Mac Backup Tips from Howard Greenstein: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-10-08

This week’s backup reminder comes to you from Howard Greenstein, one of the many who answered my call on HARO in July. Howard is a Social Media Strategist and President of the Harbrooke Group. He’s been blogging for more than 10 years—which means he used to do it all manually, back before there were blog engines like Blogger and WordPress—and he recently started a blogging column at Inc Magazine’s Startup Blog, where he helps small business understand technologies they can use to better market their businesses. He’s hoping that the advice below will save someone a headache in the future.

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Backing Up your Mac

As a small business owner with a laptop Mac, my business travels with me wherever I go. That is both convenient and dangerous. It is great to have all my mail, presentations and files at whatever client location or conference I happen to be at on any given day, but dicey to realize that I’m one cup of spilled coffee away from losing all my data. So, I’ve set up a few ways of ensuring that even if my MacBook goes south on me, I have a way to recover everything that’s important to me with just a few nail-biting hours of time. As a Mac owner, there are several choices, ranging from “free” to a few dollars a month for a service to a couple of bucks for purchase of backup software. I’ll review a few choices I’ve made, and reference others that are available for readers to pursue.

Back to the Future

Apple’s OS X 10.5 introduced Time Machine, a built-in way to store not only a copy of your hard disk data, but multiple copies, each from a different day or week. While Time Machine is a great utility for keeping a ’running backup’ of your disk, you may need a large amount of storage space. Each time a copy of a changed file is saved, it takes up more disk space. I bought a Western Digital My Book 1 TB drive to use partially as a Time Machine backup disk. My Mac has a 160GB drive, and about 135GB is used. I have Time Machine Backups going back 5 months, and I’m currently using 270GB of the 360GB I allocated in a hard disk partition to back up drive.

Time Machine is easy to use - set it and forget it. You turn it on, tell it which hard disk to use for backups, and every hour the Mac will check for changed files and back them up. Time machine keeps more files from the last few days, and check points for each week going back as far as it can before it runs out of room.

To restore, just go back to the right time in your “history” (see the diagram), click the file to restore, and hit the big “Restore” button. One downside of Time Machine is that it is not a bootable copy of your data. So, if your hard disk breaks, but the rest of your Mac is working, you can’t just boot up and get back to work. But there are several programs that will allow that.

I think I’m a clone now...

I’ve used two different programs over the past few years to create bootable, exact copies of my hard disk. Both effectively “clone” your hard disk to another disk, making the copy almost indistinguishable from your current drive. One is Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich software. CCC version 3.1.1 is Donation-Ware, so it is free for you to try. I used it for several months with good results, but for some reason, about the time that Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) was released, I switched to Super Duper from Shirt-Pocket software. Super Duper also has a free version that will make an exact copy of your disk. For $27.95 you get an upgrade that allows “smart updating”—in other words, the backup program only copies the files that have changed, making your exact backup fast and efficient.

On another partition of that 1TB drive I bought, I created a space slightly larger than the 135GB hard disk, and I run Super Duper weekly to make an exact copy of my hard drive. Once the initial copy was made, each “smart update” takes an hour or so. Every Sunday night, Super Duper turns on and automatically runs that process. In the morning I have an exact copy of my drive. If you want an all-in-one drive plus wireless access point solution, Apple’s Time Capsule is an easy to purchase, set up and forget solution.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an iMac...

Recently, my 1 TB drive had some sort of glitch, and I got worried about its reliability. I couldn’t see the drives on the desktop, but Disk Utility saw the drive as empty—no partitions. Long story short, I bought ProSoft Engineering’s Data Rescue II over the net, downloaded it, and copied a bunch of data from the 3rd partition on my 1TB drive. Somehow all the checking of the disk “brought it back,” but I still wasn’t satisfied.

I took two steps to ensure my data would be safe. The first was getting a second large hard disk, and making another Super Duper backup. (The drive actually came courtesy of Blogger Robert Scoble, who held a contest with Seagate in NY’s Times Square, and I was one of several lucky winners. I consider it fate that I won a drive the same week my other drive went flaky—don’t let this happen to you!) I use this drive once a week in the middle of the week to make a Super Duper copy, so now I’m never more than 3 days away from an exact copy of my data.

Put it in the cloud

The second thing I did was look into online backup solutions. Even though I have 2 exact copies of my hard disk now, they’re both still in my home office. If I had a fire or theft; I’d be very much out of luck for backups or a computer. A friend had recommended Mozy, which is a service from storage vendor EMC. Mozy is a small download that you install, and it searches your drive to show you files you can back up.

