Stupid Outlook Tricks: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-03-08

What I really need is a set of backup vocal cords. I was planning to do some recording this week, and what happens? I have laryngitis, with added coughing. Even if it didn’t hurt to say more than a few words at a time, I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to the squawking.

There are lots of text-to-speech programs out there, but I don’t want to subject anyone to them, either. After all, synthetic voices make people think of voicemail systems, which brings out hostility and frustration.

But sometimes it really would be nice to be able to swap out body parts the way one does computer component. (This from someone too squeamish even to get her ears pierced, never mind have electronics implanted for anything not life-threatening.)

My brain is not at its most focused right now, but I’ve read four novels since yesterday morning and even a sick person can only sleep for so long. I am, therefore, writing a backup reminder, even if it’s a trifle lame.

Last time I checked, the most common cause of data loss was still human error. Though the “undo” command can save us from those mistakes we recognize right away, we don’t always realize that we’ve deleted the newer version of the file instead of the old one, or whatever.

There was a time, right about when Windows 95 came out and the Mac ceased to be the world’s only user-patronizing computer, that I got really fed up with those “Are you sure you want to send that file to the recycle bin?” messages. I found out how to bypass the recycle bin and send files into oblivion. (At the time I was oblivious, myself, to the reality that a lot of deleted files can be recovered if the drive hasn’t been reformatted.)

I didn’t have a cat walking across my keyboard then, and my mental response to the dialog box was “Of course I want to delete it. Why else would I press the delete key?”

Naturally there came a day when I deleted something by accident and regretted it. It wasn’t a total disaster, but I decided to turn the Recycle Bin on again after that.

And then there’s e-mail. Time was, you always read your e-mail on the server via Telnet, because there wasn’t another way to get to it. But these days, most people use a POP e-mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird that copies their messages onto their hard drives.

In most cases, when the e-mail client finishes copying the messages, they get deleted from the server. But you can tell your e-mail client to leave messages on the server so that you can access them from another computer—or retrieve them if you’re a little too quick to hit the “delete” key.

I have most of my accounts set to leave my messages on the server for 3 days after I download them to my main computer. That generally gives me enough time to check them from elsewhere, if for some reason I need to get to those messages when I don’t have Enna with me.

You can decide how long to leave messages on the server. I don’t recommend leaving them there indefinitely, especially if you get a lot of mail, because you’re likely to fill up the quota your ISP gives you, or at least slow everything down. (And anyway, most of what’s left up there will be spam, and why keep that around?) If you’re planning to go on a long trip, you might want to set the length of time to match the length of your trip, but otherwise, you probably don’t need to keep messages on the server more than 7 days.

If you’re going to leave the mail on the server as a backup, however, you need to make sure not to check the box that says “Remove from server when emptied from deleted items” (or whatever the equivalent phrase is for your preferred e-mail client). Because then, if you delete a message by accident while clearing out the spam that makes it past the junk mail filters and don’t realize what you’ve done until later, you’re out of luck. I learned this the hard way just recently—twice, in fact.

It doesn’t look too professional to have to say “Sorry, I deleted your message before I could read it—can you send it again?” Especially when you’re supposed to be a backup maven.

And, speaking of e-mail, if anyone has experience with Outlook synchronization programs like PSTsync, SynchPST, and Easy2Sync, I’d love to hear about it.

Technorati Tags: Outlook backup

Back Up with Personality: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-06-08

It’s been less than a year since I reviewed Universe Point’s ION backup—and more than a month, I confess, since CEO Jeff Snader asked me to check out the latest version.

ION’s big selling point is monitored backups: if something goes wrong with your backup job, ION will tell you about it. This is a good feature to have; it keeps you from learning the hard way that your backups are no good. Finding out about the error right away lets you fix the problem and re-run the job. And no, ION never sees your data.

Okay: monitoring is a great feature. Most SOHO backup programs don’t provide it. But that’s not what I want to write about here.

What strikes me most about ION—even more in version 2.5 than in the pre-release version I evaluated in 2007—is the user interface. Every screen contains prominent links to additional help, as well as clear instructions for every step in the process of creating and running backup jobs.

And not only was the documentation written in simple English, but the author clearly has a sense of humor. Error messages say “Uh-oh” and “You’re not listening!” Tabs have titles like “Name Time” and “The What.”

