More Broadband Horror Stories

My post last Friday about our Comcast troubles appears to have struck a chord with several listeners, and I thought I'd share a few things here, including a photo of our “Third World Wiring.” (Comcast is on the left, with the splitter dividing the signal between apartments. The gray cables on the right are for my housemate's satellite TV.)

One long-time reader wrote in with the following story:

You have brought up the important point of having a backup broadband service, especially for businesses which rely on broadband for day to day work. When my neighboring office had problems with DSL, it took four business days to get it fixed. Out of this was 2 days spent at the local telco office where they had to replace the circuit board and wiring.

With all the improvements in technology, the telco office still functions like the days of old with a lot of bureaucracy thus delays. They also do not work on week-ends. Mind you, the office was located 10 miles from the international headquarters of the largest US telephone company. Other than the toll free number, which is answered from anywhere in the East or West coast or half-way around world, there is no way to contact anyone higher up. Everyone in the HQ is hiding behind unlisted telephone numbers, while heading the worlds largest telco.

A combination of cable and dsl is perhaps the ideal combination if broadband is essential for your business. You may want to research how the cable and telcos deal with small businesses which have a need for non stop broadband service. May be we should invite feedback from users with their experience. It would also be a good forum to vent our bad experiences both with cable cos and telcos so it may draw someone's attention to the issue.

We could be here a long time, and get pretty far off-topic, if every reader of this blog and the e-zine used the comments field to vent about hassles with ISPs. If you've got an especially good one, you're welcome to send it in, but I'd appreciate any focus on how it affected your backup system.

And it seems someone else has found a more dramatic way to get Comcast's attention. Back in August, a 75-year-old woman smashed a Comcast manager's equipment after having her service cut off. (He's lucky, actually, that the only equipment she applied the hammer to was on his desk.)

On a lighter note, there's the Onion's wonderful parody news item about the loss of all online data after a whole-Internet crash.

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

Special Offer on ION Backup through November 2nd

You may remember that I reviewed/beta tested Universe Point's ION backup service back in August. ION's unique selling proposition is monitored backup: they check to be sure your backup jobs have completed successfully.

Today I got the following e-mail from the ION sales department:

Dear Sallie,

Universe Point is currently running an amazing special on ION, the first monitored backup software. You will receive your ION Server or Workstation license for free (up to a $700 value) when you sign up for our monitoring service.

We have salesmen waiting by the phones to help you so give us a call (610-352-1150) or send an email to sales@universepoint.com. This offer ends on Friday, November 2nd, so don't miss this opportunity to protect and secure your data for as little as $30/month.

This special is only available if you call in or email our sales team.

I thought ION was a good product, and Universe Point provides good support (or did for me), so if you're in the market for monitored backup, you might want to take advantage of the special.

And no, I don't get a percentage. (Pity, that.)

Do You Have a Backup Internet Connection? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-26-07

I started writing this on Thursday afternoon while waiting for the Comcast repair guys to come fix my cable Internet connection, which went down Tuesday about noon. (And at that, I'm getting quicker service out of Comcast than Neville Hobson is from Virgin Media: he had to wait a whole week for service.)

To give Comcast credit, the cable connection is normally pretty reliable; this is the longest outage I can remember for years. But the cable connections into the house are a fearsome tangle of un-weatherproofed patch-togethers (what the Ur-Guru calls Third World cabling), vulnerable to all kinds of things—including Comcast technicians installing services for the other apartments in the building.

Which is apparently just what happened in this case: when installing services for the apartment upstairs, the last set of technicians failed to include a booster for our line, hence siphoning off half our signal to go to the other apartment and dropping ours down below the level where the modem could pick it up.

At least it didn't take long to fix, but this kind of thing is woefully common, and the things I hear about DSL around here don't exactly encourage me to switch. (Besides, the DSL available where I live is slower than the cable, though both are pathetic in comparison to what's available in Western Europe or Asia.)

