Back Up Your Brain

Not satisfied with mundane backups of computers, Unusual Software has come up with a tool called "Backup My Brain 1.0." In addition to your memories and professional skills, Backup My Brain promises to preserve your phobias, addictions, and bad habits.

Once installed, Backup My Brain 1.0 shows a screen displaying Homer Simpson's brain in a vise and plays a series of slightly eerie tones. (If used without earbuds, Backup My Brain 1.0 has the added benefit of driving the cat off the laptop.) As it progresses, warning messages come up: "Neuron chain read error! Please, contact your neurologist to fix this problem!"

The program is absolutely free, but does come with a warning: "Brain restore technology is still in development."

Backup My Brain 1.0 joins such notable products as the CD/DVD Rewinder and Detect Satan 2.0. Check out the complete line of "humor ware" for a good laugh.

Give the Gift of Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-24-06

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest Christmas-shopping days in the U.S. That means it’s time to start giving the gift of backup.

This past Monday, the author of the Securosis blog recommended computer backup systems as “The best gift for non-geeks that isn’t on their list (and they won’t appreciate, but really need.” This followed a post from November 16th about why backups are a pain and what he(?) thinks would make them better. (I’m only assuming that “rmogull” is a “he,” but it is statistically more likely.)

Both posts are well worth reading. Rmogull is a Mac user, so a likely sort for those of you who want to know more about Macs than I can tell you. (My last Mac ran System 7.1 and my experience with OSX comes from brief interactions with clients’ computers.) The basic concerns he(?) raises apply to both Mac and Windows machines, and I’d guess to Linux as well, though I’d rather hear more on that from a Linux expert.

So why are backups a pain?

As it is I own AT LEAST one external hard drive for every PC/Mac, not counting my small NAS. That’s a lot of drives and a lot of manual backups, and I don’t backup on the road. Eventually I’d like to have all my home systems automagically backup on the network every night, but that has to wait I can move to gig Ethernet and get a bigger, faster NAS.

This is well beyond the average home user’s capabilities. As our entire lives and family histories move to fairly unreliable PCs (and Macs; they lose hard drives too) we could be destroying our social records. Despite constant warnings I still can’t get ANY of my family members to reliably backup their digital photos.

Hence his(?) inspiration to write an article recommending backups as a holiday present. (Or birthday present. Or un-birthday present. There’s no time like the present for a good backup system.)

But if really effective backups are beyond the average home user’s skills (or budget), how do we go about giving the gift of backup?

First, as with oxygen masks on airplanes, make sure you have a backup system for yourself first. If it works for you and you don’t think of yourself as a geek, then it will probably work for your less-technical friends and family members. (You might persuade your more-technical family members to help out.)

Rmogull suggests:

In many cases your best bet is to get an external hard drive and some basic backup software (I use SuperDuper on my Mac). […] A bunch of the external drives now include basic software for free, and you can plug in the drive, install the software, and just check up on it every now and then.

I would tend to agree with that. It may not fit your budget (or their needs) to give you nearest and dearest NAS drives like the Maxtor Shared Storage II that Seagate’s clever PR department sent me, but I have to say that its automatic backup works quite well and it’s a practical solution for the young parents taking digital video of their offspring’s every step, or a family which owns several computers. I actually like the fairly basic file-oriented backup on the Shared Storage II better than Retrospect, which comes with many of the One-Touch backup drives.

Unless you’re buying for a geek (who should already have a backup system), simplicity is the key. You want it to be easy to use, and preferably automatic, so it doesn’t matter if the person doesn’t remember to back up. The Ur-Guru recommends Acronis True Image 9 for complete system backups (you can also recover individual files). I haven’t gotten his verdict on the just-released True Image 10 (US$49.99). But you should still be able to get True Image 9 cheaply online if you want to stick to the tried and true (er, sorry about the pun) version.

If money is tight this holiday season (or you just know dozens of people without backups), you can donate some of your time to help them set up free software like Karen’s Replicator or SyncBack Freeware, or an online system like Mozy. You’ll need to sit down and do some prioritizing before signing up with an online backup system, because of size limits. And, of course, online backup won’t work for anyone who is still using dial-up, which is about 40% of the U.S.