Of course, this did rather tempt me to name my test backup “Fred,” but I settled for “test.”

Under “The What” (that is, what to back up), the three options are “Common choices,” “Choose Files,” and “Outlook.” I opted for “Outlook” and found two very important options there: “Close Outlook before backup” and “Restart Outlook after backup.” This is because Outlook “locks” the PST files and it’s not possible to copy them when Outlook is running. (And Outlook has this pesky tendency to keep running even when you think you’ve shut it down, too.)

Checking these boxes not only saves you the trouble of closing Outlook down manually (something you’ll likely forget to do if you have automatic backups scheduled for times when you aren’t using the machine), it makes successful backups a lot more likely.

The first time I tried to run this job, I got the “license expired” warning above, but when I tried it again this morning, it worked with impressive speed. I’d selected my network drive as the destination for the backup, and ION copied 899.58 MB in two minutes and 37 seconds—which seems a lot faster than when I copy the same amount to a USB drive using Replicator. (I’ve never actually clocked that, though, so it might just be my perception.)

The shut-down and restart worked fine, too. I was in the middle of answering a message from Jeff Snader when I decided to test the backup, and Outlook saved my draft just as it would have if I’d shut the program down myself. It was simple and painless.

ION duplicated my file and folder structure when making the backups, which can be annoying to me as a human, given the places Outlook buries its information, but does make it clear where all those files should go when restored. (There’s also an option to store your backups as .zip files, but I presume the file structure is still preserved within that .zip file.)

ION seems like a great tool for the technophobe, while retaining enough features and options to be attractive to the geek. The available online support is tremendous, and the humor demonstrated throughout the website is a nice change from the humdrum tedium of most Windows programs.

I’ll be playing with ION a bit more over the next weeks, and I’ll report later on features like backing up your work data on your home computer (note: do not do this without your employer’s permission).

Technorati Tags: Universe Point,ION backup,monitored backups,Outlook backup

Putting the Humor Back in Backups: FileSlinger(TM) Backup Reminder 05-23-08

Is this the late-late-early show or the early-early-late show? Looking at my calendar and asking myself what the chances are that I'll manage to write a second column by Friday (when I have to get up at 4:30 AM to get ready for the BACN meeting at 7:30 AM), I decided just to post-date this and send it out now.

Last week TechTarget sent me a link to an “e-zine.” I don't know why they called it that; there's no sign that you can subscribe and get new issues. It's essentially a white paper and probably the reason I got a phone call and an e-mail message from a hapless salesperson at ASEMPRA whose marketing department doesn't know enough to put a “Don't contact me” checkbox on its download forms.

Anyway, the white paper is called “New Tools for Better Backups,” and, like most white papers, it focuses on enterprise technology: deduplication, storage resource management, VM (that's Virtual Machine) Backups. The kind of thing that gives most of the folks who read this blog a serious case of My Eyes Glaze Over.

But in the midst of these articles was a full-page ad for the latest installment from the Backup Trauma Institute:

“Are you looking to gain control of your company's digital information?

“Or maybe your sanity?

“Well, you're in luck because now you can get ‘Friendly’ advice from a professional who's truly passionate about helping you manage your data — Dr. Harold Twain Weck. That's right, John Cleese is at it again as Dr. Twain Weck to give you friendly advice on your most critical digital information protection and storage challenges.”

First, if you've never visited the Institute for Backup Trauma, go check it out. This award-winning campaign for LiveVault's Continuous Data Protection services appeared in April 2005. It makes two major points: how much trouble a company can be in without reliable backups, and how problematic tape is as a backup medium.

Three years later, Iron Mountain owns LiveVault and John Cleese is dispensing advice of dubious friendliness regarding some important questions about compliance, security, and whether there is, in fact, a mountain of iron. My favorite question is “How can I get our executives in trouble?” but my favorite answer is “How do I keep Mr. Wiggles from destroying electronic evidence?” That one expounds on some really creative ways to destroy a hard drive.

Even though Iron Mountain's solutions are aimed at the enterprise and may not be immediately useful to you, the Friendly Advice Machine is an entertaining diversion—and one that makes me glad I don't have to worry about compliance, discovery, and managing millions of e-mails.

