Backing Up My Mom: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-26-08

My mother came to visit last week and we engaged in Extreme Tourism. (Example: at the time I normally write this reminder, we were catching a helicopter for a tour of the Bay Area.)

The last time my mother had a computer was in 1999. It ran Windows 98. She used it for (CompuServe) e-mail and not much else, and ended up giving it to her uncle—who actually still has it, and still uses it.

Mom got an older Acer laptop a few months ago, and uses it for web browsing and Yahoo! mail. She’s started saving her bookmarks to Yahoo! as well, instead of inside her browser. When you’re essentially operating “in the cloud,” and have no local data to speak of, you don’t really need to back up your C drive.

One thing about Extreme Tourism, though: it tends to result in a lot of photographs. (Not to mention blisters, sunburn, and sore muscles, but those have nothing to do with backups.) I had my Aiptek HD video camera, which is also an 8-megapixel still camera, and Mom had my sister-in-law’s Canon PowerShot, which worked pretty well in spite of her complete unfamiliarity with it. We both had plenty of photos to offload in the course of our travels.

I copied all of them to my computer initially and waited until I’d backed them up to at least one place before deleting them from their respective memory cards. One copy is never enough.

I then put all the photos—about 1.5 GB of them—onto a memory stick and transferred them onto Mom’s computer. This meant she had something to back up.

So I installed a free online backup service for her. If she keeps taking pictures, or starts downloading those dressage videos she watches on YouTube, she’s going to need more than the 2 GB quota pretty soon, but for now, it’s enough.

And it will back up automatically when the computer is idle, which means Mom doesn’t have to remember to do the backups herself, or have the computer on at a particular time of day. My own online backup operates on a schedule basis, but I almost always have my computer on by 8 AM, and the online backup is third or fourth in the sequence of redundancy.

Mozy estimated that the initial backup would take 6 hours. As Mom had a plane to catch much sooner than that, we postponed the initial backup until she got home. And when Mom first turned her machine on, she got an error message about Mozy.

She called me immediately, of course, which is what she usually does when she’s having problems with her computer. Because Mom hasn’t use a computer since the days of Windows 98, and didn’t use it much then, she isn’t familiar with terminology like “taskbar” and “system tray” and “desktop.” That makes it hard for her to explain, and for me to understand, what exactly is wrong.

Grammar Girl will be delighted to know that even before installing the backup program, I set up GoToMyPC on my mother’s computer. In fact, I did it while in a hotel room in Monterey. GoToMyPC is basically an easy-to-use version of UltraVNC, which I used to use sometimes in order to see what was on a client’s screen, back when I was foolish enough to do computer consulting for a living. So now—or at least for the duration of the free trial, after which I have to decide whether it’s worth $20/month, I can see what Mom is talking about, and even fix it. (Hmm. I suppose I could use GoToMyPC to install and configure UltraVNC on Mom’s machine…)

So I logged in to Mom’s computer and took a look. By the time I got around to doing this (a good two or three hours after Mom’s phone call), this is what I saw:

Whatever that error message meant, clearly it wasn’t preventing the backup from functioning, and Mom just e-mailed me to say the backup was complete.

I confess I’m more excited about the ability to access my mother’s computer than about the online backup. I suppose you could consider GoToMyPC a backup tool, in that it provides you with a whole backup computer at need—and lets you get copies of files you forgot or deleted or that have become corrupted.

It’s probably more accurate to say that my mother and I are acting as backups for each other, since each of us now has a copy of both sets of photos. (Well, I have several copies, but her copy definitely counts as offsite backup.) Which makes me think, as did my headline, of CrashPlan, the social backup tool. In fact, if I’d thought of it sooner, I might have installed that instead of Mozy.

But then Mom’s backups would rely on access to my computer, and since my C drive is fairly full, she’d actually need access to one of my external or network drives. And while I am at home, online, and connected to those drives fairly often, I do take this monster heavyweight Pavilion dv8040 out with me sometimes, and I do turn it off at night, and Mom is three time zones away. Better she should have an always-on backup location.

The question to get you thinking until next week is: what kind of backup plan does your mother have? And when did she last back up her photos of her grandchildren?

Technorati Tags: Mozy Home,CrashPlan,GoToMyPC

“Pirate” Backup Is Not for MP3 Downloads: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-05-08

Before he went home to redesign the world’s most famous home office, the Ur-Guru and I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. In addition to watching a demonstration of Babbage’s Difference Engine #2 and sitting down to rest on a Cray supercomputer (and of course pointing out which of the early personal computers each of us had owned), we saw one of the first ever hard drives. It was bigger in diameter than the tires on my car. There’s actually a project to restore the IBM RAMAC, the computer that used it, over at the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center. (Before disk drives, computers used something called core memory. I was pleased to discover that the Ur-Guru didn’t know what that was, either.)

But while all that history is fascinating, and I recommend a trip to the museum if you get the chance to go, it won’t help you preserve your data today. So I’m introducing today’s guest blogger, Network World columnist James Gaskin, who offered me this article about “Pirate Backup” (originally published in 2007, but still relevant).

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In honor of the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean movie, let me introduce the Pirate Backup System (ARR). ARR, besides a bit of pirate talk, stands for Automatic, Redundant, and Restorable. Meeting those three goals makes a good backup system. Meeting only two will lead to disappointment. Meeting only one describes about two thirds of small businesses today.

I'm working on a “How To Fix IT Manual” called Data Safety Using the Pirate Backup System (ARR). But focusing on backup sends the wrong message, because backing up files does nothing. Users only get value when they restore files. Backup is just the necessary pain to reach the gain of restoring important data files when they are lost, stolen, or mangled. Think of backup as the insurance premiums, and restoration as the replacement payment after a loss.

The first A in ARR, Automatic, forces businesses to take into account the point made in the previous paragraph: users get no value from backup. Hence, users don't back up. One may consider this short-sighted, but users will complain that participating in any backup procedures means they're doing the administrator’s job, not their own. Since data safety is our goal here, let's not argue with the users about this today, let's just work around those issues.