You can also hire someone else to set up a family member’s backups. The Geek Squad charges $229 to come to your house and set up an automated backup system. That seems a trifle high to me, but it depends a lot on the individual circumstance. Setting up Mozy takes about 10 minutes, though the actual time to run the first backup depends on your upstream Internet speed. The last time I did this for a client, the whole process, including uploading and checking the status of the backups, took less than an hour.

Even if you don’t choose to give your family a backup system, give them a little backup awareness. Send them a copy of the newsletter or point them here to the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog.

Top Ten Reasons to Back Up Your Data: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-17-06

OnTrack Data Recovery has just published its third annual Top 10 list of “most remarkable data loss disasters.” Naturally, these are OnTrack’s top 10 successes; I don’t imagine they’re any more eager than the rest of us to publicize their failures. In many of these cases, backups would have saved these people their data recovery fees.

Most data loss occurs for mundane reasons, like drive failures and human error. It’s not that rare for people to drop laptops or cameras, either. (Heck, mine came close to having a foot-thick fence post run through it.) If you drop them from really high up, like a helicopter or a mountain peak, you might qualify as remarkable. And by now merely driving over a computer hardly raises an eyebrow: you have to drive over it with an airplane.

Some of these computers and hard drives suffered truly bizarre mishaps, and the funniest cases are those of self-inflicted damage. In 2004, a man tried to flush his laptop down the toilet. Another tried to repair his hard drive by sticking it in the freezer. In 2005, a woman attacked her computer with a hammer. (That was also the year of “The dog ate my memory stick” and “The cockroaches got my laptop.”)

This year’s top ten list doesn’t feature any deliberate computer abuse, though the professor who used WD-40 to stop his computer from squeaking was apparently suffering from academentia. And just why a hard drive should seem like a good place to leave a banana, I don’t know. It’s clear that the reason data recovery experts suit up isn’t just to protect the data.

Of course, none of these things is funny if it happens to you. It’s even less funny if you have to send your drive to a place like OnTrack and they can’t get your data back. So remember: don’t take a hammer to your laptop without backing it up first.

2006 Top Ten

2005 Top Ten

2004 Top Ten

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-10-06: Xbox "Backups" and Dual-Layer DVDs

I don’t own an Xbox 360 and I suspect most of my readers don’t, either, but some of the millions of people who do decided that they wanted to be able to back up their games. (In this case I strongly suspect that “back up” is a euphemism, but, on the other hand, even Microsoft does allow you to make a single copy of their software CDs in case the originals are destroyed.) However, copies of game discs don’t work in an unmodified Xbox. Before long, enterprising gamers found ways around that problem, whether through firmware hacks or by replacing the original chip with a modified version.

Now Engadget and others are proposing that the spread of this Xbox hack and the desire to copy games is fueling sales of dual-layer DVD-Rs. Like the Xbox 360, these have been around for a while, but both the media and the drives have been rather expensive until recently. I have a dual-layer DVD-R drive, but I’ve never written a dual-layer disc. I haven’t used up the single-layer DVD-Rs and RWs I have, and I don’t have any files too large to fit on a DVD. I suppose dual-layer DVDs might be nice because I could fit the entire contents of some folders on them, but it’s a modest gain in convenience.

Readers of Engadget claim that it’s unlikely that copies of Xbox games really account for the spread of dual-layer DVDs and drives to create and play them. Back when I was taking basic statistics in college, our professor warned us repeatedly that correlation does not imply causation. New media formats and new hardware start out expensive and get cheaper pretty quickly. The less technology costs, the more people buy it, as long as it works. And even if every Xbox owner started a veritable copied-game factory, it’s unlikely that they could account for the expected sales of 100 million dual-layer DVDs. It’s just as likely that readily-available, inexpensive media are driving the increase in Xbox game copies.

There are plenty of absolutely legitimate, non-game-related uses to which one can put dual-layer DVDs, and I’d love to hear from any readers who are using them. (If you’re hacking your Xbox, though, it’s probably better if I don’t know about it.) They’ve got an obvious application for people creating large media files, which is more and more of the population these days with the spread of digital video cameras.

Whether or not you have either a dual-layer DVD-writer or an Xbox, however, you should back up your important data. Then, if you want to, you can read the complete Engadget article.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-03-06: Just One More...

