Close Encounters of the Backup Kind: FileSlinger(TM) Backup Reminder 05-25-07

Mike Van Horn responded to last week’s Backup Reminder about audio recordings with the following:

Free Conference Call.com now has a free audio recording service. You can record any phone call while you make it. Both outgoing and incoming voices. (You must tell people you are recording them.) I'm using this on all my teleseminars now. I'm not sure if it's digital or not, but I believe it is.

Audio Acrobat does the same thing, plus they have a transcription service that goes along with it for an extra (but reasonable) fee.
So these are backups. And they can easily become MP3s.

I've had the idea (not tried yet) of making a face-to-face talk to a group while using my Bluetooth cellular headset and making a cell phone call to one of these services so that my talk gets recorded. And if I'm lucky and nimble, questions from the floor will make it onto the recording. There's a certain tackiness to making a talk with an ear gizmo on. But hey, this is the 21st century, right?

My response was that you still need to make a backup recording when using teleconference services, as I’ve been on teleseminars where for some reason or another the recording didn’t work out, and Mike agreed that redundancy was the key.

Ironically, Neville and I recorded another episode of “For Immediate Release” today—and once again we’re having to use my recording. This time it wasn’t a Skype crash but a problem either with Pamela or with Neville, who thinks he may have clicked “No” by accident when asked whether he wanted to record.

But enough about recordings. This week I had two encounters with new backup issues. Friday afternoon I arrived at a client’s house to find a box with a sticky note on it saying “For Backups.” Inside was a lovely new external hard drive from LaCie with almost no directions. It came to me that I’d actually never set up an external hard drive on a Mac before, but it seemed pretty straightforward: plug it in, turn it on, connect it to the computer.

That worked fine, so I installed the One-Click Backup Software and proceeded to start a backup of the entire user profile. (As far as I understand it, that includes all the settings as well as the files and applications, but one of you Mac people out there can probably explain it better.)

It appeared to be backing up just fine, but when it finished a notification popped up that several files had not been backed up because the drive was formatted in FAT-32 and the files were only compatible with HFC+.

I’d never heard of HFC+, but it was obvious from the context that it was a pre-OSX, pre-Intel Mac file system. The files which weren’t copied had all been transferred over from my client’s old (very old) iMac when she bought the new Intel Mac last year. They’re important enough files that I wanted to be sure she could back them up.

That meant reformatting the external drive in HFC+, which in turn meant going into the Disk Utility and selecting the drive to format. This was actually pretty easy, and also very fast. I’m not sure it would be as easy for a Mac user to find the Computer Management tool in order to format a drive in Windows. On the other hand, I can right-click to format drives from Windows Explorer—though I’ve only ever used that method on floppy disks, back when I had a computer that used them.

This time the backup worked and there were no error messages. Whew!

Wednesday I arrived at another client’s office to find “Set up new laptop” on the to-do list. Like the LaCie hard drive, the Acer notebook was still in its box. “Can you believe it was only $400?” my client asked.

Unusually low prices for laptops worry me. In this case, I was right to be worried. The machine came pre-installed with Windows Vista Basic—and had only 512 MB of RAM. I was amazed it ran at all.

Far worse from the perspective of backups was the complete absence of recovery disks. Not only wasn’t there a separate operating system disk, there were no CDs at all except an upgrade offer for a more expensive version of Vista (which wouldn’t run on that machine without at least doubling the RAM). One of the notes in the package (which did include a printed instruction manual) said to use the Acer’s eRecovery Management. I suffered a flashback to the 10 CDs I’d had to burn as recovery disks for the Sony Vaio this same client had bought a year before.

But no, eRecovery Management wanted to put its full backup, which promised to be a system snapshot, onto the second partition of the hard drive. I couldn’t find a way to put it elsewhere, though I was in something of a hurry (it was a long to-do list). And while there seemed to be an option in the program to burn a disk, it was grayed out and I couldn’t click on it.

I’d like to know how you’re supposed to recover your data if there’s a system failure and you can’t get into Windows. There may be an answer to that question, and if anyone at Acer wants to explain how it works and how to make a system recovery CD or DVD, I’m dead keen to hear about it. I don’t feel at all comfortable leaving my client with a computer that’s so much at risk.