To be automatic your backup system must work without any user intervention. You can't even trust users to leave their computer turned on for a backup job to run at 3:00 a.m. You certainly can't trust them to click an icon to run a backup.

These restrictions leave two options: data must be saved somewhere besides PCs, or you must place software on each computer that works without user intervention.

The first option, the neatest, stores all user data files on some type of centralized file server or even a shared online workspace. That would be great, but realistically you will need to install software on each computer to back up data files on a schedule or immediately upon every file change. Almost every backup software application will schedule backups on at least an hourly basis. To grab file changes immediately you will need special software from the Continuous Data Protection (CDP) range of products.

Second, redundancy protects data files, and makes disaster recovery possible. Companies learn the hard way that backup tapes sitting beside the server burn up when the server burns up. They also learn backup network-attached storage devices get stolen when thieves steal their servers. You must keep copies of data files somewhere outside your business to recover from a wide variety of disasters small and large.

Back when tape cartridges led the backup media world, people developed offsite tape rotation schedules using a Tower of Hanoi algorithm to try and keep the right data on the right tapes at the right places. Those never worked, because people dropped the ball quickly.

Today you can send data offsite much more easily than before. Many service companies offer excellent prices to accept data files across the Internet at their remote data storage center. You can send data from one office to another office, or send data files to a hidden directory on your company Web server. You have multiple options, but you need to pick one or two and get started. If you try to carry USB hard drives back and forth from your servers, however, you will soon get tired and quit.

Finally, files must restore properly or you've wasted all your time. Good backup software makes it easy to restore files to their original location or other locations. Offsite services with file redirection make it easy to share files between remote locations, but be careful that file versions don't get changed by one user without the other users knowing. But a good restoration test is to pick a data file folder at random, restore it to another location, and check those files.

If you want “bare metal restore” capabilities to quickly rebuild a personal computer or server, you'll need special boot CD-ROM disks tied to the backup files. Each backup vendor offers different methods of bare metal restore, but you can keep those boot disks close at hand even if the data stays safe in an offsite location across the country. But this example points out the need for several options in your backup system, and why I call it a system with multiple parts rather than a backup method or backup process.

Remember, you can't trust users to help you perform any backup chores. You can trust the Pirate Backup System, however, especially if you put a parrot on your shoulder before you say ARR.

Copyright © 1994-2008 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Although I’m now minus one major source of distraction, I have a lot of client work to catch up on, and I got so many responses to my call for volunteers to write guest posts that I could go on for at least another month without contributing anything original. I promise to write at least one post per month for myself, however!

Technorati Tags: Computer History Museum,RAMAC,Difference Engine,Pirate Backup,James Gaskin

Back Up Your Passport with Gmail

In response to last week’s Backup Reminder, Loyal Reader MKR wrote:

I use a very simple approach to backup my files, unless they are very large. I have a Gmail account and I e-mail a message to myself with an attachment. The message and attachment are stored on the servers of Gmail.

Recently, when one of my friends was planning to travel abroad, I told him to scan the important pages of the passport and tickets and email them to himself. If ever they lose the passport and tickets anywhere in the world, they can retrieve a copy from anywhere so long there is access to Internet.

This is important since one of my friends lost the passport and other papers in Frankfurt on the way to India. On reaching India, the airport authorities needed some evidence before admitting her. Her husband faxed a copy of the passport to the airport in India and then only she was allowed to enter. The above simple solution would have easily solved the problem.

Back in the olden days, we used to make photocopies of our passports and carry them separately from the passports themselves. That still works, but I still like this solution as a supplement, if not necessarily a replacement, to the old-fashioned method of passport backup.

It’s not likely to be very helpful if you’re in the middle of the desert with no Internet access (and no printer), but then again, most people who check your passport probably won’t be in the wilderness.

If you’re not confident the documents will be private enough stored in your Gmail account, you can always put them on your own FTP server, but that requires a higher geek-score than just sending yourself an e-mail does.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-11-08

I have a friend(?) whose chosen backup strategy is to e-mail me copies of her important files and BCC me on her important e-mail messages. I did not volunteer for this service, and I’m not recommending it to anyone as a particularly good approach to backing up your data. It beats having no backups at all, and it’s one of the few options available to my friend(?), whose own computer isn’t connected to the Internet and who does almost everything on a U3 data stick at public library computers (which tend to be designed not to let U3 data sticks work properly, or run any programs).

So she e-mails me files and I save them into a folder for her, where they get backed up with the rest of my documents. I then usually delete the attachments from Outlook, because my main PST file is big enough as it is.

And I don’t usually pay any more attention to the files themselves than any backup program would. They get scanned for viruses on the way into Outlook, and I don’t have the time or inclination to check the content or format of these files (usually Word documents).

But the other day I happened to notice something. My friend(?) was sending documents to some prospects, and one of the Microsoft Word files was only 150 bytes. When was the last time you saw a Microsoft Word doc that was less than 1K in size? Even a flat text file is longer than that if it has any content.

So I tried opening the file, and sure enough, there was nothing in it. I have no idea how this happened; some error in saving the file, perhaps. My friend(?) is kind of jinxed when it comes to computers, as if they weren’t capable of creating problems all by themselves.

I told her about the problem. Naturally, she freaked out. Then she asked me whether I had an earlier, uncorrupted version of that file. Fortunately for her, I did. (More fortunately, she had given it a different file name, so it didn’t get overwritten by the 1K file.) So I e-mailed that back to her.

But it got me to thinking about the first thing I ever learned about computers—from reading science fiction, before I’d ever touched a computer myself.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

If you make multiple backups of a corrupted file, then all you have is several useless files instead of one. Even backup software that verifies your data is only making sure that the copy is the same as the original. You’re the one who has to make sure the original is worth copying.

Now, most of us have no reason to think our files might be corrupt. If the file was fine the last time you used it, then there’s not likely to be anything to worry about. But if the document is critically important, you should check it before you either back it up or submit it to a client.

This is especially true if you’ve been having any kinds of problems with your computer, your software, or your storage. My friend(?) has been having lots of trouble with corrupted files lately. Whatever the cause (and I’m not really in a position to guess), that’s a sign that she needs to check her files before she sends them to me or anyone else—but especially before she sends them to me, if she’s counting on me to be able to provide her with intact files when she needs them.

