FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-29-06: "But I Did Back Up!"

My long-time client and colleague Eve Abbott, Organizer Extraordinaire, kindly offered to act as guest columnist for this week’s Backup Reminder while I’m at the Podcast Expo. I’ll be back next week as usual.

"But I DID Back Up My Computer Files!"

By Eve Abbott

Why are computer crashes like earthquakes? Because it is a sure thing that it is when, not if. I bought a brand new Hewlett Packard Pavilion XP system and began to back up weekly. Seven months later, I returned from making a cup of tea to hear my computer going click-click-click loudly. My hard drive had just crashed for no reason at all. As is often the case, I lost everything on it.

I felt confident because I had my data backed up by copying my entire working C-drive onto CDs—but even with backups, and even if your computer is still under warranty, let’s get realistic about how much time and money a crash can end up costing you.

Time:

It took four days for me to get the special shipping box HP sent me to return the computer. They replaced the hard drive, and it was returned within 10 business days at no charge for repair and shipping. This still adds up to three weeks without my computer.

Energy

First, I rented a laptop and spent hours installing the programs I normally use. Laptop rental cost me $250.00 for one month, with a $500 refundable deposit. I could have rented a desktop system for a little less per month, but I would have had to wait a week to get the computer. It was great to have the laptop to use until my repaired computer arrived. But, I had to go through the same restoration process again when it was returned with a new hard drive. More time lost and more frustration, too.

Second, I spent hours importing my data from backup CDs. I still lost almost a week’s worth of data (Quicken entries, Word documents, calendar and contact information) because that’s how long I go between backups.

Third, I spent hours recreating the custom settings on my software. Fourth, I had to install some smaller programs that I’d forgotten were added on after my first programs backup.

Damage

I paid $1,000.00 in computer consultant fees to get the laptop set up, and my computer taken apart and set up again to get it running A-OK. That’s apart from data recovery costs, which my backups saved me from having to pay.

The grand total: $1,250.00 and 7 days in lost time.

Pretty expensive considering that I had all my current data backed up onto CDs.

There are four questions you need to ask yourself regarding your back-ups:

1)How critical is your data? (My business and life are on my hard drive = critical)

2)Do you add or process high volumes of information?

3) In what time frame do you add enough to make it a real loss? (day, week, per project)

4) Do you work with very large files of any type?

The more information you process or add to your computer hard drive, the more often you need to back up. For high volume or crucial files you need to backup daily.

CD:

I recommend you archive paper every year after taxes (along with a backup of your accounting program and data), consider backing up entire projects onto CD when you’re finished. This keeps the data available and safe, without cluttering your hard drive. You can file a project closeout CD with the matching archived paper files. Or keep a variety of backups in a CD organizer (date labeled) divided up into Projects, Backups and Programs.

The backup CDs I use are ‘data only’ to safeguard important information in case a problem develops in between system backups. My personal number one CD backup is the updated text of my books. If you are going to archive data (e.g., taxes) and may not access the backup for a long time – go with CDs. CDs are more stable, and you are less likely to run into trouble with irretrievable data. Always use premium brand-name CDs (or other media) for backups.

External Hard Drive (XHD)

I chose this option after my crash disaster because I can recreate my entire system without the wasted time of restoring my operating system and settings, downloading programs and data from backups, and resetting application customizations, etc.

This option allows you to completely restore your computer, if necessary (with no hard drive damage). Or, install a new hard drive on your computer and then restore immediately.

After backing up, I store the XHD in the trunk of my car (in a laptop case for protection). Even if the house burns down I still have my entire computer capability just outside in my car.

Backup, BackUp, BACKUP!

So, how can you combine these different backup choices to work in your particular situation?

Take the simplest method that will safeguard your information. If all you need is a CD organizer box for backups – great!

I use the XHD weekly for a programs and data off-site backup. In between I use CDs, depending on the size of the files and how long I want to maintain them.

Also, Sallie now has me on a daily automatic backup onto some kind of monster external hard drive that is in the computer closet at my office location. That’s because my new book A Brain New Way to Work™ is in the final stages and I don’t want to lose even a smidgen of work done on the text and pictures.

If you do nothing, you are guaranteed to have a disaster sooner or later. Choose what works best for you and set a reminder to BACK UP as often as you need to stay sane when it does happen.

