Is It Time for Year-End Backups Again? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-29-06

We interrupt this program for a special announcement: 2006 is at an end! Okay, you knew that, and I knew that, but I was all set to write the next installment of the website backup series when it finally hit me that this was the last posting of 2006 and therefore time for me to say something about archiving your data at the end of the year.

This is the fourth December of the FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder. That leaves me wondering whether I can say anything new on the subject of making special end-of-year copies of your financial and business data to put with your tax archives. In any case, since not everyone has been reading since 2003, it won’t hurt to start with a little review.

If you already create yearly archives of your paper files for tax purposes, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what needs to go onto your year-end backup CD or DVD. (And remember: use brand-name media for anything that needs to last, and don’t use rewritable CDs or DVDs for archiving, especially if you’ve written and erased data from them before.) You can also keep year-end copies on a network drive or external hard drive, but it’s easier to put CDs into the same files as your paper. (Put them in jewel cases first to protect them from dust and scratches.)

Financial Data

In the United States, the IRS requires you to keep all tax-related financial records for seven years in case they decide to audit you. The popular recordkeeping programs Quicken and QuickBooks both allow you to create a special end-of-year backup. There’s even a QuickBooks Year-End Center to help you do this. (If your fiscal year starts in July, you’ll be doing this at the end of June rather than the end of December.)

In Quicken for Windows, this function is found under File|File Operations|Year-End Copy.

For more help with archiving financial data, see About Financial Software.

If you filed your 2005 taxes online or used tax-preparation software, be sure to put a copy of the returns onto a CD with your 2005 files.

Receipts

If you shop online and get receipts by e-mail, make sure you save those. If you print them out and save the printed version, that works just fine. You don’t have to save the receipts separate from your other e-mail, though it can be useful to keep them in their own mail folder.

Invoices

If you have QuickBooks or another program automatically generate your invoices, you don’t need to make a separate copy. If you create your invoices manually, make sure you include copies of them in your archive.

Bills

For me, at least, switching to online billing was something of a mistake, because I always end up printing the bill (or at least the first page) and the payment confirmation. That means I have just as much paper to manage, and I have to pay for the ink. Because I do have the printouts, I don’t worry about saving the e-mail notices. If you don’t print the bills, make sure you save the bills in electronic form. It will be much easier to produce them in the event of an audit than if you have to get them from your vendors.

Business Data

Even if the IRS doesn’t want it, you’ll want to keep copies of your client projects. If the project is finished, move everything off onto CD or DVD and file it. (Look at all that free space on your computer.) If the project isn’t finished, you’ll want to keep a copy of the files on your hard drive so you can continue working on them, but this is a good opportunity to make sure you have proof of what you’ve accomplished for the year.

You definitely want to keep copies of contracts. While old-fashioned contracts require signatures and usually manifest on paper, these days contracts often go back and forth as PDF files and e-mail messages can act as contracts. Make sure you have copies of these in case you need to refer to them or to re-negotiate them.

E-mail

If you’re subject to Sarbanes-Oxley and other data retention rules, you have my sympathy. Even if you aren’t required to keep track of absolutely everything, you’ll want to keep copies of business-related e-mail. You can create a special Outlook archive file just for your 2006 business mail and put that onto a CD.

Software

Because you might not have all the same software installed seven years from now, it’s a good idea to keep a copy of your financial, e-mail, and other programs on CD along with your data. (Backwards compatibility only extends so far.) Make sure you have the serial number or registration number for the program available, too.

Privacy

Most of what you need to archive at the end of the year is confidential or at least private. That makes it a good idea to password-protect any files or folders you are backing up. Outlook, Quicken, and Quickbooks have this function built-in. For other files and folders, you might want to use a compression tool like WinRAR which allows you to put a password on the archive file. You’ll also be able to fit more data on one disk this way.

And that’s it for this week’s backup reminder. I do recommend making your year-end backups before the New Year’s Eve party, rather than after, at least if you plan to celebrate in the traditional manner. Computing under the influence may not be illegal, but it can be dangerous.