Many businesses these days are dependent on the Internet--mine definitely included. "This is why I have to have two connections," said the Ur-Guru, who has both cable (at 20 Mbps) and DSL (at 10 Mbps).

It's worth thinking about what would happen to your business if you had to go two days—or a week—without an Internet connection. If you've got the kind of setup the Ur-Guru does, and transfer massive source code files back and forth, then you do need two high-speed connections and an automatic fail-over. (For those unfamiliar with that term, it means that if one system fails, the other kicks in automatically.) While many DSL providers offer dial-up lines in the event of a problem, the most you can really do with dial-up is check your e-mail, and then only if no one is sending attachments.

On the other hand, if you're a laptop user like I am (or can work from your laptop for an extended period if you have to), you have some other options. In this case, I just hitched a ride on the unsecured wi-fi connection the upstairs neighbors were obligingly broadcasting. (It seems only fair, since they were using our signal to power it.) That meant all I had to do was unplug my Ethernet cable and enable my wireless connection.

Failing that option (though if you work in an office building or live in an apartment, you may well be surrounded by unsecured wi-fi connections), there are plenty of other places to pick up wi-fi, like the public library half a block away, or the funky cafe where I sometimes meet with clients. And, of course, nearly every Starbucks and McDonald's has wi-fi, though I don't normally frequent either establishment.

My cousin Jason the Mac geek is away from his home connection so often that he invested in an EVDO card that connects him to the Internet via his cell phone provider. This costs him an extra $50/month on top of his phone bill and ensures that he can get online from anywhere he can get Sprint service.

Just as most of us have both cell phones and land lines, each to act as backup for the other, we need backup Internet service in order to keep our data moving—and our online backup systems working.

It's also important to have a backup e-mail provider: for some reason, possibly related to a vDeck upgrade, my sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com e-mail address wasn't working at all for a chunk of last week. I have a good half-dozen other e-mail addresses, however, so that was more an inconvenience than a serious problem, though it's a problem I want fixed, thanks very much.

So if you tried to send me any mail last week, send it again, and if ever you can't reach me at my FileSlinger address, try sallie [at] author-izer [dot] com. (Indeed, a quick Google search on my name should turn up plenty of ways to reach me.)

If you have thoughts specifically about what I write here, you can always post them as comments instead of sending me a private message. I do post and respond to all legitimate comments.

Technorati Tags: Comcast, Internet Service Providers, wi-fi, EVDO, DSL, cable internet, broadband

Test-Driving the (Maxtor OneTouch) Mini: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-19-07

Yes, I'm two days late with this. Friday morning we were in Dunsmuir. It was raining so hard you couldn't even see Mount Shasta, the Ur-Guru was in an evil mood because of the weather, and we were facing a long drive across the mountains to Eureka to meet my long-lost cousin and his family. So I had just about time to back up the computer to my new Maxtor OneTouch Mini drive, and no time to write about it.

Enough with the excuses, already. I'm home, the sun is shining, and I'm in no hurry to see the inside of my car again for a while.

This was actually the second trip with the Mini drive rather than the Seagate FreeAgent Go drive I bought a few months ago, since I wanted to be able to test it a bit more and contrast the two. Though about the same physical size, and with the same capacity, they look nothing alike. The Mini has a brushed-metal top with a rectangular depression above the Maxtor name, nested in slightly rubberized black plastic with rounded edges and a small but bright white LED which changes in brightness and pattern depending on whether the drive is sleeping, working, or powered down.

Overall, I think the design of the FreeAgent Go drive is more attractive (in spite of that huge yellow light). The OneTouch series, large and small, are supposed to look solid and vault-like, conveying security, whereas the emphasis with the FreeAgent drives is portability. (I'm paraphrasing Jay Pecheck's answer to my question about whether there were any plans to converge the two series of drives.) The hefty OneTouch 4 Plus with its odd trapezoidal profile succeeds at that; trying to make anything as small as the Mini look vault-like risks an excess of cute. But it does make for a matched set when one has both models.