Checking all your files before every backup job isn’t practical. But some files are more important to save than others. Before you take your jewelry over to the safe deposit box, you might want to be sure it’s not counterfeit.

And don’t even think about e-mailing me your documents for safekeeping.

Motivation to Back Up: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-27-08

Hi, my name is Gavin Impett and I’m here to provide you with your weekly motivation to backup. I met Sallie just over a month ago at a Podcast Meetup. I’m starting a video kitty-match-making, used cat service, www.kittysingle.com for the San Francisco Animal Care and Control, Toni’s Kitty Rescue ,and anyone else who’s willing to show me their, ahem…adoptable—meaning ready for love—cat.

This had the immediate effect of bringing my current web host to its knees, and I decided to find a new host, which meant I needed to not only find the “back up site” button on my cpanel, but also learn how to use it, since I’m packing up and moving on.

So I sent Sallie and email to Sallie, saying more or less, “Here I am, dutifully backing up my site. Golly, I wonder what this ‘destroy all data button’ does. I wonder if anyone I know knows anything about backing-up and stuff. You wouldn’t have any thoughts on that backing-up subject, would you Sallie? Help me, for the love of god, I’m on my knees here.” To which Sallie replied, “Hey, I have an idea: you could write this week’s reminder.” Maybe I was too subtle.

Fair enough and as it turns out, I am uniquely qualified on the subject of backing up. Some years ago, I attended a Wilderness Medicine with my Physician girlfriend in the mountains above Aspen. (There’s nothing like listening at 9,000 feet to a lecture on the symptoms of altitude sickness, checking off the symptoms, and saying, “Yep that’s me, I got that. I can die up here! Rockin’!”)

An Army doctor gave us his lecture to the troops, on the subject of the differences between frostbite and trench-foot. He made a joke about his medical title and what the Army really thinks of its soldiers. My sweetie leaned over and explained, “He’s a veterinarian.”

“You don’t see trench-foot too much these days,” he said, “that’s why the war in the Falklands was so great. This guy was in a water-filled fox hole for a week. When we took his shoe off, his whole foot came off. Next slide please. Now if that doesn’t make you change your socks, nothing will.”

Let's just say, the photo left an impression. The reason I mention this seeming digression is it comes to the subject of backing up, I am uniquely qualified on this subject, not unlike the Army doc dealing with something now rare, but once common and responsible for the loss of millions.

I was one of the first human beings to own a computer. No, not the Atari, but the now long-forgotten Apple IIc. When the San Francisco Museum of Modern art had a display on ancient computers, my IIc was older than anything on display. I remember laughing at people who wanted common monitors for their computers and attended the very first computer art class offered at San Francisco State University. While every other student was figuring out how to make squiggly lines move in random patterns in the class, I attempted to see if it was possible to write a short story on one of these computer things. With AppleWorks, you could write about 400 words before the Apple IIe ran out of ram.

In those days, you had to save the file to a floppy—a real floppy, mind you—and if you were smart, you backed up to a second floppy that you stored next to the original so it wouldn’t get lost (not so smart). Then someone pointed me to AppleWriter, which allowed me to have a forty-page file, and life was good. So I wrote, backed-up, tried to remember which was the original, which was the back-up, and so on. One great happy adventure, except when the power went out, or I hit the magic delete-the-only-record-of-these-forty-pages button, which happened on more than one occasion.

Since those happy, innocent days of floppies, I have learned the obsessive joy of backing-up to 5.25 disks, CDs, DVDs, MyBook. My current jones is for a Blu-Ray (50 gig a disk!) burner.

My obsession for back-up stems from the two simple facts. First, I can no longer have printed copies of everything. Video, photos, blogs, websites, are not printable in any functional way. Many of my files can now only exist on hard drives and servers.

The second reason dates back to when it was time to move on from my trusty IIc, which if you held the conversion box just right, could still print to the old dot-matrix. I needed a better quality printer and it was time. So I printed everything I had written on the IIc, walked into the Apple Store, money in hand, and asked a fateful question. “Mac supports IIc files, right? I will be able to convert these files over, right? Apple makes both products, right?”

So I walked out of the store, bought a PC and haven’t looked back. In fairness to Apple, many of their support people and Mac aficionados everywhere have assured me over the years that it is possible to convert IIc files to the Mac format. In my defense, I will say, no one I have ever spoken to or contacted on this subject has actually attempted or managed to accomplish this task. Apparently, the necessary hardware is stored in a secret mountain village in the Himalayas that appears only every eighty years or so, because next to Apple’s file conversion secret is the secret to eternal life and world peace and 90 per cent of the world’s computer users just aren’t worthy.

Now if the next slide doesn’t make you back up your files to a usable format, nothing will.

Technorati Tags: KittySingle,Apple IIc,file conversion

System Restore Can Save Your Skin, but Not Your Data: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-30-08

Last week I did something impulsive: I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3. None of the problems I'd heard mentioned seemed to apply to anything I was running.

Microsoft does warn you to back up before installing SP3, but I didn't feel like taking the extra hours required for a complete drive image, and I knew all my data was already backed up. This was, of course, not the best time to start getting lazy, but it was well into the evening, which meant that not only would it have been very late by the time the drive image completed, but my brain had obviously shut down for the night already.

The first thing I noticed after rebooting was that StyleXP, a program I've used for years to manage the “theme” that determines what Windows looks like, no longer worked. I checked, and while there was an upgrade for StyleXP, it still wasn't compatible with SP3. Well, okay—I could live with using the Windows XP theme if I had to. It doesn't look too bad in silver. (But we will pass over the trouble I got myself into by trying to apply a theme that would no longer function, until I managed to fumble my way through uninstalling StyleXP.)

The kicker came the next morning when I went to update the podcasts on my MP3 player. I have a fairly old Sansa m230 that still works fine with the audio podcasts I listen to. I bought it in 2005, and since I haven't managed to destroy it yet, haven't seen a need to replace it.