Back Up Your Website, Part 2: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-22-06

Last week we discussed two ways to back up your website, both of which assume that you have direct access to your web hosting account. This is your website and your domain, so even if you outsource the design and maintenance, you should keep the login and password on file.

Today’s Backup Reminder is aimed at the slightly less geeky and those who don’t edit their own sites. Next week I hope to be able to provide some specifics on backing up database-driven websites and those created with content management software like Mambo. (My Mambo expert colleague is looking into the details of this.) For now we’ll concentrate on how to back up your site even if you leave all the confusing stuff about hosts, servers, and control panels to someone else.

The key to backing up your website (or indeed someone else’s) if you can’t log in an download it through FTP or a website editor like Dreamweaver is getting an offline browser utility. Offline browsers date back to the days before widespread broadband access. These days it’s possible to be online almost anywhere. You can find free wireless in most major cities of the US. (In fact, a new café with free wireless access opened just down the street from me, and El Cerrito is not a major city.)

Ten years ago it was a different story. Browsing websites was a slow and often expensive proposition, with either the ISP or the telephone company charging by the minute for access to the Web. (Yes, Europeans have to pay by the minute for all phone calls, as I discovered when living in England in the mid-Nineties.) So there was a good reason to develop tools like this.

Fortunately for those who need to make copies of websites and don’t want to sit there saving each individual page from their browsers (which doesn’t really make an accurate copy of the site anyway), offline browsing utilities still exist. I use WinHTTrack, which I discovered a few years ago. (The name comes from the http protocol used by web browsers.) The most recent version dates from September of 2006, so it’s keeping up with the times. Just give it a URL and it will copy the entire site to your hard drive, preserving the folder structure. It’s free, and you can download it from http://www.httrack.com.

For the Mac user, there’s the colorfully and aptly named SiteSucker, available at http://www.sitesucker.us. Not having a Mac, I can’t test it out, but it appears to work the same way as HTTrack: feed it a URL and it sucks the web pages down to your hard drive. It promises to work on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, but you need OS X Tiger or newer. (If you have an older Mac, dig around a bit on the shareware sites and you’ll probably find something that works.)

These two free programs mean there’s no excuse not to make a backup of your website. Of course, if the website changes, you have to update your copy.

This isn’t an ideal backup method, but it’s a lot better than nothing. If you’re not sure what your web designer is doing about backing up your site, it’s a good idea to give yourself some insurance.

Don’t forget to back up before you plunge into the holidays!

Back Up Your Website: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-15-06

A few weeks ago, one of my Faithful Readers wrote to say:

I'm pretty rigorous about backing up, but I just discovered that our web pages don't get backed up. We accidentally deleted several pages while editing our website, so I asked the question, ‘How is our website backed up?’ The answer: ‘Duh-h-h-h, don't know.’ Our web hosts informed us they don't back up our pages. So we're having to reconstruct them from original Word docs.

Ouch!

When last I checked, he still hadn’t found a backup system for his website. And if one person has this problem, there are guaranteed to be others, so a newsletter about backing up websites seemed timely.

The easiest way to make sure your website gets backed up is to create and edit your website offline. Programs like Dreamweaver ask you to set up a local directory for your website files. Change the files there, then upload them. Then make sure that the local directory gets backed up along with your other business data.

If you don’t maintain your own website, be sure to ask your web designer to do this. (Chances are pretty good that s/he updates your site offline, but only about 50-50 that s/he backs up.) Any time there’s a major overhaul to the site, get a copy of the files on CD.

There are also other ways to back up your site. If you have control panel access to your web hosting account (and you certainly should; check the original messages you got from your hosting company for details), you should be able to back up your entire home directory in a few easy steps. My current web host, iPowerWeb, uses the vDeck control panel; my previous web host used Plesk. Both are pretty straightforward. You log in at a special URL (usually something like “www.yourdomain.com/cpanel”) and get a choice of things to administer, usually accompanied by colorful icons.

In my case, I click “Host Administration” and then “Backups.” After that all I have to do is enter my e-mail address and click the button labeled “backup.” This results in the message: “Your backup request has been queued. When the backup completes, you will be notified at sallie@fileslinger.com.”