You can select your Documents folder, or only Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents, for example. The free backup holds only 2GB, which is fine for many people. If you want to back up more than 2 GB of data, say the 17.3 GB of iTunes I have in the picture, Mozy allows unlimited data storage for $4.95 a month. Yes, UNLIMITED, for HOME users. If you’re a business, you’re supposed to use Mozy Pro, which is $3.95 a month plus $.50 per Gigabyte for a desktop, $6.95 + .50/GB for a server. For those of you playing along, that would be about $55.00 a month for my 135 GB hard disk, assuming I backed up about 100GB (and not system files or programs). So, for Mozy’s purposes, I’m a home user. (Also, there’s no final version of Mozy Pro for Mac yet, only for PC, so I’m not feeling guilty here).

I find that Mozy, on my Cable Modem, seems to upload about 1.0 Mbits/second, so the initial upload will take several days. Then, at night or when my computer is idle, Mozy will update any changed files so I always have a good copy of data “in the cloud.”

There are other online backup solutions, including Sugar Sync which promises you not only backup, but access to your files (such as your music) from any computer with a browser or to some files via your iPhone. The 100GB I’d like to back up would cost $14.99/month from Sugar Sync. Since I don’t need that kind of access, I’m not using it, but it has been well reviewed and for those who want any time/any place access to files, Sugar Sync could be well worth it.

Mac and Me

Another choice for online storage is the old .Mac account, now known as Mobile Me, which allows backup and sync between several computers. It also allows access to files via browser wherever you are. It also provides an email account that can be accessed from many devices, or via browser. A 20GB storage plan, enough for most people, is $99/year.

Other tips and tricks

There are other things you can do to keep your data safe and secure, and out of the house or office. You can upload all your contact data to Plaxo, which will sync with your Mac’s address book and provide a convenient online storage for that data. If your contacts are on Plaxo and they change their information, your address book gets the updated information automatically. Gmail from Google lets you store up to 7GB of email on their servers for free. Using the IMAP protocol, you can get that mail on your desktop or in a browser, and the online mail is always up to date. It is an excellent way to keep your mail backed up. Google also allows you to store documents in Google Docs, which can be edited and shared. If you need more room for mail and documents, you can even run a small company on Google Apps for Domains. As a small business, I have 2 accounts for $100 a year, and that gives me 25GB of mail and documents.

To store your photos, Google’s Picasa allows you to upload several GB of photos from iPhoto. Yahoo’s Flickr.com Pro service allows unlimited storage of photos, and sharing with friends, for only $24.95 a year. Your first 100MB of photos are free.

One other sharing solution is DropBox - you can sync files between multiple computers and access the information online. 5GB of file storage is free, so you could consider dropping some critical files and have them stored on your brother’s hard disk, and have his stuff on yours, or save files between your work and home computers. It works on Mac or PC.

There’s no excuse to lose files with all these choices. The only thing keeping you from being fully backed up is a few dollars, and inertia. But nothing’s a harsher lesson than figuring out what is and what isn’t backed up when a hard disk fails.

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Thanks to Howard for that ounce (or two) of prevention for Mac users. Almost any backup solution costs less than losing your data. And I have tons more of them to write about in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Super Duper,Carbon Copy Cloner,Time Machine,Time Capsule,DropBox,SugarSync,Google Apps,Picasa,Flickr,Seagate,Mozy,Mobile Me,Harbrooke Group,howardgr,Howard Greenstein

Tracey’s Time Capsule Story: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-19-08

This week’s Backup Reminder comes to us from Tracey Franks of Words and Money. Like me, Tracey is a professional writer. Unlike me, she’s an expert on finance. She’s also a Mac user—a recent convert. Since I know that some of my most loyal readers have Macs, I like to include Mac-backup stories whenever I can.

And since I have about a zillion things to do before my mother arrives tomorrow, I’m grateful to have a guest post to offer you.

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For some reason I’ve always considered myself to have good computer Karma. Everyone else seemed to have a nightmare come true about losing data or experiencing “the black screen of death.” Even though I had heard plenty of these stories from friends, I never experienced anything like that. Sure, I’d had some freeze ups or forgotten to save a document properly, but I never really lost control of my technology life.

Backing up work is important for everyone, but particularly when you write and edit for a living. The problem is that when I’m deep in concentration on a project, I forget to back up or don’t do it nearly as often as I should. Ideally, I need a backup secretary to just do it for me so I don’t have to think about it. The Tech Guy who comes to my house, and saves me from entering technology hell, always preaches the importance of a backup system. Yeah, I know, but that stuff happens to other people because it’s never happened to me. And off I go back to my corner of denial.