Sign up for Sallie’s backup reminder and contact her for your particular questions. And fear not, the FileSlinger will be back next week. Thanks for letting me pinch-hit for our champion!

Tips excerpted from How to Do Space-Age Work with a Stone-Age Brain.™

© 2006 Eve Abbott. All rights reserved.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-22-06: RAZR-Sharp Backups

Lest anyone think this has become the Maxtor backup reminder, I’m going to talk about something different today: cell phones. I’ve written about cell phone and PDA backup once or twice over the past three years, but I never did get a phone sync kit for my old Motorola 120.

That phone was far from top-of-the-line when I got it; I distinctly remember the kid who sold it to me trying to convince me I needed a color screen. Two years ago Verizon offered me a free camera phone when I renewed my contract, but I couldn’t see why I’d need one, and passed it up. I have been, in a nutshell, a cell phone Luddite.

All that is changing. Among other things, I discovered why a person with a digital camera could still want a camera phone. As of just over a week ago, I am now the proud owner of a Motorola RAZR V3m. It has a color screen and a 1.3 megapixel camera.

More important, at least for the purposes of this newsletter, it has a USB port.

Not that Verizon really wants me to use it for anything except connecting the battery charger and the headset. Here is a phone designed to be able to sync up beautifully with a computer, but the wireless carrier locks out all those functions in an attempt to make you send all files and make all backups through their network. (I give Verizon credit for providing a backup option so people don’t lose their cell phone contacts, but that doesn’t mean I actually want to use it.)

Getting the phone to talk to the computer requires additional software. I invested a modest amount in Motorola Phone Tools and a companion “Advanced Features” CD from CellCables.com. Apparently the Phone Tools software works with most current Motorola phones, as does the companion CD.

I spent about two hours arguing with the software after I installed it, and then about an hour on the phone with the helpful customer service person at CellCables.com, and finally had everything working. I can now back up my cell phone numbers onto my computer, and also synchronize them with my Outlook contacts. That means that to some extent the phone also acts as a backup for my computer, though it only stores the information from phone, e-mail, and Instant Messaging fields.

The synchronize function works much like HotSync for PDAs. You get to choose ahead of time which folders and/or categories to synchronize (I don’t really need all 820 contacts in my phone) and to decide whether the computer or the phone should take precedence. (I set it to “ask each time” as there’s no guarantee one will be more up-to-date than the other.)

The main use the Motorola Phone Tools help file suggests for the backup/restore function is “cases where you would like to recover data overwritten by synchronizing.” Almost everyone has had at least one experience of overwriting the wrong thing during synchronization, so it’s definitely a good idea to back up the data already in your phone before performing your first synchronization. If you add numbers directly into your phone a lot, you should back up or synchronize (or both) frequently.

The help file also says that “The mobile phone contacts, calendar and tasks are saved locally in a .csv file.” CSV stands for “comma separated values.” You can open such file in a text editor like notepad or a spreadsheet like Excel, or import the data from it to Outlook, ACT, or another contact manager.

“Locally” isn’t very specific, though. You don’t have to know where the files are to use the Restore Wizard, but I like to know where my backups are so I can make sure to back them up, and you certainly have to be able to locate files before importing them into another program. So I went hunting and located the backup files in C:\Documents and Settings\Sallie Goetsch\Local Settings\Application Data\BVRP Software\Motorola Phone Tools\Backup.

Not exactly right out in the open. I might’ve expected Motorola Phone Tools to create a folder in “My Documents” for storing phone data, but apparently that would be too risky. “Local Settings” is one of the folders that Windows likes to hide from you, so unless you have “display hidden files and folders” turned on in your folder options, you’d never spot this file, much less be able to mess with it.

When importing the .csv file, you need to be aware that the fields are not separated by literal commas, but by semicolons. And there are several columns containing numerical data which is probably only meaningful if you’re a cell phone programmer.

If you’re using Outlook and your cell phone to back each other up, you might not need this particular backup, but why take chances? It’s actually easier to back up than to synchronize. And it’s much easier to back up than to key in all those names and phone numbers again, even on the relatively generous-sized number pad of a RAZR.

Next week at this time I’ll be in Ontario, California, giving a presentation at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo. I’m hoping to be able to write and queue up a Backup Reminder before I go, but now would be a great time for one of you to volunteer to write a guest column.

Until then, don’t let playing with new gadgets distract you from backing up your data!