Technorati Tags: Iron Mountain,LiveVault. John Cleese,Friendly Advice Machine,Backup Trauma

A Real Live Backup Scam: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-14-08

It was only a few days after publishing last week's “Are You Paranoid Enough?” Backup Reminder that I heard the sorry tale of G-Archiver, a program designed to back up your Gmail account. Or allegedly designed to back up your Gmail account, anyway. A programmer named Dustin Brooks discovered that G-Archiver did something else: it sent the Gmail IDs and passwords of everyone who had downloaded it to the Gmail account of one John Terry.

The G-Archiver website claims that this was a “coding mishap” and urges users to remove the old version and replace it with a new one. This strikes me as lame both as an apology and as an explanation (I have trouble imagining how such a “feature” could find its way into a program by mistake), but at least it's better than pretending the problem never existed.

Still, I suspect that very few people who have read about said “mishap” are going to take a chance on G-Archiver again. They're probably too busy changing the passwords for their Google accounts.

Neither flaws nor deliberate scams are necessarily obvious. If Dustin Brooks hadn't decided to examine the source code using Reflector, we might all still be ignorant of the problem with G-Archiver. It takes a programmer to discover a problem at that level.

But it doesn't take a programmer to run a product name through Google and Technorati and see whether someone else has found problems. And it doesn't take a programmer to look for (or ask about) alternative ways to back up the specific data you're looking to copy.

One commenter on the original post in Coding Horror made the following sensible point:

Why would anyone pay $30 to get a backup copy of their Gmail account when Thunderbird is free? Just connect to Gmail's IMAP server, set TB to save all downloaded messages, and do a complete sync. Not only would you then have a complete backup, but you would also be able to read and send email from TB while having it synced with Gmail.

Just about any other mail client with IMAP support should also work.

Since I don't use my Gmail account for mail, I've never bothered downloading the tiny handful of messages there into Outlook, but that's probably what I'd do, since my Outlook .PST file already gets backed up at least once a day.

It seems obvious to me that an offline mail client would be the obvious way to backup an online e-mail account, but that might not occur to everyone. But if you type “backup Gmail” into Google's search box, you'll find lots of possibilities, including instructions from Google about backing up your mail with POP. (You'll also find instructions for using your Gmail storage space to back up data from your hard drive, which brings it all full circle.)

So once again, the moral of the story is, don't hand out your passwords to anyone you don't have some reason to trust, and do your homework on new products before trying them. Backups are supposed to make your data safer, not more vulnerable.

Technorati Tags: G-Archiver,Coding Horror,Gmail

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-20-06: Don't Back Up Your Spam

First, I’d like to apologize for not sending a Backup Reminder last week. I was suffering from a virus whose results are best not even imagined, never mind discussed. Humans, unlike computers, are self-repairing, but we can’t revert to a previous, healthier version of ourselves with a couple of mouse clicks, either.

As if being sick weren’t enough to get me thinking about lingering undesirables, I just weeded a hundred or so spam subscribers off my mail service. Somehow spammers have gotten hold of the autoresponder address for this newsletter and are sending messages to it, which leaves me coping with bounce messages when the opt-in confirmation goes out to their fake addresses, as well as a list of “clients” with names like “Robbie condescend.”

Even with storage as cheap as it is, there’s just no point letting that kind of junk take up space on your hard drive or your mail server. I’ve written a couple of “clean up before you back up” articles before, and I figure it’s time for another one.

E-mail
Most e-mail clients these days have built-in spam filters that shunt mail into a “Junk” or “Bulk” folder. Many people ignore these folders. It’s actually a good idea to look in them to see whether anything you want to read has gone astray. E-zines like this one frequently end up in Bulk Mail folders, and even messages from your friends and family might get misfiled if they use trigger words.

Once you’ve rescued any false positives, delete the spam. Then empty the Deleted Items (Outlook) or Trash (Thunderbird, Eudora) folder. Then compact your mailboxes or PST file. The larger your Outlook PST file, the slower Outlook runs, and the more likely errors will be.

While you’re cleaning up, you might want to go through and get rid of any attachments you don’t need any more and move older mail into an archive file. Copy the archive file onto a CD and put it somewhere safe.

Recycle Bin
I’m always amazed at how many people don’t empty their computer’s Recycle Bin/Trash on a regular basis. Sure, it’s handy to be able to retrieve something that you didn’t mean to delete, which is why I no longer bypass the Recycle Bin. But most of the time, you do mean to delete it, and if you don’t empty the Recycle Bin, it’s still taking up space on your computer. If your Recycle Bin icon is overflowing, open it up, make sure there’s nothing in there you want to keep, and empty it out.