As for Vista itself, in my brief encounter I found its version of Windows Explorer rather confusing, and I had to fumble a bit to set up the wi-fi connection, after which I got several “not connected” messages even when the connection strength was good. (Alas, Vista has not done away with the notification tray.)

I didn’t get a chance to experiment with Vista’s own backup tool, of which I’ve heard both good and bad things. I did have an opportunity to try the Norton Removal Tool, however, and that worked just fine to clear out the Norton Internet Security trial version that also came pre-installed. The machine was running slowly enough without having to suffer that.

I have definite reservations about this machine. I suspect it would have been worth another $400 to get system disks, enough RAM—and Windows XP. If the Ur-Guru doesn’t see a reason to upgrade to Vista, I can’t think why anyone else would bother. Next year, maybe. Or the year after that.

How to Back Up Your Data for Free (Podcast)

A couple of weeks ago, George Smyth had me on the One-Minute How To podcast to talk about backing up your computer. You can hear my sixty-second outline of backing up online with Mozy in Episode 142.

Make a Backup Recording: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-18-07

Some of you may know that I have an alter-ego: ‘Professor’ Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with ‘sketch’) of the Podcast Asylum. I’ve been a podcast junkie for about two years now, and am rarely seen without earbuds. On the whole, I prefer listening to producing, but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been interviewed for/guest host on three different shows, and I’ll be reprising my guest host appearance on For Immediate Release this coming Thursday.

What does that have to do with backups?

While I do make my own backup copies of certain podcasts, because I might want to listen to them again, I don’t save all of them. Eve Abbott of A Brain New Way to Work (who wrote a guest Backup Reminder a couple of months ago) has a rule about what to save, and says that you don’t need to bother hanging onto anything that you can get again if you need it. Podcasts fall into that category: I can always download them again, unless the podcaster takes the old archives offline. So I usually just save the ones that I appear in and the ones I’m collecting as a complete set (like the Podcasting for Dummies companion podcast).

Naturally, if you’re the host of the podcast, like Anna Farmery, who wrote the April 27th Backup Reminder, you want to back up your own shows. You might well want to back up the Audacity project file as well as the actual MP3 output, too, in case you need to re-mix anything. Anna puts hers onto an external drive.

So we’ve covered all that, and it should be fairly obvious that if you produce media files and they’re important for either your business or your personal life, you should back them up. What I want to talk about today is making backups during the actual recording process, something I touched on after last year’s Podcast Expo when the official recording team somehow failed to record my presentation—and so did I, through unfamiliarity with the way my new iriver IFP-895 worked. Where we should have had two recordings, we had none.

I think audio recording—and I presume video recording, though it’s not something I’ve done since the days of the 8mm tape—is one area where tapes really are more reliable than disks. Or, at least, they are more reliable than audio recording software. If the batteries on your mini-cassette recorder die halfway through a recording, at least you have the first half. If your audio recording software crashes halfway through a recording, you lose whatever you’ve done up to that point and have to start over.

This problem seems to be unique to recording. Outlook automatically saves drafts of e-mail messages. I can save a Word doc while I’m working on it. Ditto a Photoshop image file, and even an Audacity project file where I’m mixing together several different sound tracks, or a Camtasia video file where I’ve been editing a screen capture video. Once the recording is made, saving changes you make to it isn’t a problem, and even if your editing program crashes, or your system freezes up, or your cat walks across the keyboard, the most you’ll lose is the most recent few minutes of work.

Heck, even the WordPress blog software I use for my Author-ized Articles and the dynamic content on the Podcast Asylum site now auto-saves posts while you’re composing them.

But the only way I know of (and I’d love to hear any suggestions for alternatives) to back up a recording in process is to make more than one recording. If you’re producing the recording in your office, try making one recording onto the computer and one onto a portable device. You could even make one onto good old-fashioned cassette tape. This might mean having multiple microphones if your backup device doesn’t have a good built-in mike, but at least it can save you starting over at the beginning.

If you’re working from a script, starting over only costs you time; if you’re not, you might lose energy, spontaneity, or a particular insight that doesn’t occur to you the second time around.

If you’re recording an interview conducted via Skype or telephone, the best thing is to have both parties record. Combining the two recordings to ensure maximum audio quality is called producing a “double-ender,” and many podcasters who work with co-hosts via Skype do it for every show, because in most recordings of this sort, the person making the recording sounds a lot louder than the person on the other end of the call, and combining the recordings saves fussing with the levels.