Student Arrested for Backup

From The Collegian:

Back in December of 2005, a student at the University of Richmond contacted the campus help desk for help backing up his personal files, but they didn't provide storage in those quantities, so they sent him to the campus computer store, who could.

With an astonishing degree of naivety, the student then requested that the technician take special care to back up the "kiddie porn" folder. No slouch, the tech called the police as soon as his would-be customer was out the door, and the now-ex student has now been indicted on 16 counts of possession of child pornography, which is a felony in Virginia.

Naturally, I'm glad the kid is getting put away. Child pornography is revolting. But many of us have things on our hard drives which we don't necessarily want strangers to see, even if they aren't illegal, immoral, or fattening. These are the files you should encrypt before putting your hard drive in someone else's hands or backing your files up online.

Now if only all those banks who keep losing backup tapes with our financial information on them would do that...

Backup Con-Fusion

Last week a client sent me a link to a New York Times article about backup (free subscription required), the first part of which focused on the Maxtor Fusion drive. The Fusion looks just like my Maxtor Shared Storage II (still working nicely), but it includes software to allow access to the drive via the web, meaning you can get to your data when not connected to your own network.

Gizmodo says the web interface sucks. CrunchGear describes the user interface as “kludgy,” despite giving the drive a good review overall. I haven’t tried the drive myself, so I don’t have an opinion.

It wasn’t the drive itself so much that interested me about the article, as that the NYT author lists it as the first in a series of options for remote backup. Of course, if you’re transferring data to the Fusion from your laptop while on the road, that’s remote backup for your laptop. But the drive itself isn’t a remote backup solution if you keep it in the same building as the computers it’s backing up.

The “remote” aspect of the Fusion is actually provided by Fabrik, which also designed the Fusion’s web interface software (which Fabrik itself claims is “silky smooth”). If you wanted your entire 500GB Fusion drive backed up on the web, Fabrik would charge approximately $251/month for it.

This is actually fairly inexpensive as online backup goes, but suffers from the same drawback as other online backup solutions: transfer speed. (The United States is now a mere 16th in world broadband penetration, and by comparison with Japan, Korea, and Europe, we get pitiably slow transfer rates for outrageously high prices.) Trust me, you are not going to want to upload that much data over a consumer-level DSL or cable connection.

The other cautionary aspect to the Fusion/Fabrik partnership is that Fabrik is still in beta. At least online backup providers like Mozy (discussed in my 7/21/06 Backup Reminder) and LiveVault have been around long enough to develop reputations. So I’d wait a bit before investing in Fusion if your main interest is web access and offline backup.

But don’t wait to back up your computer.

FileSlinger™: Backup Reminder 09-08-06: CD Backups in Mac OS X

Last week I arrived at a client’s place for a non-IT-related job and found a note saying “Do you know how to do CD backups?”

In the circumstances, the answer was “maybe.” I know several ways of getting data onto a CD, but only on PCs, and my client has one of the new Intellimac/Macintel machines. The last time I owned a Mac, it had System 7.1 on it. OS X is mostly a mystery to me. I can operate programs like Word and Quicken, but overall I’m not too comfortable. And I had never tried to burn a CD.

I decided to see what happened when I inserted the blank CD-RW to which my client had attached the note. A dialog box popped up asking me what I wanted to do next. There were decidedly fewer options than when I do the same thing on my Windows machine, which always includes several options for burning a CD (because I have several programs that can do so).

Dragging files to the CD icon on the desktop didn’t seem to work, either. I eventually fumbled my way into the Disk Utility and made my way through the slightly convoluted procedure of first creating an image from a folder and then burning a CD from the image. It worked, and my client (who only recently upgraded from an ancient iMac and can fit all her documents onto one CD) was happy, but it seemed to me that there had to be an easier way. “Easier” is what Macs are known for, after all.

There is, in fact, an easier way, and if I’d been thinking clearly I would have discovered it before I started in with the always-dubious BullYourWayThrough technique. A Google search conducted this morning revealed several detailed descriptions of how to make various kinds of CDs using the built-in software. Boston College starts at the very beginning, with a description of what CD-ROMs are and where to find the “eject” button on a Macintosh keyboard.

When presented with the “You have inserted a blank CD” dialog, instead of opening Disk Utility, open the Finder and drag the files you want to put onto the CD over to the CD’s Finder window. (This drag-and-drop approach will be familiar to anyone who has burned a CD using Windows XP’s built-in software.) Then you just select File|Burn Disc (again, similar to Windows’ File|Write these files to CD).