Like the FreeAgent Go, the OneTouch Mini requires two USB ports, one for power and one for data. This is probably the thing I like least about the drives, because if I have both of them connected, it means that my USB hub and the four ports on my laptop are all filled. (If you're curious, the other ports are taken up by the tablet and the scanner, now that the printer is connected to the Shared Storage II.) One thing I can say in favor of those shiny, fingerprint-attracting Western Digital drives the Ur-Guru has is that they only need one USB port apiece. So, since I know it's technically possible to run power and data through the same USB cable, I'm not sure why the Seagate/Maxtor drives don't do that.

The cables are a minor quibble, though. I've had no complaints with the FreeAgent drive since I got it, and the Mini is shaping up nicely. Jay isn't kidding about wanting to associate the Maxtor name with data protection, since the Mini comes with three different options for backup.

Two of the backup options included with the OneTouch Mini (and the OneTouch Plus) are familiar, at least to someone who has used other Seagate/Maxtor products. There's a basic backup program like the one on the Shared Storage II, where you choose the folders to back up and the days you want the backup job to run.

I ran into a small problem when choosing folders: many of the folders on my C drive didn't appear in the list, presumably because Maxtor Manager identified them as hidden or system files, which it doesn't support. In three cases, at least, those identifications are wrong, since I have three folders under C which hold my business documents: ! Author-izer, ! FileSlinger, and ! Podcast Asylum. The exclamation points (which are there to ensure the folders appear at the top of the list in an alphabetical sorting) seem to confuse Maxtor Manager.

I got around this problem by selecting the same folders on my D drive, which contain almost-as-recent information as those on my C drive, thanks to SyncBack—as well as many older files which are no longer active but which I might need if a former client calls. (Apparently Maxtor Manager only worries about exclamation points on your C drive.)

Unlike many software programs, Maxtor Manager's backup doesn't offer you the option of backing up your e-mail or your bookmarks. Since I use Outlook and my .pst file (with all my mail and contact information) is kept in a "hidden" folder (I long since un-hid it), I can't even manually choose to back that data up, but I had no trouble with backing up the archive .pst files on the D drive. Because Outlook locks those files when it's running, though, running the Maxtor Backup program with Outlook open results in a "backup failed" message and a little red icon in the system tray. (The same is true for Quicken data, but the program doesn't appear to have any problems with open Microsoft Office documents.)

The Mini's second backup option, Sync, suffers from the same "blindness" as the backup program, and works much the same way. You get a choice of "Simple Sync," which synchronizes the My Documents folder and "Custom Sync," where you choose your own folders; in my case the choices are "My Documents," "Desktop," "C," and "D." (Some people tend to store a lot of stuff on their desktops, something I never understood but see often enough to understand why Seagate chose to provide that option.)

The difference between "Sync" and "Backup" is that Sync copies—and deletes—files in both directions. The idea is to be able to update your files on one computer, sync with the Mini drive, connect the drive to another computer, and sync again to ensure all the newest files get transferred onto that machine, updating any previous versions. You can choose to sync automatically or manually, and to have the program ask whether you want to replace files or always overwrite. Except for the restriction on the folders you can choose to synchronize, Maxtor Sync appears identical to Seagate's Folder Sync, though I think the Seagate interface is a bit slicker (unfortunate color scheme notwithstanding).

These tools, while useful enough, are nothing really new. The most interesting backup option on the OneTouch drives is SafetyDrill, Maxtor's new drive imaging software. The Ur-Guru and I tested it on a system we'd just reinstalled, and it worked perfectly. To make the image, you go to the "Safety" tab in Maxtor Manager (denoted by a life ring) and choose "Create SafetyDrill(TM) Copy Now." You can ask for reminders to create copies every X days, and you can limit the space your OneTouch drive lets you use for those copies. You can also decide how many of those copies you want to keep (just the most recent, the last two, the latest five, etc).