Having two recordings can save a lot more than that, however. Case in point: my debut as guest co-host on For Immediate Release on May 10th. For some unfathomable reason, the regular hosts of the show have both upgraded to Windows Vista, something not even the Ur-Guru has seen a good reason to do yet. This doesn’t seem to have caused a problem for Shel Holtz, who usually records the show through his mixer, but it messed up HotRecorder completely, and that’s what Neville Hobson normally used when he was the one doing the recording. Neville had just switched to Pamela for Skype at the time he and I were recording.

I was petrified about doing the show, but one thing I didn’t worry about was the recording. I have a nifty program called Skylook which integrates Skype with Outlook and can record Skype calls automatically. (The only down side is that Outlook has to be running for it to work.) So I knew that even if Neville continued to have problems, I would be fine, especially as I’d just tested Skylook after installing Pamela myself.

About halfway through the show, Skype crashed at Neville’s end. “Disaster,” he reported when he had it back up again. Skype had brought Pamela down with it, and his recording had vanished. “I’ve got the recording at my end, so it’s not a disaster,” I responded. (Skylook had simply terminated the recording as it does when a call ends normally, and I’d already checked to see that the WAV and MP3 files were there.) So we picked up where we’d left off, and then I uploaded my recording to an FTP folder where he could pick it up and edit it.

The next day I was interviewed for another podcast, and the podcaster was having trouble with his recording software, so we just used mine.

The moral of the story is: record at both ends. If someone is interviewing you, make your own recording of it. Telephone recording devices (which plug into your headphone jack at one end and a recording device at the other) cost about $20. You can get free trials of software like HotRecorder, Skylook, and Pamela, which will get you through any one-off interview, and they’re not all that expensive to buy. Like any other backup, it could save you a lot of trouble.

I’d love to hear readers’ suggestions for backup audio and video recordings. There have to be techniques I haven’t thought of, though some may require more equipment than the average home office user has around.

And I’m always open to publishing reader stories about their experiences with backups, data loss, data recovery, and the like.

Hear Sallie on For Immediate Release May 24th, 2007 at www.forimmediaterelease.biz.

Another Vision for Backup

After I published last week’s Backup Reminder about FAM, I got a snarky response from the tech support guy at VW Solutions saying

“I believe the problem was that the program is too advanced for you; this kind of review is something I expect from someone of your caliber. We received an outstanding review from PC World; they are the type of people that actually know how to use a computer.”

I don’t really blame him for being snippy. No one likes reading a negative review. I don’t particularly like writing them. It’s not as if I go out of my way to have bad experiences with products, services, or books.

This had the Ur-Guru rolling in the aisles; he’d tried FAM some years back and experienced problems with it himself, and he’s the kind of person who considers PC World a publication for amateurs. To be fair to VW Solutions, however, the Ur-Guru had the same kinds of problems with all products of that nature. Open file support is tricky.

Anyway, I pointed out to the affronted tech support employee that most magazines run their tests on clean systems, whereas mine was not, so the potential for driver conflicts was high, and that was probably the cause of my troubles. When I got a much more polite letter from VisionWorks co-founder and CTO Brian Bondy, he suggested much the same thing:

“It sounds like you have several backup software products installed, and I think this may be where the problem lies. FAM is a low level driver; the only other time that I've seen such a disastrous install, was when the user had another open file manager installed on their computer. If you are using FAM as your open file solution, you must make sure that all other open file software are uninstalled.”

I think Mozy may actually be the culprit; when I looked over the settings the other day prior to recording a One-Minute How To (I’m on episode 142) on how to use the program, I noticed that it has support for open file backup. I’d forgotten all about that, assuming I ever noticed it in the first place. I don’t back tricky (and private) things like Outlook and Quicken up on Mozy anyway, and copying open Word docs is rarely much of an issue.

In any case, what I decided to do was reinstall Vision Backup and see how it worked without FAM.

The answer is: pretty well. I tried making a backup to my Maxtor Shared Storage II, a backup to my second internal drive, a backup to FTP, and a backup to CD. You can set all of these up through a straightforward wizard.

The only serious problem was with the Maxtor Shared Storage II. For some reason, Vision Backup just does not like this drive. Even when I’ve signed in and am connected to the drive, I get error messages reading “Warning, could not connect to mapped drive (Z): The network name cannot be found.” I’m not sure what the issue is there. Given that the Z drive is where I have the most storage, it’s an obvious destination for backup copies, particularly now that the X drive is starting to show signs of wonkiness.