And don’t forget about the things that should go into the Recycle Bin, like installer packages for browser add-ins and upgrades, not to mention those shortcuts to services you don’t want.

Spyware and Adware
Unlike the documents in the Recycle Bin, spyware programs don’t take up a lot of space. And unlike viruses, they won’t infect files you back up. They just slow your system down and tell advertisers what you’re looking at online. But unless you get rid of them, they could make a system image useless: instead of restoring to a trouble-free time, you end up restoring your machine to a slow, kludgy state.

I use Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search and Destroy from Safer Networking, which are both free tools and get reasonably good ratings. The best defense against spyware and adware used to be using the Firefox browser, though with its increasing popularity it’s no longer quite such good protection. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 is supposed to be a vast improvement over IE 6, but I haven’t tried it yet and can’t comment.

Viruses
There’s just no point in backing up an infected system, because the virus will come back when you restore it. (That’s why you have to turn off System Restore before running virus-killers on a Windows machine.) I like AVG Free Edition from Grisoft, but as long as you don’t install anything from Norton/Symantec, you’re probably fine. (For some reason Norton’s so-called protective programs mess most computers up worse than viruses do.) For cleaning viruses off already-infected machines, McAfee’s Stinger works well.

So there you have it: first clean up your system, then back it up. Don’t waste your storage space on things you never wanted on your computer in the first place.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-30-05: More Tales from the Backup Trenches

I seem to have had my hands on a lot of computers lately. On the plus side, I had a client who’d just purchased an external hard drive despite her reservations and had as her most pressing problem backing up her Outlook Express mail and addresses. Judging by the complexity of the operation, Microsoft really doesn’t want you to back up Outlook Express. (Personally, I really don’t want you to use Outlook Express, but I do have some clients who are wedded to it, and this wasn’t the time to recommend Eudora or Mozilla Thunderbird.)

There are several utilities designed to make it easier to back up Outlook Express, so I downloaded a few and brought them with me. Outlook Express Backup Wizard has an interesting offer: if you provide a permanent link to their site (using their HTML code), you can get the $39.95 full version for free. It’s a very simple program, a mere 858 K download, and you get two options when you start up: back up Outlook Express, or restore an Outlook Express backup. I installed it for my client and checked the appropriate boxes to back up her Outlook Express identities, mail, and address books.

The first time it ran, it seemed to hang up, but I discovered on the second try that this appearance was deceptive. After running through the first part of its process quickly, it takes some time to complete. Nevertheless installing it, running it, demonstrating it to my client, and then configuring Karen’s Replicator to back up her My Documents folder (in which the OE backups are now stored) to her external hard drive took less than an hour.

Setting up the external drive itself was a no-brainer. It was a modest-priced Maxtor drive which needed only to be plugged in and hooked up. (This is actually true of most ready-made external drives; the problems I discussed in the previous week were not with the Seagate drive, but with the client’s FireWire port.) While external hard drives are almost as vulnerable to failure as internal drives (I say “almost” because an external drive is usually not at risk from a problem with a different component in the machine), they are by far the fastest and easiest method of backing up and restoring your data. You can always copy the most important data from the external drive onto CD or DVD to send off-site.

On a less positive note, I spent nearly four hours on the 20th making space on my own external drive to back up a client’s machine before reinstalling it. This client owns an XHD—I’ve seen it. But it was nowhere to be found, and the client is out of the country. It’s possible their regular tech person has taken it off site, or that it’s in the safe deposit box—both good practices, but not convenient in the circumstances.

I was tempted to cannibalize the 40 GB iPod, but the nature of iPods is that they don’t automatically show up as a drive: you need special software to use them for anything but music, and I had serious doubts about getting it recognized in PC-DOS. Besides, it was full, or nearly so. (I admit to being short on iPod expertise, as I use a different brand of MP3 player, one with far too little memory to consider using to back up a drive image.)

So I found myself creating CD after CD in order to free up the 25 GB I would need to back up her 40 GB drive. Oh, I could have made the Ghost backup directly onto CD, but my last experience with that was not a good one, as a CD got scratched and ruined the backup. Besides, it would have taken at least as long to do it that way, and then a painfully long time to restore anything from that backup.