After I installed SP3, Windows refused to admit that the Sansa existed. (Normally it shows up as drive S.)

That was enough for me. Time to ditch SP3.

This time, I made a drive image first. It took almost 3 hours, which the magic of blogging can compress into a single short sentence.

Then I started up System Restore. This handy program, which saves snapshots of your system state, lives in Start | All Programs | Accessories | System Tools (or does if you haven't rearranged your Start Menu). When you start it up, it gives you two choices: “Restore my computer to an earlier time” and “Create a restore point.” Windows automatically creates restore points once a day and when you install and remove software. I selected the restore point for the SP3 installation and away we went.

Presto! StyleXP was back, along with my preferred theme, and I could connect my MP3 player. All was well.

I realized, however, that I should probably clear out my old restore points; these get to taking up a lot of space, and can also harbor viruses if your computer has ever been infected.

In the course of doing this (go into My Computer | Properties | System Restore and turn off System Restore) I discovered that System Restore was in fact monitoring four drives: the C drive where my system lives, plus drive D (my second internal drive), Drive F (the FreeAgent Go) drive, and Drive M (the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini).

There is no earthly reason to have System Restore monitor a drive that has no operating system installed on it. (Or if there is, I never heard of it.) So I have now turned off monitoring for those drives, and freed up space there, too.

System Restore is a handy thing to have. You just can't rely on it to save your data. It's only interested in your system state, and doesn't do anything at all to protect your data.

Drive imaging software like Ghost, TrueImage, or Safety Drill (and now Time Machine for the Mac, which my stepmother has started using along with the Time Capsule I'm using to connect to the Internet while visiting Cleveland) preserves both system state information and data. If you want to be able to restore everything just the way it was, quickly, this kind of software is a good thing to have. Creating a drive image (at least in Windows) can be a lot more time-consuming than creating a system restore point.

But trying to re-create your data can be a lot more time-consuming than re-installing your software, too.

Wherever you go—back up. Even on vacation.

Technorati Tags: System Restore,TrueImage,Norton Ghost,Safety Drill,Time Machine,Time Capsule

Thanks, Mom: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-08-08

Yes, this Backup Reminder is late. Sort of like my Mother's Day card. It's getting to be a habit, and not a good one. Part of the problem is that it seems to take me so much longer to write my own e-zine than to write a blog post for a client. Those rarely take more than half an hour, including research. The Backup Reminder rarely takes less than an hour, often not including research.

Not being entirely without filial piety, I phoned my mother yesterday afternoon. She got a computer a few months ago and has been faithfully reading my Backup Blog and discovering all kinds of things she never knew.

Mom had a great suggestion: to re-post earlier editions of the Backup Reminder when I was pressed for time or didn't have a good subject in mind. I've known podcasters to do this: just repeat the first season instead of recording a second season. It works fine for those who didn't start listening until near the end of the first season anyway. And there are only a handful of people who actually read the first year's backup reminders, because it's a small mailing list and I didn't start posting them on the blog until 2005.

There is one small problem, however. Technology changes fast. Recommendations I made in 2003 may be totally irrelevant now. Nevertheless, in looking over some of my earliest posts, I did get something of a sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same. (I usually prefer to say that in French, but I'm not going to attempt the diacritical marks here, and anyway, it is kind of pretentious.)

I thought what I'd do instead was look at some of the older posts and produce updated versions. Today we're going back to April of 2004, to talk about the Iomega REV drive.

So what did I say about the REV drive in 2004?

Iomega, the maker of my venerable 100-MB parallel ZIP drive, is now offering a Removable Hard Disk System (which it calls the REV). The drive (available either as an external USB 2 drive or an internal ATAPI drive for desktop PCs) takes 35 GB removable disks and claims to be 7 times faster than tape backups.

At $350 for the drive and $60/disk, it's not an inexpensive solution, though the drive ships both with Iomega Backup Pro and Norton Ghost. The REV system claims to be more cost-effective than DDS-4 tape backups, but if any of you are currently using, or considering investing in, tape backups, it's news to me. The REV system also suffers from the same problem that Iomega's ZIP and JAZ do: although you can transport a lot of data on one disk, only another REV drive can read it.

My 100 MB ZIP drive died years ago, and everything I used to have on ZIP disks in now on CD, DVD, my network drive, or all of the above. But Iomega has just announced the latest iteration of the REV: a 120 GB removable drive available with either an external or an internal enclosure, with Dantz Retrospect Express (not one of my favorites, last time I looked at it) pre-installed to help you make your backups.

The problem with the new REV drive, as Stephen Withers writes in ITWire, is the same as the problem with the old REV drive, and all of Iomega's proprietary storage solutions. It's expensive for what you get, and there's no obvious advantage over the alternatives. And unlike an ordinary external hard drive, you can't just connect it to any computer: you need a working REV drive to restore the data.

All of which makes it faintly amazing that Iomega continues to produce removable drives. They do also sell network drives and ordinary external hard drives (some of them rather cute), and even a drive designed to work with you Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. I liked my ZIP drive, mind you, but I like USB thumb drives and 2.5" external hard drives a lot better. They're more portable, more compatible, and less expensive.

Technorati Tags: Iomega,REV 120 GB,ZIP drive

Why It’s Worth Writing About Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-11-08

Yesterday I upgraded several of my blogs/sites to WordPress 2.5. (If you're a WordPress user, I recommend that you do this also. Be sure to back up your blog first—the whole thing, not just the database.)

One thing I noticed in the course of doing this was that I really have very few posts/articles about writing. Indeed, many of the posts that started out on the Author-ized Articles blog were actually about podcasting, and I've moved them over to the Podcast Asylum site. Fifty-odd posts about writing and publishing versus more than 300 on backup is a pretty dramatic ratio. If it's as a writer and not a computer consultant that I want to establish myself, shouldn't the proportions be reversed?

The answer to that would be “absolutely,” but for a few points:

1. There are many e-zines and blogs about different aspects of writing and publishing.
2. Almost no one writes about backup.
3. I didn't actually start writing this Backup Reminder in order to make money.
4. It's useful to demonstrate that I can write about a boring technical subject in an accessible way.