Now if someone could just explain to me why the OS X “burn” icon looks like a radiation warning symbol…

Some People Are Just Rude

I received an e-mail message this morning with the return address "thomas.l.ray@gmail.com on behalf of Rick [firetowerlist@hotmail.com]"

It wasn't complimentary, but I hardly consider myself or what I write here above criticism, so that's not a problem in and of itself. The message was in response to my January 14, 2005 Backup Reminder, and because it does contain some valid points, I wanted to reprint it here.

From your blog, "The Geek Girls say that a differential backup copies the files which have changed since the last full backup and that an incremental backup copies the files which have changed since the last backup of any kind. (Are you confused yet? I am.)"

What's to be confused about? It works exactly the way they say.

-You make a full backup on Monday
-On Tuesday, you change 1 file and back it up only. That's Differential
-On Wednesday, you change 1 more file. Now, if you back it up and the one from yesterday, the only changes made since the last full backup, then that is Differential. If you only back it up and not the one from Tuesday, then that is Incremental.

That's actually the clearest explanation I've heard of the distinction between differential and incremental backups.

Since when is a RAID system even similar to LIVE BACKUP? ("LIVE BACKUP is a term I found on a database backup site, and it refers to a continuous backup process, where backups are made as the files are changed. This is similar to what happens in a RAID system") BACKUP backups data. RAID provides data recovery ability, not a backup.

I understand RAID much better now than I did in January of '05 (which isn't saying that much, as the Ur-Guru is now trying to explain parity bits to me after reading this post) and I agree that while some configurations of RAID duplicate your data as its created—and some people rely on that instead of instituting real backup systems—what RAID is really designed to protect against is disk failure, not the corruption or loss of data. If you delete a file on one disk, it will get deleted on the other disks in the array. If the file is corrupted, the corruption will be duplicated. So it's not really a backup.

Yet the similarity between RAID and "live backup" or "continous data protection" (as most people seem to call it these days) should be obvious: the duplication happens when the data is changed, continuously, in the background where you don't notice it.

That's the useful part of the message. It's followed by the snide part:

If you don't know these simple basic facts and prefer to wing it by just using your own terminology ("Personally, I like the term "Differential Backup," and that's what I use to describe the way my own file backups work."), then you have no business in the IT field. You're an embarassment to the rest of us that do know our business and take it seriously.

Don't bother replying (especially since this is a null address used for spammers). Either get out of the field or learn your craft properly.

Well, Thomas, or Rick, or whatever your name is, you might be relieved to know that I'm not in the IT business. I do provide some general-purpose consulting to home office computer users, based on having more experience than they do and being able to call on the Ur-Guru to answer questions I can't. But I don't claim to be a real IT professional, and I don't want to be an IT professional.

I'm a writer. I'm writing a column, which I research to the best of my ability given the constraints on publishing it and the fact that I'm not getting paid for it. I correct mistakes when I'm made aware of them, but I don't have every past post memorized, so unless I get new information shortly after publishing something or people point out errors, they may stay in the blog.

There are countless other people out there who know more about technology, and specifically about backups, archives, and data protection, than I do. None of them seem to want to write a weekly e-zine/blog exclusively devoted to the subject. And persistence usually wins out over genius.

The point of the Backup Reminder is to get people to back up their data. If they need to hire a real professional, and not me, to get that set up for them—all the better. But those who do hire me can at least be assured that I won't treat them with contempt just because they don't know as much as I do about something.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-01-06: Maxtor Shared Storage, Part II

I asked my housemate, with whom I’m sharing the new Maxtor Shared Storage II, for a quote for this week’s Backup Reminder. Once I’d figured out how to set up user accounts for different machines, I created one for her, and then set up the Maxtor backup software to back up her work files into her disk share every night. So far it seems to be working, because the Maxtor icon in the notification tray is green and says “Backup complete!”

My housemate is also a business owner with a home office, so her work data is on that machine—as are the revisions for her book. Until I set up her drive share, she’d been making Ghost backups to an external hard drive every week or so. Or rather, her geek boyfriend (notice that her boyfriend is a geek but mine is a guru) had been making the backups. The DOS version of Ghost isn’t all that difficult to operate, but it’s foreign-looking to anyone used to operating within Windows.