In addition to the several-times-daily backups of my own current files and the roughly-weekly Ghost backups of my drive, I use the XHD to store things which I need with some frequency, but not enough to keep them on my main drive. It’s a handy place to keep software installers, for instance, which is why I had it along with me in the first place. I made several CDs with audio files and pictures and a few with programs, and finally had enough room to back up my client’s machine.

Once that was done, the actual backup via FireWire took only about an hour. Then at last I was able to reformat the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows. Today I’ll finish restoring the data from the backup and reinstalling the last of the software (as well as setting up the new CardScan device). But moving the backup off of my drive and onto the client’s will have to wait until she’s back in town and we find her external drive.

She won’t need to keep that backup forever, just long enough to make sure she has everything she needs. Ideally I would create a new backup of the just-reinstalled system, but I don’t have anyplace to put it.

Perhaps it’s time for me to get a spare drive to put client documents on when doing this kind of work. What I’d most like to do, of course, is get one of the hard drive manufacturers to send me one to review. So far, however, it’s only software companies soliciting me for endorsements—on which subject more in the future.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-23-05: Tales from the Backup Trenches

This week I thought I’d share some real-life backup stories. If you want to go for drama, visit LiveVault CEO Bob Cramer’s blog and read about how his wiring was struck by lightning—twice.

Backing up is definitely not as easy as it should be. One faithful reader wrote in to say that even though he backs up faithfully, he had to get a consultant in to set up e-mail backups on his Macintosh, and still only has the consultant’s word for it that the e-mail is being backed up.

So a tip to everyone regarding your e-mail: go into the advanced options section and check “leave mail on server for 3 days.” (The exact phrasing of this will differ from program to program and platform to platform, but both Outlook and Eudora will allow you to do it.) That will protect your most recent messages from accidental destruction. (If you get mail in any volume, leaving it on the server for more than 3 days will result in a full mailbox and new messages won’t get through.)

Speaking of mail, a reader wrote in after last week’s reminder to say that he uses his Gmail account to back up his files. If you want one of his 100 remaining Gmail invites, e-mail him at senzar@stic.net. Others have used Yahoo! Groups for the same purpose.

A few months ago, the person who first suggested the Backup Reminder Newsletter to me called to ask for help setting up a new FireWire hard drive. He was tired of the slow speed of backup to his USB 1.1 drive, and none of the USB 2 cards he’d bought for his laptop had worked.

I set up the drive (a matter of taking it out of the box, plugging it in, and connecting it to the laptop’s FireWire port) and started DriveImage. Not long into the backup process, an error message popped up. The drive had completely disappeared as far as Windows was concerned.

I took the drive home to test on a different machine to try to figure out where the real problem lay. I hooked it up to a desktop computer’s FireWire port and tried reformatting it. This worked flawlessly. Later I attached the drive via USB to my own computer (this one doesn’t have FireWire, more’s the pity) and left it running for hours on end. The drive, or more probably the fan, made a slightly odd noise every so often, but it worked just fine otherwise.

So I took it back to my client to try to figure out what was wrong. Once again, we connected the drive. Once again, it disappeared after a short while. This time I remembered to look at the Event Log, which was showing me SBP2 Port errors. I was familiar with those from occasional problems with the FireWire port (or rather the controller for it) on my old laptop, but I’d never had a problem there that wasn’t solved by removing and replacing the connection.

I had asked my client whether he’d had any problems with his FireWire CD-RW/DVD drive, and he’d said no. I’d forgotten to ask when he’d last used it, though, and when we went to connect the CD drive to the laptop, it never showed up at all. Windows simply couldn’t tell it was there.

Conclusion: a perfectly good external hard drive and a dead FireWire port. As the USB port on that side of the computer is also unreliable, there may be wider damage. Cords plugged into laptops do tend to get tripped over and yanked on much more often than those connected to desktop machines, and even though this was a solid 6-pin FireWire port, something probably got jiggled loose.

This story has a mostly-happy ending, however. The main reason the client wanted the FireWire drive was that he didn’t want to lose the 2-3 hours required to make a backup with DriveImage. I helped him set up my favorite free backup tool for the PC, Karen’s Replicator, to back up his My Documents folder, his Quicken data, and his Outlook PST file automatically. The total time required for that was under 20 minutes. So now he can keep his files safe without losing a lot of time and only needs to make a new drive image when he installs new software or upgrades the operating system.