I started reading Podcasting for Profit the other day. One of the first points author Leesa Barnes makes is that you need specific, measurable goals for creating a podcast. Reading that reminded me that this Backup Reminder didn't come about because of any kind of strategic planning on my part. I started without having very clear goals, which makes it kind of difficult to tell whether it's worth continuing. How do you know whether you're successful if you don't know what success looks like?

Though I heard a lot about the value of e-zines for marketing in the first few years (before I had the blog to host the archives), I didn't start the Backup Reminder as a way to market my services. My motive in writing about backup every week was to spare my clients the trauma of data loss. I was still masochistic enough to do tech support work in those days, but I ran into one too many situations where I couldn't save the client's data. It's heartbreaking when that happens. And even when you can get the data back, it's back-breaking labor. Much easier to help people set up their backup systems than to attempt data recovery.

So I suppose one way to define success would be “When all my friends and clients have (and use) working backup systems.” If I achieved that goal, then maybe I could move on to doing something else.

And, indeed, many of my past and present friends and clients do now have backup systems in place, whether or not I was involved in creating them. (I just sent out a message asking them.) But what about future friends and clients? And what about the fact that we all have more types of data to back up, and more options for doing so, than we did five years ago? I still hear tales of woe from people who thought they had backups and people who never knew they needed them.

There's always going to be a need for someone to spread the word, and no one else seems to be volunteering. Sure, there are tons of white papers about enterprise backup, storage, and data protection systems. And there are increasing numbers of products available for the small office/home office computer user, plus at least one site dedicated to reviewing backup products. But nothing quite like this.

Am I really providing a valuable enough public service to make it worth putting in so much time and effort? I usually enjoy it, but there's no question there are other things I could be writing which would bring me greater financial rewards (like a couple of post's for a client's blog, which need to be done today). I'm not arrogant enough to think that writing an e-zine with a small subscriber list and a 20% open rate is going to make the world safe from data loss.

But it might mean fewer tales of heartbreak from the people I know personally. And it does mean that if my readers lose their data, it won't be because they didn't know they were supposed to make backups.

A Backup Battery for the Battery Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-04-08

I've mentioned battery backups—that is, Uninterrupted Power Supplies which provide electricity when PG&E decides to stage a rolling blackout—once or twice in the past. This past week the Ur-Guru had an adventure with his, so I've asked him to write about it.

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One of the things often overlooked when thinking about backups is an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). We back up our data (don't we?) but usually don't have to think about providing backup power to the computer system itself. Because I use a set of two systems to provide both frequent automated backups as well as several key services such as e-mail, web domains, etc., it's essential that these systems do not suddenly lose their power.

Loss of power on a system has the possibility of corrupting data. If a system is actively writing data to disk, a loss of power can not only corrupt the data it was writing but even the entire file system. Bad news if it happens to a “mission critical” system.

To prevent that from happening I had both the (relatively small) systems powered by APC Back-UPS ES battery powered power strips. Heavy and bulky as they are these things are essential in allowing the systems to run on battery power during a black-out or other power/current malfunction while being protected from power surges. The 10 minutes these UPS'es provide the two systems is more than sufficient for the systems to shut down properly and wait for the main current to come back on (at which point they would power themselves back up again).

However, a UPS can break down. More importantly, the batteries in these things do not last. They need replacement every 2-3 years (3-5 if you believe the manufacturer, though I suspect those numbers are not based on 24/7 use).

A few days ago one of the APC Back-UPS devices decided it no longer liked me and started yelling at me through its audible alarm. Adding insult to injury it then decided to start flashing its little lights at me to express its utter dismay of me having completely forgotten to replace the battery that decided it had been worn out. Then in a final attempt at letting me know about its unhappy state it decided to just completely break down on me (a slight tap on the device being enough to turn the power on or off, definitely not an APC Back-UPS feature!).

Two days later the second one decided that the battery needed to be replaced (not even 3 years after initially buying and installing them). Except this UPS decided it wasn't just unhappy but angry at me because instead of just sounding the beeping alarm and flashing the error lights it decided to temporarily, for about 5 seconds, pull the power from the server it was providing with current. Needless to say I'm not amused by devices that misbehave like that and considered it an attempt at intentional sabotage. I consider the act of pulling the current from my server and sending it into a straight reboot without a proper shutdown to be an act of war.

Since I had decided I wanted to start using a different machine as the main server it was a good time to get a completely new, different, and bigger UPS so I ended up ordering the APC SC1500i model (1500VA, 865 Watts), which arrived at my dealer within a few days. At close to 22kg in weight this was not the kind of device you happily carry back home. But after running some tests it is showing that it can power both of the servers for about 30-35 minutes before instructing them to shutdown. I hope this UPS behaves better than the previous two.

I would have expected the APC software, or the units themselves, to inform me when a battery would need to be replaced but alas, that never happened (even though it should), and as a result I was lucky to get away with a scare instead of a corruption on the system. But it's a good idea to not rely on software notifications and just mark down and keep track of approximately when you will need to order a replacement battery. Having one as a backup long before you're going to use it would be a waste since they'd only end up running out of warranty but getting a replacement when needed is no luxury either.

The problem, of course, with automated backups is that they run unattended and always cause disk read/write activity that could suffer horribly when the power is taken off unexpectedly. Another thing, if you're in the US and suffer from what I call “third world cabling” then you may really want to consider a backup for your power. You very likely wouldn't have to get something that you can't reasonably carry but a simple and reliable UPS that will allow your system to shutdown properly might not be a luxury item depending on your area (or in anticipation of the return of Enron). Pulling the power from a system that is writing to disk can often be harmless but it's like playing Russian Roulette with your ongoing file activity because for every dozen times it's harmless there's a decent chance of the next power loss being fatal to your data.

And don't forget about those replacement batteries when it's time!

###

Technorati Tags: APC,UPS,battery backup

Backing Up Social Networks, Part 2: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-28-08

Last week I talked about backups for two different Web 2.0 services: del.icio.us and LinkedIn. I chose those two because they're the ones I use the most often.