To restore from your image, you need to boot your machine from the SafetyDrill™ CD which ships with the drive. Once you do that, you find yourself in a Linux environment. Don't mind the X-shaped pointer; everything in SafetyDrill works pretty much the same as in Windows, and there's not much room for confusion, since the only choice you have to make is which image to restore. The idea is to keep you from making mistakes during such a critical operation.

Backup and restore times were comparable to Symantec Ghost 8 Corporate (which we'd just used to make an image before testing SafetyDrill). SafetyDrill is easier to use, at least for those who aren't familiar with DOS and the rather odd way Ghost rearranges your drive letters. I'm thinking of using the Mini to store drive images and keeping the space on the FreeAgent available for straight file copies. It's small enough that it's easy to take out of my office and store in a safe-deposit box (should I ever get one), and the drive has encryption options built in, both password-protection for the entire drive and Maxtor Encryption, which automatically encrypts and decrypts files when you put them in the password-protected folder it creates.

It's always good to put a password on anything it's easy to lose, like small hard drives, USB sticks, PDAs—and laptops, which may not be all that easy to lose, but remain easy to steal. Just back up the password somewhere other than the Mini drive.

I'd give the Mini four stars out of five. I think it needs an e-mail backup option if it's really going to protect people's most critical data without resorting to a complete drive image. And since many laptops are short on USB ports, combining the data and power cables into one would enhance usability and portability. Nevertheless, I think the software bundled with the Mini, in particular SafetyDrill, is a big improvement on the "lite" version of Retrospect that shipped with earlier OneTouch drives.

Finally, I have to wonder why Maxtor is sticking with the OneTouch name, because neither the Mini nor the Plus has a button on it that you can press to run your backups. Admittedly you can back up or sync by right-clicking on the Maxtor icon, but that's actually two touches. Given that the backups run automatically once you set them up, perhaps "Touch Free" would be more accurate.

Technorati Tags: Maxtor, OneTouch Mini, SafetyDrill

Drowning in Drives: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-12-07

I want to start this week's Backup Reminder with a story about how spam blockers can sometimes backfire. It turns out that Jay Pecheck at Seagate actually responded to the first message I sent him about the unexpected and untimely demise of Teras, the Maxtor Shared Storage II drive he had sent me last August.

The problem was, I had recently turned on a challenge/response system for my sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com e-mail account. (That funny way of writing my e-mail address is to foil the harvester bots.) Unless you're already on my "whitelist" of e-mail addresses to accept, the first time you send a message to that address, you get a "challenge" message generated by my mail server, which asks you to reply in order to confirm that you're a real person and not a spam-bot. (You've probably seen the more sophisticated versions of this system used by Earthlink and Spam Arrest.) All you need to do is hit "reply," and then "send," and your original message will reach me.

Unless my "challenge" message gets caught in your spam filter, that is. Then you never realize that there's something else you have to do in order to get your message through, and I never know you tried to contact me.

Which is exactly what happened with Jay's response to my "Help!" e-mail. The spam filters at Seagate sucked in my "challenge" message, so I never got his response.

Last week, puzzled by the silence and frustrated by my interactions with the baffled tech support team, I manually added Jay Pecheck's e-mail address to my whitelist. No sooner had the Backup Reminder gone out than I had a message saying "Didn't you get my earlier mail?"

So I owe Jay, and Seagate, a public apology, because they weren't ignoring me.

Not only that, but these people know how to make good when there's a problem. First, Jay sent me a replacement Maxtor Shared Storage II drive by next-day courier and gave me the UPS account number in order to send back the dead drive so he could see whether the data might be intact in one of the drives in the RAID setup. Then he decided to throw in two more drives: a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus (500 GB) and a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (160 GB). Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and Baby Bear, as you can see from the photo.