Vision Backup has no problem connecting to the public section of the Shared Storage II drive, however: it just completed a swift and tidy backup of a 223 MB client folder. So it must be something about the machine-specific partitions which is the problem, but I don’t have the technical knowledge to know what.

I wouldn’t think the problem was password-protected access, however, because the backup to my FTP server, which requires a login ID and password, worked just fine. I won’t describe it as “swift,” but that’s not really a function of Vision Backup as much as it is of the upstream speed of my so-called broadband connection. The speed of the upload varied wildly between about 25 kbps and about 400 kbps, for no reason I could see.

Backup to my second internal drive also worked just fine. Curiously, even when backing up to other locations, I continue to get the error message about Drive Z. Restoring the backup on the D drive also went without trouble. (You can choose whether to restore files to their original location or to another one.) The only thing which seemed odd to me was having Outlook backed up as a DAT rather than a PST file.

The first two attempts at backing up onto a CD resulted in the program crashing. When I switched my selection from “straight file copy” to “full backup,” the backup ran smoothly. I’m not sure why, or whether, the choice of backup type should have caused such a problem. Unless I’m actually making a drive image, I prefer straight file copies to special formats like .pfa. However, only the .pfa files can be restored through Vision Backup, rather than simply copied back onto the source drive.

A full backup, on the other hand, backs up all the files and sets the archive bit to “off.” Archive bits are used to tell incremental and differential backups whether or not to copy a given file. It seems to me that I read something about archive bits recently, but I can’t find the article now and can’t remember anything except that the author was arguing that they should really be called “backup bits.” In any case, I somehow doubt that they’re a matter of burning interest to most of my readers.

My conclusion is that Vision Backup is a decent product of its kind, though I’m not likely to use it to replace my existing system. I’m not in a position to test its enterprise features, because I’m not an enterprise. But it’s generally easy to use, the scheduling feature works, it includes a wide range of options, and it seems to work with all media except mapped network drives.

I stand by my recommendation to use open file support (of any kind) with caution. But then, I’m someone who insists on using the DOS version of Norton Ghost.

Free Chapter of New Backup Book

SearchStorage is offering a free 43-page download of Chapter 2 of W. Curtis Preston's new book, Backup and Recovery (O'Reilly, 2007). Preston (unlike me) is a real backup expert.

Chapter 2 is entitled “Backing it All Up” and starts “Don't Skip This Chapter!” Now that's a sentiment I can agree with:

The casual reader might assume that this chapter is an introduction to basic backup concepts. While that is, in fact, the purpose of this chapter, it is also true that many seasoned administrators are unfamiliar with the ideas presented here. One reason for this is that administrators find themselves constantly being pulled away from “mundane” activities like backups for things that are thought to be more “important,” such as installing new servers and figuring out why systems are running slowly. Also, administrators may go several years without ever needing to perform a restore. The need to use your backups on a regular basis would undoubtedly change your ideas about their importance.

There probably aren't all that many seasoned administrators reading this blog. After all, my target readership is people with home offices and small businesses, the ones who know less about computers than I do. (And for my detractors out there, yes, there are in fact lots of people who know less about computers than I do.)

But the fact that this particular chapter does cover the basics means that it's worth reading even if you're not an IT professional. The pre-backup inventory questions are something any computer owner—and certainly any business owner—should ask before choosing a backup solution, and the ten types of disasters are things we should all think about.

Nip on over and download the chapter. You'll have to fill out a form, but that's pretty typical for downloads of this sort, and you can always unsubscribe later.

Meanwhile, I'm going back to laughing about the fact that someone thought I should receive a free subscription to Dr. Dobb's Journal. Of course, it wouldn't be any stranger than the free subscription to CFO Magazine, but honestly—do I look like a programmer to you?

A Vision for Backup? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-04-07

Yesterday I woke up to one of the worst product pitches I’ve ever received in the history of this e-zine/blog. Not that I get flooded by hundreds of them every day, but people do send me requests for product reviews, affiliate partnerships, and the like. (The best pitch so far, as you know if you’ve been reading for a while, came from Seagate/Maxtor.)