This week I'm going to start by talking about Flickr, a popular photo-sharing service that doubles as a social network. I don't post photos to Flickr myself, but the Ur-Guru does. (Yes, lots of them are pictures of me. What did you expect?)

I first noticed the existence of Flickr backup tools a couple of years ago. I had a bit of trouble understanding why you would need them. After all, the photos can't get to Flickr unless you first have them on your computer (or a camera connected to the Internet). Surely if they're worth sharing with the world, you're going to save them on your hard drive or a CD, and they'll get backed up with the rest of your data.

On the other hand, if something happened and you needed to re-upload your photos, remembering which ones you'd had there and which tags you'd used to identify each image could get to be a real challenge. That's why there are programs like Flickredit, a Java-based program for editing, tagging, uploading, and backing up your photos and their associated metadata (copyright info, title, description, tags). If you've put hours into creating this metadata for your Flickr photos, I'd recommend checking it out.

Photobucket, another popular photo-sharing site, lets its pro users back up via FTP download. Regular users can order backup CDs or DVDs from the Photobucket Store.

Enough people who belong to multiple social networking sites have expressed a desire to import their profiles without typing everything over again that there's now a Data Portability Project. There's a long list of the benefits of data portability over on the Use Cases page. They look particularly useful for people who use a lot of job-search or social networking sites.

Interestingly, however, while the list mentions transferring, aggregating, and exporting contacts and other data, it doesn't specifically address backup. If your data is that portable, however, it should be possible to port it onto your hard drive and back it up. And, of course, having the same information duplicated across several sites can also act as a backup, though if you delete something by accident, the deletion might propagate across all the sites. Which leads me to wonder whether there's an “Undo Portability Project” in the making. (Repeat after me: synchronization is not backup.)

It will take a while before the Data Portability Project produces useful results, so remember to check out the possibilities for backing up your profile information and other data before you sign up. If you need to keep your profile info in a Word doc in order to keep from having to re-type it, then that's probably what you should do. And if you can get new messages, photos, and the like from your friends as an RSS feed, remember to subscribe to your own feed in order to keep a copy.

In most cases, anything you post on these sites goes up there at your own risk, and it may well become the property of the social networking site once you put it there.

If you're an avid user of MySpace, Facebook, or other social networks, why not share your method for backing up your profile and other data—or your reason for not bothering.

Technorati Tags: social networks,MySpace,Facebook,Flickr,Photobucket,data portability

New Backup Resources from Tech Target

How could anyone fail to read an article entitled “Five Signs that You Are Headed for a Backup Disaster”? Like most of TechTarget's material, this piece focuses on enterprise backup, but it's still worth reading—in particular, I'd say, the point about keeping your offsite backups up to date.

And speaking of getting your backups offsite, there's also a special report about online backup. This comes in three parts: “Online Backup is a Matter of Trust”, an “Online Backup Product Roundup”, and a podcast featuring a Forrester researcher entitled “Online Backup Addresses Specific SMB, Enterprise Needs.”

Happy reading.

Backing Up Social Networks, Part 1: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-21-08

I've been using del.icio.us profligately in the last six months or so. It's a handy way to keep track of things I want to read, and things I want other people to read. But it suddenly occurred to me yesterday that whereas my Firefox bookmarks get backed up along with the rest of my critical data thanks to Karen’s Replicator, I had no backup of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

It turns out that it's just as easy to export bookmarks from del.icio.us as to import them: just go to “Settings” and check “export/backup” under “Bookmarks.”

Admittedly, the resulting HTML file is just a long list of links, rather than having the formatting provided by del.icio.us tags, but it beats losing the links altogether if you're still in the middle of using them for research. (Not that I've ever experienced a del.icio.us outage, but it's always possible.)

You can also export your del.icio.us bookmarks to an XML file by pasting the following link into your browser and entering your del.icio.us username and password: http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all. But unless you know what to do with an unformatted XML file, I'd recommend the first method.

Once I had my bookmarks backed up, I started to think about other “social” sites. I've been spending a lot of time answering (and occasionally asking) questions on LinkedIn. A few months ago I asked my network about their backup practices and got enough information to fill up a Reminder column. For today's column, I searched the existing LinkedIn Answers for information about backing up LinkedIn itself.

The easy part is backing up your connections: you can export them to a .csv (that stands for “comma-separated values,” if you wanted to pick up some additional jargon today) file and then import them into Outlook or pretty well any other contact-management program. If you go to your Connections page in LinkedIn and scroll to the bottom, you'll see an “Export Connections” button. This takes you to a page with instructions for exporting to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Mail, or Max OS X Address Book.

That's all well and good, but anyone I'm connected to on LinkedIn is pretty much guaranteed to be in my Outlook contacts already, because I'm scrupulous about not connecting to people I don't know well enough to recommend in some capacity, and if I know you that well, chances are I have your e-mail and phone number already. (And LinkedIn doesn't include phone numbers in their contact info anyway.)

I was more interested in whether I could back up my profile, my recommendations, and my answers to questions. It turns out that it's possible to back up your profile, after a fashion, by saving it as a PDF file. This includes recommendations people have written for you, though not recommendations you have written for others. You can do this with other people's profiles, as well, which may be more useful than just exporting their contact info, if also more cumbersome.

It's possible to copy and paste text out of this PDF, so having it would spare you from re-typing everything if something happened and you had to re-create your profile from scratch. And it would save you some typing if you wanted to re-use the information for another social network.

Curiously, this handy convert-to-PDF feature is not available for your recommendations or your answers. My recommendations page at least shows the full text of the recommendations I've written, so I can use the “print” function to create a PDF version. But the tab with my answers doesn't show the full text (perhaps because I'm inclined to give long answers), and if there's an option to subscribe to your own answers, I haven't seen it. (Besides, the feeds you get from LinkedIn aren't full-text feeds, anyway.) And it only shows the 30 most recent answers.

I guess I know what new features I'll be requesting from LinkedIn!

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn,del.icio.us,social networks,data portability

Are You Paranoid Enough? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-07-08

Now and again I talk about aspects of data security that aren't directly related to backups. I don't do it often, because I'm not a security expert, but there's more than one way to lose your data, and stories about backup tapes stolen from financial institutions and missing laptops with confidential information on them show up in the news pretty often.