The first priority was setting up the new Shared Storage II, which I named "Teratides" (4 syllables) because that's the Homeric Greek for "Son of Teras." (You already knew I was a geek, but what you might not have realized is that I'm a classics geek.)

As I said last year, basic setup of this drive is quite simple, though there are a few tricks to remember. When you first connect the drive, you're prompted to ceate a password for the advanced web administration access, but not told that the login is "admin." And when you first create a "share" from one of the machines on the network, Maxtor Easy Manage suggests your Windows login as the name for the share. The problem with this is that my Windows login is my full name, with a space in it, and login names with spaces don't work for Easy Manage. I'd remembered that from last time and used my computer name instead.

There were a few other quirks we ran into during the course of setting up Teratides and then connecting Mama Bear to the USB port to act as a backup for the network drive, but we got them sorted out with Jay's help. For those of you who might be considering getting one of these drives, I'll sum the fixes up by saying that 1) it's a good idea to download and install the firmware upgrade, and 2) when you connect a printer to the MSS-II, don't use the printer software that came with the printer, or it will get confused. I was getting "Communication error" messages from Epson even when documents printed properly, until Jay pointed me at the knowledge base pages that explained how to do the printer setup. (This required uninstalling all the Epson printer software, which in turn required several passes through add/remove programs, both before and after disconnecting the printer.)

Communication with the printer is still a bit slow--there's a perceptible pause between the time I send the "print" command and the time the printer actually starts working. But the documents all print just fine, and now my housemate can use my printer even when I'm not home and have taken my laptop elsewhere. (Yes, she has her own printer, but mine does 13"-wide documents.)

A few of the issues I ran into almost certainly stemmed from the fact that I hadn't removed the old Maxtor Easy Manage software before adding the new drive. Easy Manage has been somewhat updated since then, in order to make it play better with the Maxtor Manager software that comes with the OneTouch drives. That's all been straightened out, and the scheduled backups to Teratides are running properly, as are the backups from Teratides onto Mama Bear.

Those are a little trickier to track, as the interface is a bit lacking, but it's possible to see that drive by going to "My Network Places," where it shows up with a long Unix tag: "MaxBackup_Maxt_1_2HAA0GP3." The backups themselves are .tar.gz files (that's a compressed Unix format), unlike the files on the Shared Storage drive, which are direct copies mapped into the same folder tree as on my C drive. If this sounds a bit obscure and confusing, it's deliberate. You're not supposed to mess with those backup files, because they won't do you any good if you accidentally delete them.

When we went to bed on Saturday night after setting up the new drives, we noticed that the (very bright) white LED on the front of Mama Bear was gently pulsing in a sleep rhythm. The Ur-Guru loves LEDs (they remind him of home), but I may turn it off after he goes home. To do that, I have to disconnect the OneTouch Plus from Teratides, connect it to my laptop, use the Seagate software to turn off the lights, and then reconnect it to Teratides, so I might just decide not to bother. I'm starting to get used to it, and at least it's not yellow.

So that's the news for this week. Seagate is in fact both paying attention and concerned about its reputation—and my data, too, for that matter. I'll be back next week with a discussion of the new Safety Drill software that comes with the OneTouch drives, and I'll keep you posted on whether Jay manages to recover the data from the late Teras.

Technorati Tags: Maxtor Shared Storage II, seagate, Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus

A New Backup Blog on the Block

This morning's Google Alert brought me the press release about AmeriVault's new Backup Blog. (Note that it only displays correctly in Internet Explorer.)

I'm not at all opposed to having other people blog about backups. The more people raise awareness about the need for regular, reliable, tested backups, the better. Besides, most of what I write about is backups for small and home office users; enterprise software is something else again, and not an area I even aspire to expertise in.