And, sure enough, I get notified. Then I need to download that file onto the drive I want to back it up to, so I fire up my FTP program.

This is a big file (428 MB), because it not only includes my two websites (which have a fair number of audio and some video files on them, as well as a collection of PDFs) but also my FTP server, mail server, assorted configuration files, and three blogs.

To restore the site from one of these backups, I just have to tell the control panel where to find the file.

I’m being summoned for a conference call, so I’ll return next week with more ways to back up your website. Meanwhile, if you’re not sure how or whether your website is backed up, go and find out!

Backup Modems: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-01-06

These days, our livelihoods and businesses depend on internet access. I’ve noticed a rash of inaccessible web and mail servers in the last few weeks, my own among them. (I was lucky, though: fileslinger.com was only down for about an hour, and that’s the first time in more than a year.) A client’s website was down for three days over Thanksgiving weekend because her site is hosted on a server at a friend’s house, and his DSL went down while he was out of town.

One of the sites that went down was the Ur-Guru’s. He hosts several domains on his own servers in his home office, though he also has a hosted ISP just in case. Even though he has both cable and ADSL internet, sometimes things can go wrong. And last Friday I got a message saying:

Hon, I have no idea what is going on.

I woke up noticed the server not having a connection. ADSL is down. But DOWN BIG TIME!

The modem does not want to connect at all. I have no idea what is going on. But... this might not be an easy problem or something I have control over. Of course, this also means your mail is stuck and you can't reach it. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out.

This was followed by an update:

According to the info pages at XS "some customers" in Rotterdam center can't connect. They are working on fixing the problem. It was reported at 8am so there's no telling when this happened. I could probably see it in the POP logs (last time my checker checked my mail) but this is pretty bad.

I hope they fix this soon! If this was reported at 8am... well, then, they already had the entire morning and it's now past 1:30pm already.

All mail to my domains will either go into fallback or get queued up. Mail for your author-izer domain probably won't bounce either unless this problem is going to take 3 or more days. However, you can't access my server now at all. Damn.

After that, I suggested that he write something for this e-zine about the importance of having a backup modem, and, in general, more than one way to get online when your business depends on connectivity.

This is what he wrote:

What I have and why would probably just puzzle people (given that my network, routers, etc. are created redundant so every one has a backup in case of failure... trying to explain why that is so important would probably go beyond the scope).

I would say, though, that if your internet connection is important to you and you can't afford to be offline because your modem dies on you, it is useful to have a backup modem that you can hook up and continue on with business at hand. Sometimes it's easy to see where the connectivity problems are, at the ISP level but once your modem no longer gets a sync signal and appears not to even connect at the basic level there's no real way to tell what's going on. Usually people would call their provider or cable or DSL company and that'll get you into a queue and a lot of time gets lost trying to do all sorts of tests in the scripts of the helpdesk folks, many of those tests often being a waste of time.

Hooking up a backup modem that has been pre-configured has saved me a lot of time because if the backup modem, presumed to not be faulty of course, also doesn't get a sync signal then it's clear where the problem lies. It is then easier to call any helpdesk for information or details if you can tell them more precisely what the diagnosis is.

So for me, instead of having had to call the ISP and jump through their test script hoops I could immediately tell them the problem was the modem wasn't getting a sync and a backup modem also wasn't getting one so turning things off for 30 minutes and turning them back on would be a futile waste of time to try. Since the problem was affecting a wide area they already knew what to tell me but that's beside the point.

If the modem would have been dead the replacement would have been an immediate swap-out and things would continue as usual until I get a new modem to replace the backup modem or have the new modem go be the new backup modem.

Just like your data, having backup hardware that forms a key part of being able to continue business, work, or otherwise, is a consideration to be made. Cost of having a replacement modem is probably less of an issue than wasting lots of hours not having any connection at all.

Saving arguments with the help desk is definitely good. That still doesn’t guarantee that your ISP will fix the problem, but at least you’ll spend less time on the phone to India.

I’ll be back next week with more on internet connectivity and website backup.