The security of your backups can be an issue for everyone. If someone broke in and stole your external hard drive, would they get everything? Most small and home office users have at least some information that shouldn't be available to anyone who finds a USB key lying on a taxi seat. So we should all take basic precautions and not make it easy for those with harmful intent.

I saw an announcement about a new service called BlogBackupr the other day and flagged it as something to investigate. As a backup blogger, I'm certainly in favor of backing up your blog. (I'm not at all in favor of that awkward name; even "Blog Backer-Upper" would be more euphonious.) Before I could check the service out, however, I saw a post from Ike Pigott warning readers about a the way any provider of such a service could abuse the login and password information for your blog.

And just in case I wasn't feeling paranoid enough after reading Ike's post, I got a link to a new white paper from Bitpipe this morning: “How to Fully Protect Your Storage Environment.” (You'll have to register to download it, if you're interested.) The section that caught my eye was “Why and How Your Storage Environment Will Be Attacked,” by Kevin Beaver.

While the guide addresses enterprise storage, a few points apply to smaller businesses and home users as well:

1. Storage security does not equal redundant systems and good backups. These two elements are only part of what’s going to keep your data safe and sound, so it’s important not to solely rely on them as has been done in the past.
2. Storage encryption is not the silver bullet. Not for data at rest and not for data in transit.

The truth is, we all have to trust someone with our data sometime. Even if you run your own web and mail servers, even if you avoid online backup services, the only way to protect your data against fire, flood, and theft onsite is to move copies of the data offsite—which means it's vulnerable in transit and at its destination. And most companies providing backup and storage solutions limit their liability pretty severely.

The malicious hackers are way ahead of most of us, too. They know more ways to attack than we're aware we should defend.

So what's a sensible person to do?

If you work with really sensitive data, it's probably worth hiring a security expert. Otherwise, take the obvious precautions. If it's small and portable (and even my twelve-ton, 17-inch laptop qualifies for that category), put a password on it. And store your passwords in a password-protected program. Don't leave your data unattended. Do provide someone in your company or family with your master password in the event you are injured or killed and they need access to your data, but make sure that person knows how important it is not to hand out that information.

Check out any storage services you're thinking of using before you sign up: search on Technorati and in places like Yelp to find out what people are saying about them. One or two negative reviews is normal, but if you find pages and pages of complaints, stay away. If a storage company is making headlines because of lost or stolen data, choose someone else.

At least most of us SOHO users can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we are just too insignificant for serious hackers to bother with. The payoff for stealing your PIN number is fairly small. The payoff for stealing millions of credit card numbers from a bank is a lot higher.

But don't let that make you careless.

Technorati Tags: BlogBackupr,Ike Pigott,data loss,security

Backing Up to...Paper? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-25-08

After last week’s discussion about the relative merits of paper and electronic storage for text and photos, I was particularly intrigued to come across a blog post about paper as a backup medium. Someone has actually gone and invented a program that will back your data up in the form of zillions of squares of tiny black dots (90,000 per square inch of paper at 300 DPI). You can get all of about 5 KB of uncompressed data on a page if you’ve got a 600 DPI laser printer. (Inkjets don’t work as well for this.) To restore data, you need a high-resolution scanner.

Now, I can remember when a Mac’s entire operating system ran on a 4 KB diskette. And I’m sure some of you remember the days when computers were the size of a building and ran on punch cards or punch tape. But given the size of even a short Microsoft Word document these days (last week’s Backup Reminder is 57 KB), you’d be well advised just to print the file, then scan it into an Optical Character Recognition program.

So you won’t be too surprised that this program, PaperBack, was created as “an open-source joke.” But it’s a real program, and Karl Gechlik over at Ask the Admin went and tested it. He backed up a 13.7 MB program called PC Tools AntiVirus Free Edition to an 88-page, 100 MB PDF file. Is there an antonym for “data compression”?

I passed this link along to the Ur-Guru with the comment “Now that is weird.” His response (as so often) made me feel slightly foolish:

No it’s not, actually.

Do you remember how my exit-slip looked, the one I got not the last time but the one before, when I left the US? That paper thing with all those weird dots like a mashed up barcode in blocks? Same thing.

Various of those things have been used to store data as “print,” so extending it to full sheets makes sense.

Sure enough, as soon as he mentioned his travel documents, I realized that I’d seen something similar when printing my own Southwest boarding passes. (You can do a Google image search for “print boarding pass” if you’ve never seen one.)

But the next comment really surprised me:

I once wrote a tool that did something similar, trying to compress actual data into color bitmap images. The idea was to print in color and scan them back in as a backup but scanners and color reproduction was not good enough [in 1997] for the full 0-255 range of integers and as a result it wasn’t viable or practical for large amounts of data.

It was, however, very viable at 0-32 ranges of color (RGB per pixel or dot printed at up to 600 dpi) as a means of encryption and to travel with data that would not appear to be data. :-)

I’ve talked about encrypting backups occasionally, but I’ve never thought about attempting to disguise my data as something other than data. Though I will say that if I were a customs inspector and someone had a heavy suitcase full of paper printed all over with tiny black dots, I’d start to suspect that something funny was going on.

If you have a funny story about backup—or a tragic one—and would like to write a guest column for this newsletter, just e-mail me.

Technorati Tags: PaperBack,Ask the Admin

Upgrading Your Archives: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-18-08

After last week's column about creating annual archives, one Loyal Reader wrote in with the following question:

Old codgers have old archives on old disks. I have disks and files going back into the 1980s. I have no computer that can read these disks. (Anyone have an operational Mac Classic that can read 256k disks?)

But even files from the late 90s sometimes come up with a "This file is unreadable" message.

What is a strategy for keeping your archives recoverable? Of course you could go back every few years and re-record them on up-to-date media. But that's a lot of trouble compared to keeping a shoebox full of old photos under the bed for decades.

And even then, sometimes you get the "unreadable" message that brooks no appeal.

