The Halloween Backup Reminder: Wanna See Something Really Scary?

'Tis the season when folks hang skeletons in their windows and visit haunted houses, and it only seemed right to get into the spirit of Halloween by providing some computer-related horror stories. Back in 1998, Geek Culture’s Mind Numbing Magazine™ created a clever introductory page for the computer horror stories they hoped to collect:

It can happen to anyone, even you. One minute you’re fine, working away on your faithful computer, the next minute you’re living a nightmare! Somehow, for no apparent reason, your most trusted friend has turned against you with every silicon fibre of its being:

• Months of work has disappeared in a nanosecond.
• Everything that defines you as a geek is gone. Perhaps forever.
• And to top it all off, your backup Zip™ drive is now click-click-clicking itself to death.

The idea didn’t catch on, though you can find plenty of people recounting their own tales of electronic woe online. In most cases, there’s nothing spooky, eerie, or cinematic about computer disasters. Most data loss disasters happen without special effects, though the DriveSavers Museum of Disk-Asters has some pretty spectacular photos of the kinds of physical damage computers can suffer.

I’d certainly be horrified if I came home to find my laptop a burned-out shell and my external hard drives scorched and melted. And right now it would take something that destroyed my whole office to deprive me of my business data. But that would be enough to do it, because I still haven’t found a really effective off-site backup solution for myself. And it *is* fire season in California.

Nevertheless, hard drive failures and human error are far more common than earthquakes, fires, and floods. So…you wanna see something really scary? How about a $2000 data recovery bill for a week’s worth of work lost when a laptop died on the way back from a business trip. Or coming home from a vacation in Europe to discover that the server died without anyone noticing and the backup tapes were useless? A year and $10,000 later, that company still has data that has to be re-entered by hand from printouts.

If it’s important, back it up now. If it’s really important, back it up offsite as well as locally. Then it won’t matter if your computer plays tricks on you.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-20-06: Don't Back Up Your Spam

First, I’d like to apologize for not sending a Backup Reminder last week. I was suffering from a virus whose results are best not even imagined, never mind discussed. Humans, unlike computers, are self-repairing, but we can’t revert to a previous, healthier version of ourselves with a couple of mouse clicks, either.

As if being sick weren’t enough to get me thinking about lingering undesirables, I just weeded a hundred or so spam subscribers off my mail service. Somehow spammers have gotten hold of the autoresponder address for this newsletter and are sending messages to it, which leaves me coping with bounce messages when the opt-in confirmation goes out to their fake addresses, as well as a list of “clients” with names like “Robbie condescend.”

Even with storage as cheap as it is, there’s just no point letting that kind of junk take up space on your hard drive or your mail server. I’ve written a couple of “clean up before you back up” articles before, and I figure it’s time for another one.

E-mail
Most e-mail clients these days have built-in spam filters that shunt mail into a “Junk” or “Bulk” folder. Many people ignore these folders. It’s actually a good idea to look in them to see whether anything you want to read has gone astray. E-zines like this one frequently end up in Bulk Mail folders, and even messages from your friends and family might get misfiled if they use trigger words.

Once you’ve rescued any false positives, delete the spam. Then empty the Deleted Items (Outlook) or Trash (Thunderbird, Eudora) folder. Then compact your mailboxes or PST file. The larger your Outlook PST file, the slower Outlook runs, and the more likely errors will be.

While you’re cleaning up, you might want to go through and get rid of any attachments you don’t need any more and move older mail into an archive file. Copy the archive file onto a CD and put it somewhere safe.

Recycle Bin
I’m always amazed at how many people don’t empty their computer’s Recycle Bin/Trash on a regular basis. Sure, it’s handy to be able to retrieve something that you didn’t mean to delete, which is why I no longer bypass the Recycle Bin. But most of the time, you do mean to delete it, and if you don’t empty the Recycle Bin, it’s still taking up space on your computer. If your Recycle Bin icon is overflowing, open it up, make sure there’s nothing in there you want to keep, and empty it out.

And don’t forget about the things that should go into the Recycle Bin, like installer packages for browser add-ins and upgrades, not to mention those shortcuts to services you don’t want.

Spyware and Adware
Unlike the documents in the Recycle Bin, spyware programs don’t take up a lot of space. And unlike viruses, they won’t infect files you back up. They just slow your system down and tell advertisers what you’re looking at online. But unless you get rid of them, they could make a system image useless: instead of restoring to a trouble-free time, you end up restoring your machine to a slow, kludgy state.