Next week I’ll tell you about why I have a 24 GB Ghost backup of a client’s PC on my external hard drive and what I had to go through to get it there.

Keep sending in the feedback and suggestions, and please—post comments and questions to the blog. It’s easy to do and you get free publicity that way. ;-)

Guest Article from the E-zine Queen: WHOOPS — There Goes My List!

Have you backed up your mailing list lately? This article, published in the 9/7/05 edition of Alexandria Brown's "Straight Shooter" e-zine (and reprinted here with permission), is a good reminder about the importance of keeping any mailing lists you manage backed up. In fact, as soon as I finish posting this, I'm going to back up the list of subscribers to the Backup Reminder Newsletter.

Note that I haven't tried iBackup myself (that I remember), but that any online backup solution requires a high-speed connection, and even then it can take a surprisingly long time to back up the mere gigabyte or so of truly critical data on your computer.

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WHOOPS — There Goes My List!
(Are You Backing Up Your BIGGEST Asset?)
By Alexandria K. Brown, "The E-zine Queen"

Have you ever accidentally lost an important file on your computer? Perhaps your computer crashed (again) or your cat sauntered over a dooming sequence of keys. Remember that little pang in your stomach you felt when you realized that file was gone for good?

OK, now imagine losing your entire e-zine subscriber list or customer list. Did that pang just get a bit more intense? (Ouch!)

When several Internet marketing gurus were asked the question, "If your office was burning down and you could save one thing, what would it be?"

The unanimous answer among all of them was, "my list"!

Your list is your goldmine. It's your pool of warm prospects and clients with whom you've taken months to build a level of credibility and trust. They're your ticket to a steady stream of income.

It can take years to build a large collection of opt-in subscribers and customers. But they can disappear in a flash if they're not protected.

So, are YOU backing up your list on a regular basis? (Be honest!) If not, let's get you started today.

If Your List Resides on Your Computer...

If you send out your e-zine or e-mail promotions from your own computer, you MUST make backing-up your list a daily habit. And by "backing-up," I mean saving your list to a disk or location other than your hard drive. For example, you can save your list to:

1) a CD (you'll need a CD burner)
2) an external hard drive (these are less expensive now than they used to be)
3) a secure, Web-based file storage service.

I currently use option 3 for my computer files. The service I use is called I-Backup, and there are many others out there, starting at as little as $3 per month. I prefer this option because I have so many large files on my computer that I'd have to backup my files to several separate disks or CDs. And because this method is so EASY, I'm more likely to follow through and back-up my files on a regular basis!

I also like I-Backup for traveling, as I can upload files that I'll need to access on the road. This way I don't have to bring a disk with me.

If You Use an Online List Service...

Even if you host your list online with a listserve (such as Constant Contact) or an autoresponder service (such as QueenCart.com), you should still make your own backup copy on a regular basis! Just download or "export" a copy of your list each week for safekeeping. It should be pretty easy to do. This procedure varies depending on what program you use, so see its help files or contact their support center for assistance.

Consider Purchasing a Battery Backup System

Southern California is known for its frequent power outages, and they were wreaking havoc on my computer. So I purchased a battery backup unit. (I chose APC's 650 model.) It's about the size of a breadbox and keeps my computer going for another hour or so in the event of a power outage. This gives me ample time to back up any files I'm working on and shut down my computer properly. It also functions as a surge-protector to keep my computer safe from electric surges. You can buy units like these at any large office supply store, and they range in price from $100 to $500.

Don't Put It Off Any Longer!

I know that backing-up your files seems like another irritating addition to your busy schedule. But remember that you've worked hard to build your list ... and your business. So take just a few minutes each week to protect that investment.

I now keep three separate copies of my list backups among me and my two assistants as well, so they are spread across the country and on different computers! (This may seem anal, but when you consider the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year they are worth to me, it makes sense.)

TIP: Pick a certain day each week to back up your list. For example, my electronic calendar automatically reminds me to do this every Friday.

© 2003-2005 Alexandria K. Brown

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR E-ZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this blurb with it: Online entrepreneur Alexandria K. Brown, "The E-zine Queen," is creator of the award-winning 'Boost Business With Your Own E-zine' system. To learn more about this step-by-step program, and to sign up for her FREE how-to marketing articles and FREE audio class, visit www.EzineQueen.com

WANT TO SEE MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE?
See Alexandria's Small Business Marketing Blog.