The problem started before I even opened the message. It had a subject line of “Hi,” which immediately set off the spam alarm bells. Worse, it started off “Dear Sal.” You’ve got to be kidding. Only my immediate family gets away with calling me “Sal.” Even my fiance doesn’t call me “Sal.” (And don’t any of you out there start, either!) So I was not predisposed toward a positive response.

However, when I went to the website, the product in question (Vision Backup and the associated File Access Manager) looked legitimate, and since I always need something to write about, I’d check it out. Besides, the marketing manager apologized handsomely and promised to hire an editor next time. So now I have two new backup-related products and pro license keys for them.

The purpose of File Access manager, which is designed to work with a number of backup products, is to allow you to back up open files. Some files cannot be copied when they’re open. Your Outlook .pst file is one of them, and it would appear that Quicken files also fall into this category, because if I have Quicken running when my Maxtor backup service runs, the entire backup fails. That means I have to remember to close Quicken by 9 AM (yes, I am the kind of sick person who can get up and do Quicken entry or run reports at 8:00) if I don’t want to have to redo the backup manually or stare at a reproachful red “M” in my system tray until the next day.

The Maxtor Shared Storage II drive isn’t set to back up Outlook. I do that primarily with Karen’s Replicator, and I have to let Replicator finish copying the .pst file before I can open Outlook. (Since Replicator runs when I boot the machine, it almost never happens that Outlook is already open when I run the program. If it is, however, I can’t copy that file, though the rest of my backup jobs work all right.)

Hence the need for something like File Access Manager. Or, at least, the convenience it could add to one’s life, particularly if backup windows are a big issue in your company. (It only takes about 10 minutes, maybe 15, for Replicator to run, and less than that for my Maxtor backup.) I confess to a deep-seated prejudice against backing up open anything in Windows, but that’s primarily an issue for me when it comes to entire system images rather than individual files, and in any case it’s beside the point. Either FAM works and provides usable copies of locked files, or it doesn’t, and if it does, I should dispense with my prejudice.

The first thing that happened after I installed File Access Manager and rebooted was that I got an error message saying that LVCom Server had shut down. I hadn’t realized I was running anything called LVCom Server, so I looked it up. It turns out it’s something Microsoft uses to talk to my Logitech webcam. I don’t even have the webcam plugged in right now (I only connect it when I’m going to use it), so that’s not an immediate issue, but this might mean I’d need to turn FAM off and restart LVCom Server in order to use my webcam.

The second problem was that when I clicked on the preferences and got the “Add Software” section, there was no “add” button. Enna here has 1900 x 1440 resolution, and I prefer not to have to squint at the screen (I am almost 40, after all, and squinting makes terrible wrinkles), so I have my display set to use large fonts. This has a tendency to mess up the way some dialog boxes display, but I can usually get around that by resizing the dialog box in question. (Just put your mouse at the edge of the corner and drag.) Not this time.

So here I am in my display settings switching from 120 DPI to 96 DPI. Which it’s supposed to be able to do without restarting, but appears not to be doing. Which means I get to reboot my computer again. Be right back…

*squint* Okay, This time 1) I didn’t get the LVCom error and 2) I could see (with a magnifying glass) the “Add” button. Of course, I couldn’t activate the darn thing, because I’d forgotten to tell Windows Firewall to let it talk to its servers. Anyway, I added all the backup programs I use to the allowed list—which took a while, since there are several, and it wasn’t clear which .exe file I needed from the Vision Backup folder. I added them all, just to make sure.

Now that I’ve entered my settings, I can switch my display back to something readable, but I can’t do that in the middle of a backup job, because of the need to reboot, so I guess I’ll just magnify my Word display here (yikes! 150% is a little too big) and hope I can get to the end of this article without giving myself a headache.

For some reason, activating Vision Backup went without any trouble. The interface is fairly straightforward for those familiar with backup programs. The main screen has a series of options running down the left side: Create a New Schedule, Run a Backup Now, Restore Backup, Edit Backup Schedules, Manage Templates, View Reports, Preferences, Manage Plug-Ins, Help Files, and License Information. I opted for “Run a Backup Now” to see whether it would, in fact, be able to copy my open Outlook .pst file. (And then realized I didn’t have Outlook started yet—all this rebooting is getting me confused.)