Anyway, she’s immensely relieved to have this setup, because getting her data backed up no longer depends on remembering to do it or having someone else available to help. I don’t think she’s actually gone and looked at the backups, but what the EasyManage backup software lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in simplicity.

As for me, I’ve kept the drive running nonstop all week, and I’m amazed at how cool it stays and how quiet it is. The fan on my laptop is definitely noisier. (The drives get hotter, too, though they don’t spin as fast. But I’m using more of their capacity, more often.)

It was only last night that I figured out how to make the ghosts of the non-functional user accounts go away. Despite the fact that there was no sign of the deleted accounts in EasyManage or the web administrative interface, I would still see “Sallie Goetsch on Maxtor Shared Storage” when I opened up “My Network Places” in Windows Explorer.

There was nothing in the User Guide about this problem (in fact, it seems to lack a “Troubleshooting” section altogether, which seems more than a bit optimistic on Maxtor’s part). I went online to look at the support website, and there was nothing there about it, either. Then it occurred to me to try just deleting them from within Windows Explorer, and presto! Away they went, and they haven’t been back to haunt me. The duplicate config links have also gone away—for a while the drive was appearing both as “Maxtor Shared Storage (Teras)” and as “Maxtor Shared Storage (MSS-number-number)”. I think those might have cleared up earlier, but I don’t actually remember.

Although I’d been coveting a drive like this, I hadn’t really been planning for it, and I didn’t know how they worked. What I decided to do was put things that both my housemate and I might use (like software installation packages) into the “Public” share (where everything is labeled “Our” instead of “My”) but keep my data in the “Enna” and “Star” shares. Most of my data lives on Enna, so all I have in the “Star” share is drive images in case I have to reinstall her.

I’ve copied my photo and video files over from the X drive, which I’m still using for my on-startup file backups, into the “My Photos” and “My Videos” folders on Teras, and made a Ghost image of Enna over the network. That’s a bit slower than the USB 2.0 backup to the X drive, but reasonably speedy given the size of the image. I even pulled out my quirky, unreliable K drive (salvaged from my previous laptop, Keramat, when her power supply connection broke), managed to get it to talk to Enna, and copied the Ghost files from there over the network to Teras.

I wiped the K drive clean after that—my likelihood of needing to restore anything from an April 2005 Ghost image of Keramat is very small, so I certainly didn’t feel compelled to keep those copies. Anyway, I’m not sure what I can use that drive for. The drive itself appears to be okay, but the connection is unstable. Depending on what I’m connecting it to, it either won’t work without the power connector, or won’t work with it—and I’m not sure that’s the only problem. So now I have a blank 30 GB drive and no clue, but enough space on the X drive to ensure I can make backups when on the road.

The Shared Storage II is an impressive drive, but portability is not its strong point, and the reason I got a 2.5” external drive to start with was so that it wouldn’t need its own luggage.

Having Teras is making me rethink my previous approach to backup. So far, in addition to the drive images, what I have on the network drive are second copies, or rather extra copies, of things I have on other drives, like the 4 GB of icons that live on the D drive, and the photos, which are also on DVD. I’ve deleted some of the software from the X drive, leaving only the most critical programs, things I might find myself needing on the road if something went wrong. Likewise, I’m only expecting to keep one Ghost image on that drive. Or maybe…one of each computer. And then the backups of my current working files, but not necessarily all my data going back to the dawn of time.

A few months ago, a speaker recommended using a data-free laptop when giving presentations or traveling, because there was so much risk of having it stolen. I reinstalled Star with just that intention. (Besides, she weighs a lot less than Enna—3 inches of additional screen size adds several pounds.) That seemed fine for one-day outings, but if I go away for a week, I need my data, or at least what I’m working on now, and my Outlook PST file doesn’t fit on my thumb drive (which in any case is entirely too easy to lose).

But if I have that data on the X drive, which is small enough to lock away as well as to travel with, then I don’t need to load it onto Star and bring it into public places. The only down side to that plan is that Star only has USB 1.1, not FireWire or Hi-Speed USB, but for a few days or a week that’s by no means unendurable. (I survived just fine with Star as my only machine for the better part of a year, after all.) Yes, I think this is starting to look like a plan.

Next week we’ll return to the outside world, but you can look for a revised version of my Seagate Saga on Kickstartnews.com before then.