E-mail Archiving Seminar

Storage Central has added e-mail archiving to its Storage School online seminar offerings. This one collects three webcasts which cover everything from federal security regulations to enlisting the whole company in the archiving effort.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 6-24-05: Don't Make Outlook Backup Harder Than It Has to Be!

Due to a peculiar quirk that appeared in Firefox yesterday, I managed to delete all of my backup bookmarks, a fact I only discovered when I sat down to start this article last night. It’s a good thing I had them backed up! After writing all these newsletters, I’ve accumulated a lot of links to backup-related websites, and, I’d just finished sorting them into subfolders a few days ago.

Sometimes we make working with technology harder than it has to be. I remember how mortified I was when the Ur-Guru asked me why I wasn’t using any shortcut keys on the PC in my then-office at the University of Warwick. The answer was simple: I’d been using Macs until that year, and I didn’t know that Windows machines had keyboard shortcuts. There was no Command (Apple) key to hold down, after all. Once I learned that CTRL-S in Windows was the same thing as Command-S on a Mac, I started using keyboard shortcuts.

And when I first had to start using Outlook, I backed up the hard way, by using the File|Import and Export feature and going through multiple steps to create a secondary .pst file. It’s not entirely my fault I was doing it that way: I was just following Microsoft’s instructions for backing up Outlook 2000.

Once again it was the Ur-Guru who came to my rescue, telling me that I could just drag the original .pst file onto my external hard drive. Of course, I did have to find it first, and Windows doesn’t make that easy. Now I set Replicator to copying the file automatically every time I start my computer. My mail, contacts, and calendar change more frequently than the rest of my data combined, and this seems to be true for most people I know.

It turns out I’m not the only one to have approached Outlook backup the hard way. One of the readers of the FileSlinger Backup Blog mentioned that she was backing up her Outlook .pst files, a task she undertakes every three months. “The contacts, calendar and tasks are a snap,” she said. “What is time consuming is the email backup, especially if you like folders and subfolders. Ugh.”

She was actually exporting each separate mail folder to a different .pst file, and this took hours. When I told her that all she had to do was copy the original .pst file, she was stunned.

“Wow, if you're saying what I think you're saying, then you can highlight the "Outlook Today" icon (all email subfolders plus tasks, calendar and contacts reside there), then go to File>Import and Export...This is the process I've been using for each subfolder, then subfolder of the subfolders. Is this right? If so, you saved me hours of time and eliminated procrastination.”

In fact, backing up Outlook is even easier than that. Just in case anyone else was spending hours on backing up Outlook when they didn’t have to, I thought I’d better say something about it.

As I said above, before you can copy your outlook.pst folder, you have to find it. In Windows XP, this folder normally lives in C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. In order to find it, you have to have Windows set to show system files. (You do this in Windows Explorer under Tools|Folder Options|View. Make sure that “Hide protected operating system files” is not checked. )

If it’s not there, just do a search for files with .pst extensions. I know one client whose outlook.pst ended up installed to her Windows directory for some reason, but the backup process works just the same: drag and drop.

I gave these directions to my reader, and she said “That's great. I just found the path to outlook.pst (and I am, indeed, on XP). Unfortunately, the size is 356 MB, so it's time to pare it down. Of course, emptying the Deleted folder and much of the Sent folder usually helps…Is there a way to test it, or to view what you have saved? My guess is that you won't really know until you import it into a new computer, or into a newly-installed Outlook.”

This is where another of the Ur-Guru’s lessons comes in: you don’t need to import .pst files. You can just open them, and you can have more than one .pst file open in Outlook at a time. Just go to File|Open|Outlook Data File. As long as the file you’re opening hasn’t been password-protected (or you know the password if it has), you can access everything in it.

Microsoft does have a free Personal Folders Backup tool for Outlook, which automatically creates a backup of your .pst file every few days. You can download it from the Office Updates site. You need to use Internet Explorer to use the Microsoft website.

And finally, for any of you Mac users out there who have Entourage, the Mac equivalent of Outlook, you can find backup instructions at http://www.entourage.mvps.org/backup.html.

Now you have no excuse not to back up your Outlook data.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-1-04: Backing Up Outlook Express

After last week's piece on the Personal Folders Backup tool for Outlook, someone asked me about backing up Outlook Express.