What does one do? What does your panel of gurus suggest?

Before the twentieth century, there were very few ways to record data, and they didn't change often or quickly. These days, file formats and storage media become obsolete with breathtaking speed.

I'd love to hear suggestions and recommendations from readers, but I'll tell you what I've always done, and that's transfer my data onto new media once it became clear the old media were going to disappear—and sometimes just to save storage space.

For example, when I got a ZIP-100 drive back in the mid-1990s, I transferred a lot of things from floppy diskette onto ZIP disks. Some ten years later, when ZIP disks became obsolete (and my old ZIP drive started suffering the Click of Death), I transferred that data onto CDs. By that time, floppies were also nearing extinction, so anything I still had on floppy diskette also went onto CDs. Much of that data, if it's important to me, is also on one or more external drives.

And speaking of floppy diskettes: I had some of those 256K Mac diskettes, myself. And my PowerBook 145B (the first and so far only Mac I owned) no longer hand a functioning floppy drive. However, I had a friend who had a PowerBook only a little newer than mine, and she was able to put the data on high-density floppies that my PC laptop could read. Those files, too, got copied onto CD.

A few of them did get corrupted and lost along the way; I just checked one file that now lives on my NAS drive and got a warning message from Microsoft Word that I'd never seen before, about opening files in earlier versions being prohibited by my registry settings. Curiously, I can open the file with WordPad, though the formatting is messed up. This is a reminder that if the files are important, it can be a good idea to re-save them as newer versions, or to keep a copy of the older version of the software with them.

That's the strategy I have. It takes a bit of effort, but I'm not at all sure that I'd call it "a lot of trouble." Trying to do it years after the time you should have does make it more trouble, of course. (It is possible to find people with functioning "antique" computers; Charles Lee at McTek in Berkeley is one of them.) If you no longer need the data that's on the about-to-be obsolete media or in an about-to-be-unreadable file format, then don't bother.

But let's look at the ways used to preserve data prior to the era of computers. For centuries, the only way to produce even one copy of something was to write it by hand on papyrus, parchment, or clay. In the right conditions, papyrus lasts a long time, but most places don't have the right conditions. Fired ceramic is pretty near indestructible (you can break it, but not dissolve it, and the glaze doesn't fade), but not practical for long documents. Parchment, which is made from animal hide, is subject to various forms of rot. None of them is especially compact and easy to store, and all are limited in terms of the type of data they can contain.

Does anyone remember the Xerox commercial where the two monks are saved from their laborious work in the scriptorium by the photocopier? The ancient literature that remains to us today had to be painstakingly copied letter by letter (often by scribes who didn't really understand what they were writing), again and again over the centuries. Not surprisingly, these scribes frequently made mistakes; part of the job of more modern scholars is comparing these early manuscripts and trying to decide which one is correct in cases where they disagree.

If you remember that commercial, you probably also remember re-typing things on a typewriter because you made a mistake. Then came typewriters with correction keys, and those with single-line displays and memories. For all of my high school and undergraduate years, I wrote out all my student essays—and three or four novels—by hand before typing them up on whatever the technology to hand was: "programmable" typewriters in my high school days, and the campus mainframe when I was in college. (Oh, yeah, and my 160-page undergraduate honors thesis, too. I used to post the empty pens on my dorm room door. You can imagine how popular I was with my hallmates.)

Due to my own oversight, I never collected a computer tape with that work; I have only paper copies of some of it. But then, the only thing I really need it for now is nostalgia. It's true that it's easier for a human to read the printout of that thesis than it would be for my HP Pavilion laptop to read the tapes they would have given me of the mainframe data if I'd gotten them before I left Providence.

If all you want to do is look at something occasionally yourself, you may just want to print it, and then try to keep the printout in a waterproof, fireproof location. I've got a bunch of handwritten journals in a metal filing cabinet downstairs. I haven't looked at them for years, though I'm starting to be a bit curious (and to realize I no longer remember those years as clearly as I once did), so I might pull a few out. I can only hope that the paper hasn't gone moldy and the ink faded. Mildew is a terrible book killer, but so is too much dry heat. And in this case there's also handwriting to contend with. Unlike the monks in the scriptorium, I don't write in a gorgeous calligraphic hand.

And then there are photos. My paternal grandmother gave me some family photos back in 2000 when I visited her. Many of the ones of her parents when they were young were in remarkable condition. The photos of my own childhood—from the early days of color photography—were almost all badly faded. I've been able to scan them and touch up the color some, but at the time they were taken, the only way to make new copies would be to have the negatives. Negatives are rather fragile things and need to be stored carefully. The negatives for these photos were long gone. The photos themselves might be faded almost to invisibility by the time I'm a great-aunt.

You'll find that there are a lot of things you have no need or desire to keep beyond the time the IRS requires you to have them. But if there's something you want preserved for posterity, make a point of transferring it onto new media whenever you see that the old media are on the way out.

It's Time for the Annual Archive: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-11-08

This is the post I was planning to write last week, your annual reminder that you need to archive your data at the end of each year. (If your fiscal year is different from the calendar year, you should create these archives then.)

I've written about year-end backups on several occasions before. Because (as I pointed out in December 2005) these aren't really backups, I'm going to stop talking about "year-end backups" and start talking about "annual archives." At the end of 2004, and again in December 2006, I described the kinds of data that goes into one of these archives. My focus up to this point has been on archiving your data for tax purposes, so those posts address primarily financial and business data.

The need to back up--and archive--all supporting documents relating to your business income and expenses has not gone away. I've just made 4 DVDs to add to the tax box. There's one for each of my business personas (the FileSlinger, the Author-izer, and the Podcast Asylum) and one with the new promo photos the Ur-Guru took this year. (You can see some of them on Flickr.) The most time-consuming thing about making them was isolating 2007 data. In some cases I had already done this, but I haven't been completely consistent.

Once it was done, I removed all finished projects from 2007 from my C drive to make room for 2008 projects. I'm not that pressed for storage space on my machine, but it's annoying to have to look through folders for clients I'm finished with, or previous versions of documents I'm working on, when I want to get to my current work. So I use making the annual archi