Most backup strategies have weak points, which is why it’s good to have more than one in place. A colleague who specializes in risk management once said to me that the correct answer to the question “How many backups do you need?” is “Just one more.” My own experience at the 2006 Podcast Expo proves this.

I was giving a presentation about “Creating and Keeping Raving Fans” for your podcast. Before setting out on my fateful drive down to Ontario, I put a copy of the PowerPoint presentation, complete with audio clips, onto the handy USB stick the Ur-Guru gave me for Christmas last year. (Aren’t we the romantic couple?) So I knew, standing by the ditch looking at the remains of my car, that even if my laptop had died in the crash, I had what I needed to give my presentation.

Since this was a podcasting conference, the organizers had arranged for all the speakers to be recorded and to have the recordings released as podcasts. I was looking forward to this, because I’ve only had homemade recordings of my presentations to date, and they don’t pick up either the audio from the computer or the questions from the audience, even when I’m not dealing with a mangled microphone cord or horrendous background noise.

Being the backup fiend that I am, I asked the conference organizer if it would be all right to make my own recording of my talk, so I could put it on a CD and send it to my mother. (My mother not only doesn’t have an MP3 player, she doesn’t have a computer.) He said it was fine, so I packed along my newly-purchased iriver IFP-895, which I had tested out the week before.

This particular model of iriver gets great audio quality with its built-in mic, but it has one real drawback from my point of view: the buttons are all too sensitive. They react to the lightest of touches, which makes putting the thing in your hip pocket a less than stellar idea, as I learned the hard way.

It turned out that when I thought I was starting the recording on the iriver, I was actually pausing it, so what I ended up with was 15 minutes’ worth of pre-presentation setup discussion with the sound and projector person. (And somehow neither of us noticed until halfway through the presentation that the projector’s resolution wasn’t up to Enna’s 1440 x 900 widescreen and I should have re-set it before starting. I blame it on the angle I was seeing the screen from, up there on the stage, but I don’t know what his excuse was.)

I was disappointed and embarrassed when I got home and checked the recording, but was reassured that at least the professional, plugged-into-the-computer, second-microphone-for-the-audience recording would be coming out in a week or so.

And then I got an e-mail message from Tim Bourquin:

I am so embarrassed and upset to have to write this email, but I am afraid the audio-visual recording company we used for the show has made a huge error and recorded over your session at the Expo.

It was a terrible error, and while the AV company has apologized profusely, it doesn't bring back the audio file. Apparently they lost a total of 4 sessions (including yours) from the upstairs sessions on Friday afternoon.

I have spent the past two days speaking with the president of their company, because they were told and knew from the beginning how critical these audio recordings were to us. Nonetheless, they failed to make backups and lost 4 of the sessions.

Now, I’d like to know how you can record over a digital file. Ron Moore of the Battlestar Galactica podcast had just finished telling us that morning about the way his digital recorder started a new file every time he tried to go back and “tape over” a mistake. There wouldn’t be any reason to give recordings of different talks the same file name. I suspect them of using actual magnetic tape for the recordings, which not many companies do these days.

The most important line in the message might well be “they failed to make backups.” There are nearly infinite ways to lose a file, but a great many ways to back one up, as well, and even physical tapes can be copied without too much trouble, even if it takes more time.

If I hadn’t botched my recording, it could have saved the day for them. If they hadn’t botched their recording, it could have saved the day for me. But neither of us produced a usable recording.

Sometimes that happens. Sometimes you have four copies of a file and every one is corrupt. As I said last week, I have multiple copies of everything, but right now they’re almost all in the same building, so fire, flood, or earthquake could destroy all of them at once. (I have trouble imagining even a dedicated thief going through all the file boxes in the garage to get every last end-of-year DVD I make.)

No backup strategy, and in particular no implementation of that strategy, is completely foolproof. Murphy’s Law is alive and well and flourishing inside your computer. But the more backups you have, and the more places you keep copies of your data, the safer you’ll be.

Don’t go too far overboard: you don’t want your backup system to interfere with your ability to create that valuable business data in the first place. But especially if you’re going into a risky situation (like traveling to a conference), it can be worth making just one more backup of the most important data.