If you use Outlook Express for your e-mail, my advice is—DON'T. Like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Outlook Express is the mail program most targeted by (and vulnerable to) the makers of viruses, worms, and other forms of malicious code.

However, if OE is what you use and what you've been using, you do still need to know how to back up your mail.

This, it turns out, is not as straightforward as with Outlook. Instead of keeping its mail and contact information all in one place, Outlook Express divides it across several different files. Microsoft provides detailed instructions for backing up and restoring Outlook Express data.

Here is the short form of the article.

To backup Outlook Express data:

• Copy mail files to a backup folder
• Export the Address Book to a file
• Export the mail account to a file
• Export the news account to a file

To restore or import Outlook Express data:

• Import messages from the backup folder
• Import the Address Book file
• Import the mail account file
• Import the news account file

There's also an article about backing up and restoring the Outlook Express Blocked Sender List (which serves in place of the highly effective Outlook 2003 spam filtering system) and Mail Rules. Doing this involves exporting/importing part of the Registry—something that is best left to your tech support person, so that at least you can blame them if it results in a disaster.

In summary, backing up Outlook Express is a lot of work. Recognizing this, several companies have produced third-party Outlook Express backup products. If you do a Google search on "backup outlook express", you'll find several, some with free trials. They cost less than buying the full version of Outlook, but then again, all they provide is the ability to back up OE—they don't include the integrated calendar, tasks, contacts, spam filters, mailmerge capabilities, etc of the full version of Outlook.

If all you want to back up are the actual messages, you can drag and drop them into a folder on your external hard drive, or put them onto a CD. I've done this before when transferring data from one computer to another. It's not very sophisticated, but it works.

If you prefer your mail client just to do e-mail, but want an alternative to Outlook Express for purposes of internet security, try Eudora, PocoMail, or Mozilla Thunderbird. All have free or ad-supported versions. They are not necessarily easy to back up, however.

For those who use Netscape mail, Harvard University has provided handy backup guides:

• PC Users
• Mac Users

You can find a list of Windows e-mail backup utilities here.

Now that I've overwhelmed you with tasks and links, I'll leave you to your backups.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-24-04: Personal Folders Backup

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

It occurred to me earlier this week that you could all just create reminders for yourselves in Outlook or ACT! or whatever calendar program you use, and then your computer would automatically notify you to make your backups, and you wouldn't need me to send reminders to you.

In fact, it's probably a good idea to do this. It's easy for one e-mail message to get lost in a sea of others, but Outlook's reminders are determined to get your attention, popping up a dialog box and playing a noise. (You can actually turn off the sound.) Indeed, my handheld PC will turn itself on and chime dulcetly at me from across the room whenever it's someone's birthday or I have an appointment, and it will keep doing it until I get up, open the machine, and tap the appropriate dialog box.

If anybody doesn't know how to create a reminder, let me know. Otherwise I'll assume you can do this. (But you'll have to let me know if that means you want me to stop sending the newsletter.)

It's important to back up those reminders themselves. If you're making a full system backup, then your calendar files will be backed up along with everything else. But if you're just backing up your data, make sure you remember to copy all those reminders.

If you use Outlook, your calendar is stored in your outlook.pst (Personal Folders) file, along with your Inbox and your Contacts and all other Outlook information (like your mail sorting rules). To back up the calendar, you have to back up the .pst file.

The Personal Folders Backup tool for Outlook 2000, 2002/XP, and 2003 (available for free from Microsoft) allows you to back up your Outlook data without having to go digging through Windows Explorer to find and copy your .pst file by hand. (For detailed information about this tool and how to use it, see the Microsoft website).

Since Windows XP doesn't even want you to be able to find your .pst files, this is a definite advantage.

Once you install it, "backup" will appear as a choice on the File menu. The "Options" button lets you specify how often you want to be reminded to back up your personal folders, where to put the backup copy, and which of those folders (if you have more than one .pst file) you want to back up. My Personal Folders Backup is set for weekly reminders, and it saves the backups on my external hard drive.

Unlike archiving or exporting, the Backup Personal Folders tool makes a complete copy of your .pst file instead of moving only some of the information elsewhere.

If you need more help backing up Outlook—or anything else—just let me know.

More backup news next week,
Sallie