I got a warning message about not being able to access my Z drive (that’s the private partition for this computer on the Maxtor Shared Storage II), which seemed a bit strange since I’d logged into the thing and created a folder to put the backup in. It appeared to be copying something to somewhere, though. I just tried to open the log file and got an error message saying there’s nothing associated with .htm files. (Right. I have three web browsers installed.)

That was the point at which everything seized up and I had to reboot the machine again.
It does seem that something got backed up, however. There’s something called a .pfa file on my Z drive.

But I thought I’d better try again, so I started over—at which point I had to leave the house for an hour. I came home and found the machine frozen solid. This is not what you’d call encouraging.

After the third or fourth time the machine seized up so badly I couldn’t even get a response to CTRL-ALT-DEL, I gave up, uninstalled both programs, and reset the font display. Enough is enough.

Now, I’m sure not everyone gets this response to the FAM software (and I’m pretty sure it’s the FAM, rather than the VisionBackup, that causes the problems). I don’t know what on my computer objected to it so strongly that nothing would work. What I do know is that I obviously can’t use it. And, of course, I can’t recommend a program that I can’t use.

Try it at your own risk.

Better than Backup?

And while we're on the subject of seminars, time)spring, maker of TimeData continuous data production software, is offering a webinar entitled “Way Better than Backup for Windows.” This one takes place on multiple dates. Just click on a link if you want to attend.

• Thursday May 3, 8am Pacific
• Tuesday May 8, 8am Pacific
• Wednesday May 9, 3pm Pacific
• Wednesday May 16, 9am Pacific
• Thursday May 17, 2pm Pacific
• Monday May 21, 10am Pacific
• Thursday May 24, 1pm Pacific
• Tuesday May 29 8:30am Pacific
• Wed. May 30, 8:30am Pacific

There's also a collection of no-registration-required white papers in PDF format on the time)spring website for your delectation. There's a mighty positive review there, which does however warn: “You do have to have IIS installed, .Net Framework and if you're using the secure mode, you'll need to setup the TMC Admins group on your system.” If you don't know what any of those things are, you should probably consult an expert before opting for this solution.

Ziff-Davis eSeminar: On-Demand Data Protection

I get invited to a lot of seminars and events related to backup and storage, and while I'm not in a position to attend most of them, it has belatedly occurred to me that I could post announcements about them here in case any of my readers are interested. Most of them are online, so it doesn't matter where you are.

On May 15th at noon Eastern Time, Ziff-Davis is sponsoring a 45-minute eSeminar about on-demand data protection. The e-mail invite reads:

Join us to hear Doug Chandler, IDC Program Director, Storage Software and Services, reveal the latest findings and trends, showing why use of on-demand data protection is growing in the SMB market, why software-as-a-service has become the preferred data protection strategy for more and more emerging businesses, and how your business can take advantage of this option now.

I'll probably register, and I might even manage to attend. Which means I'll get a follow-up phone call from Arsenal Digital, and will be disappointing yet another friendly salesperson with hopes of getting me to purchase a solution aimed at far bigger businesses than mine. (The govenrment's definition of “small business” is a bit different from that of ordinary humans.) I've lost track of the number of people to whom I've had to say “I was just researching this so I could write about it in my backup column” when they call after I download a white paper or sign up for a teleseminar.

It's too bad ZDNet's registration page doesn't include “Press” (or “Blogger,” or “Student”) among the possible job titles for attendees. “Other” isn't really very helpful to companies in determining whether it's worth making a phone call to try to close a sale.

Backup Blog on TechDispenser

The FileSlinger™ Backup Blog is now part of TechDispenser, the Computerworld Blog Network. As far as I understand this, that means that content from this blog will sometimes appear on the TechDispenser home page (as I write this, two of my posts are up there), and likewise short excerpts from other TechDispenser blogs appear in a box in the sidebar on this blog.

The “About” page at TechDispenser describes the network this way:

Computerworld’s human powered technology blog network and news aggregator. Tech Dispenser is different from the bot-run landscape of news aggregators because every site in our network is hand selected by real human beings and every piece of content that appears on techdispenser.com is categorized and prioritized by Computerworld’s editors.

It certainly beats having my content scraped by a bot hands down. I'm hoping it will bring some more traffic this way. Backup is not the sexiest of topics, and I'm not in any danger of becoming an A-list blogger whose popularity generates massive bandwidth bills. But I do want to get the word out to people before they lose their data.