It appears from the first (and so far only) blog post that AmeriVault has hired a company called DCIG, Inc to write its blog. Nothing wrong with that; I write blog posts for other companies, myself. (I just can't tell you who they are.) And DCIG's home page, which aggregates blog posts they've done for several clients, suggests that they've got some employees who understand the informal tone appropriate to a blog.

But the first post for AmeriVault (entitled "It's Time to Wakeup [sic] to Online Backup") is a doozy:

In this first blog entry for AmeriVault, DCIG Inc wishes to thank AmeriVault for agreeing to be a beta client for DCIG Inc's new blogging service. As part of this beta, DCIG Inc will provide AmeriVault with three blog entries a month written by a DCIG Inc analyst. In these blog entries, DCIG Inc will discuss and examine topics germane to AmeriVault's business model - online backup - and is directed to customers who already use it or are considering its adoption. So without further ado, welcome and read on!

Apart from the grammatical errors and the fact that "wake up" is two words, this is corporatespeak at its worst. That may be the way AmeriVault wants it. As any self-employed person knows, the client may not always be right, but the client is still the client. But I hope for the sake of everyone involved that the blog becomes more readable over time, or the only thing AmeriVault will accomplish is reinforcing the perception that backups are boring.

Technorati Tags: AmeriVault, DCIG, backup blog

I Need a Backup Blogger: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-06-07

Okay, be honest: who forgot to back up last week? Anyone?

That's the "Does anyone actually need me?" question. Because if you've all got your backups automated by now, does it matter whether I actually write this reminder? Do people even notice if I don't produce one?

Not that I'm trying to let myself off the hook for not producing a post last week, mind you, but no one on my less-than-enormous mailing list (backups are never going to win the e-zine popularity contest) wrote to ask where I was last week. (I was at the Podcast Expo in Ontario, California, having a great time but with scarcely time to check my e-mail, never mind compose a Backup Reminder.)

Just because I was on the road doesn't mean I didn't back up. I took my new FreeAgent Go drive with me in a pocket of my laptop case, and it worked just fine. The Ur-Guru took all six of his Western Digital XHDs--and a lot of pictures, which you can see on Flickr if you search under the tag "newmediaexpo2007." We heard more than a few people mention what they did to back up their photos and their audio and video files, but mostly it came down to DVDs (which they were trying to get away from) and external hard drives. Nothing really new there.

Nothing new from Seagate about my dead Shared Storage II, either. Oh, I had a bit of back and forth with the tech support team, who were baffled by the serial number I gave them and asked for a photo of the label and a proof of purchase. Um, guys? My point was that I didn't purchase it at all. After I explained that and sent them everything they asked for, they decided to pass the buck to another division and told me they'd get back to me, which they haven't.

Suggestions for more reliable NAS drives to replace the late Teras are welcome.

I also did a comparison test of Norton Ghost 8 versus TrueImage 9. The Ur-Guru has been using TrueImage on all his systems (actual and virtual) for some time now, and he suggested I try it. First I did a Ghost backup of my hard drive. It worked the way it always does, and took a good while but performed as expected. The TrueImage backup projected that it would take somewhat less time, but I got a strange error message in the middle, even though everything thereafter appeared to work normally and TrueImage told me it had completed the backup successfully.

"I wouldn't trust that backup," the Ur-Guru said. Well, no, not if I had to try to restore my whole system from it. So I'll stick to using Ghost 8 until I find something that works better.

But why TrueImage should work for him--and many others--and not for me, I haven't a clue.

I'll conclude on a humorous note. The Ur-Guru and I attended the Halo 3 launch party in Silicon Valley on September 23rd. The only game I play on my computer is Solitaire, but I knew the guy organizing the party from the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology.

In addition to the gaming competitions, Microsoft was showing off some of its other projects, including the new improved Hotmail and the Silverlight/Popfly combination. We were talking to the Hotmail guy and I asked him what they did about backups.

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. "I know the answer to that question," he said, "but I'm not sure I'm allowed to tell you."