I use Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search and Destroy from Safer Networking, which are both free tools and get reasonably good ratings. The best defense against spyware and adware used to be using the Firefox browser, though with its increasing popularity it’s no longer quite such good protection. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 is supposed to be a vast improvement over IE 6, but I haven’t tried it yet and can’t comment.

Viruses
There’s just no point in backing up an infected system, because the virus will come back when you restore it. (That’s why you have to turn off System Restore before running virus-killers on a Windows machine.) I like AVG Free Edition from Grisoft, but as long as you don’t install anything from Norton/Symantec, you’re probably fine. (For some reason Norton’s so-called protective programs mess most computers up worse than viruses do.) For cleaning viruses off already-infected machines, McAfee’s Stinger works well.

So there you have it: first clean up your system, then back it up. Don’t waste your storage space on things you never wanted on your computer in the first place.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-06-06: This Is Why We Back Up

Last week at this time I was preparing to deliver my presentation at the Podcast Expo—and feeling extremely grateful for my backup systems.

Just before I packed up the laptop for the drive down to Southern California, I copied my PowerPoint slides and audio clips onto my USB key, then clipped the key back in my handbag where it lives. (Since I’m one of those women who is surgically attached to her handbag, I can be sure I’ll always have the USB key with me if I need it.) Then I put the laptop and my 2.5” external hard drive into the laptop case and loaded them into the trunk along with my other baggage.

I’d gone about 250 miles when I lost control of the car and spun off the road into a ditch. This was not, shall we say, one of the high points of my journey. However, I emerged with nothing worse than bruises, and surprisingly few of those.

Two hours later, when I said goodbye to my car for the last time and loaded my bags into a rental car at the Bakersfield Airport, I had no idea whether my computer had survived the accident. It’s probably a good thing I was carrying so much, because it didn’t have a lot of room to move around. The bag looked undamaged, but I had another 150 miles to drive, and it wasn’t until the next morning that I was able to confirm that the computer, like me, had made it out alive.

I’d have been pretty upset if the computer were destroyed, but I knew that I could still give my presentation. Actually, after the technical difficulties at my last presentation, I’d already determined to make sure I could deliver the thing with no slides at all, if I had to.

I didn’t have to, though I had a nervous moment when I went into the presentation folder on my C drive and found that somehow, mysteriously, the PowerPoint file had disappeared. (This might have happened while I was transferring photos from my phone, something I’m not terribly good at yet.) But since my business data gets backed up to my second internal drive (D) automatically whenever the machine is idle, and since I’d backed up to the X (portable external) drive the day before, and since I still had Wednesday’s version of the presentation on the USB key, I knew I was covered.

That’s what backups are for: to save you from yourself and from unforseen occurrences.

My fellow presenter and favorite podcaster Shel Holtz wasn’t quite so lucky. The hard drive on his Mac laptop died at 10,000 feet en route from New York to California. That put paid not just to his slides but to all the work he’d been doing on his trip. (See Shel's blog for all the details.)

Shel backs up, but not while he’s on the road. That meant he couldn’t just borrow another laptop to run the slide show. He gave what I understand was a brilliant presentation with no slides whatsoever—refreshing to the PowerPoint-saturated audience, no doubt. (His presentation was the same time as mine, so I didn’t get to see it.) Now he’s faced with the possibility of losing all his recent work, even if he pays a fortune for data retrieval. Ouch.

The good news from Shel’s perspective is that he gets to replace the Mac he hated with a Sony he’s been coveting. But there’s no brand of computer that’s proof against drive failures. All hard drives fail eventually. (The Ur-Guru goes through about a dozen every year.) And they don’t make them like they used to, either: it’s not unusual for a drive to die within two years. If they make it past two years, they might go for as long as five. A drive that lasts longer than that is contending for the Guinness Book of World Records.

If you create data on the road, then you need to back it up on the road. In fact, given the greater likelihood of theft or breakage when traveling, backing up when traveling might be even more important than backing up at home. The reason my first external drive was a 2.5” model rather than a less-expensive 3.5” model was so that I could take it on the road without needing extra luggage. These days a road warrior like Shel Holtz would be better served by a 4 GB flash drive or 1.5” drive, easy to carry and easy to attach even in cramped circumstances.

Anywhere you take your computer is a place you should be making backups.

Now if only it were so easy to make backups of a car…