrueImage backups of the laptop (system, software, and data), as well as the ISO of the Bart-PE recovery CD.

The 120 GB drive holds all the data he wanted to have along on the trip, including 18 GB of e-books, icons, source code, and project files for his current clients, a few virtual machines, software he might need to install, and an active synchronized copy of work and project data from the laptop. (He wrote his own script to do the synchronizing.) The rest of the drive holds instructional videos, MP3 music files, and other media. And there’s still enough room (or will be, after we watch the movies) for the photos he’ll be taking.

Then he has a 512 MB memory stick full of utilities he might need anywhere. (I have a similar memory stick which I load up with programs clients are likely to need, like the AVG free anti-virus or Karen’s Replicator.)

There are two more drives, each with a 4 GB capacity. One is a memory stick, one a 1.8-inch disk in a case about 2 x 2.5 inches, with a standard USB plug that tucks into one end. Because it has to spin, it’s slower than the stick, and it gets much hotter when used over an extended period of time. Now that the flash-memory sticks are available in multiple-gigabyte capacities, the Ur-Guru recommends using them instead of the mini-drives.

These two smaller drives serve as rotating backups of the source code for the Ur-Guru’s client project, so that he always has a copy of the current version and a copy of the previous day’s version. He also keeps his current work synchronized with the 120 GB Western Digital drive.

If you’re interested in getting any of them for yourself, the Ur-Guru and I will be happy to answer any questions you have about them.

Until next week—back up early, back up often.

FileSlinger ™ Backup Reminder 06-02-06: Slashdotting Backups

This isn’t actually what I planned to write about today, but I couldn’t resist. I haven’t laughed this much about backups since the first Backup Trauma video.

The creators of the Slashdot.org geek news forum chose its name “to make the URL silly and unpronounceable.” That hasn’t kept it from becoming a web phenomenon and the source of all kinds of lingo that has found its way into the blogosphere as well as elsewhere on the web. If you get “Slashdotted,” you’re famous—or infamous. And if you post a question on “Ask Slashdot,” you’re going to get lots of answers, many helpful, some irrelevant, some downright crude, and many of them extremely funny.

On Wednesday, May 31, someone going by “higuita” asked “What practices and policies do Slashdot users implement for backups they perform at their office?”

Since he asked specifically about policies for a company with about 1000 workstations and 20 servers, the practical answers aren’t likely to be useful to many of the readers of this newsletter (even the Ur-Guru). But some of the *other* answers are definitely worth passing on.

***

don't make the mistake that one guy did
the office was in the North Tower --- The "offsite backup" was in the South Tower

***

I dump stuff on undergrads. They've got to be good for something.

***

My backup strategy consists of hoping that my hard drive doesn't fail before I get a new computer/hard drive. It's worked so far, even with a laptop.

***

Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies.

***

Who bothers with backups? I've personally never wasted any time backing

A fatal exeeption 0E has occurred at 0137:BFFA21C9. The current application will be terminated.

* Press any key to terminate the current application
* Press CTRL+ALT+DEL again to restart your computer. You will lose any unsaved information in all applications.

Press any key to continue _

***

I don't bother with backups. I've got a airtight policy in case of a HD crash or any other form of data loss:

1. Look shocked and terrified.
2. Yell.
3. Scream.
4. Pull hear.
5. Bang head to wall.
6. Sit quitely sobbing a corner.
7. Kick the cat.
8. Replace HD (if necessary).
9. Reinstall software.
10. Kick cat again.
11. Redownload mp3s, movies, games and pron.
12. Feed cat.
13. Mail goatse.cx pictures to random innocent people as an act of pointless revenge.
14. Make futile threats to a deity that if it happens again "the cat gets it".
15. Continue life as normal.

Now what could possibly go wrong with my plan?

***

I have a rosary backup policy. My prefered saints to pray to are Mary, Don Bosco, St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. IGNUcius.

***

We use what we call a "finger drive" (not to be confused with thumb drive). After a catastrophic failure, we are all driven to finger pointing.

***

Here's what I do when I need to back up:

1. Depress the clutch pedal.
2. Put the gearshift into "Reverse"
3. Slowly let out the clutch pedal while pressing lightly on the accelerator pedal

It works really well, and I can almost always recover from those backups too.

***

I zip all my files and name it "Naked pictures of (insert star name here)". Then I publish the torrent. Cheap distributed offsite backup.

***

These are obviously some very creative people. Of course, if they’re really using any of these techniques, I think we should all be very afraid.

And please, whatever you do—If your hard drive fails, don't kick the cat. Or the dog, either.