A corporate client had given me a large project that I was working on one morning when my computer Karma ran out. My trusted Sony Vaio had been trying to give me signals for weeks that its hard drive wasn’t feeling well. Like a bad parent, I ignored the signs of impending illness thinking “this too shall pass.” Besides, we’d had a good six year run together without a single problem.

Finishing a piece of the project, I reached for my thumb drive to back it up and then it happened to me...the black screen of death. I’m fairly certain my neighbors could hear the guttural scream that came from somewhere within my body. I reached for the phone and called Tech Guy, begging him to drop everything and recover my work from the bowels of the Sony Vaio. My deadline with the client was hours away.

“Did you back it up?” he asked.

“Um, sort of. Well, some of it,” I replied.

I felt like a little kid who just did something I wasn’t supposed to do, and so I braced myself for the lecture. Tech Guy didn’t give me a lecture, but he did come over and retrieve what I needed to make my deadline. Then we talked about how to get my computer Karma back.

A visit to the Apple Store not only sold me on the iMac with the 20-inch screen for my 45-year-old eyes, but also on their version of a backup secretary, the Time Capsule/Time Machine. It works with both Macs and PCs, so there’s no reason why everyone can’t use one of these wonders. This little white box backs up everything on the hard drives of my iMac and my Powerbook G4 every hour, which is probably an hour more often than I was backing up my work. It also serves as a wireless router so I can work anywhere in my house, and even outside in the backyard if I choose to.

When I hear the quiet hum of the Time Capsule entering its backup mode, I feel a sense of relief that Big Brother is watching over me. It’s so quiet that one day I shut down my iMac right in the middle of a backup. When I realized what I had done, I grabbed the manual and saw that those Apple guys had thought of everything. Once I powered my iMac back up, the backup continued where it had left off. Nice! I can also tell the Time Machine to only back up certain folders or files on the hard drive. With 500GB of storage, I’m not too worried about running out of space.

Tech Guy still tells me to back up more often than every hour, and I will admit he is right. At least my corner of denial is smaller and I feel like I’ve got my computer Karma back...for now anyway.

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Technorati Tags: iMac,Time Capsule,PowerBook

Saved by SuperDuper: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-22-08

This week’s (very late) backup reminder is one for the Mac users. It comes from Dave, the founder of EAR/Rational Music. Dave also writes his own Music Blog.

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I’m a SOHO owner and Mac user and I was saved by SuperDuper!, disk cloning software made by Shirt Pocket Software. (Not affiliated with them other than being a satisfied customer.) I have a separate building on my property from which I run the business. I use a small space heater in winter and a portable swamp cooler in the summer. As you might imagine, the barn, as I call it, isn’t exactly “climate controlled.” At the time of this story, I was using an eMac, an all-in-one computer which served me well. One Sunday afternoon in April, I went out there and found the computer off. I assumed we’d lost power, which happens occasionally, but to my chagrin I found that I was unable to boot the computer at all. The screen showed a flashing question-mark icon, which means the computer could not find a disk to boot from.

I have a 300GB external hard drive that I use for backups, and I keep it in the house, rather than in the barn, for two reasons. First off, the house is climate controlled, so the drive won’t be affected by extreme temperatures. Second, if there is a fire or other damage to the barn, the external drive will likely be protected in the house. Of course a hard drive isn’t a perfect backup solution, since it could fail, but it’s unlikely that both drives will fail at the same time, especially if the backup drive is unplugged when not in use.

After retrieving the drive from the house, I plugged it into the FireWire port of the eMac, and rebooted. Since this drive contained a clone of the internal hard drive of the eMac, I was up and running in 5 minutes. As it turned out, the clone had been made about a month prior to this incident, so not all files were up to date, but the one file I really needed, the data file for my invoicing/accounting program, had actually been copied to my wife’s laptop earlier in the day. At the time I did not have a laptop, and I would copy this file to my wife’s laptop when I wanted to work in the house instead of in the barn.

So the bottom line is that I was lucky. SuperDuper! got me most of the way there (and indeed, would have gotten my farther had I run it more often), and dumb luck got me the rest of the way. It turns out the hard drive in the eMac was completely fried, and not even visible to any recovery software. With a bit of work, I was able to install a new hard drive about a month later (as I said, it’s an all-in-one machine, and as such, it isn’t made to be upgraded), but prior to doing that, I was able to run just fine from the external drive.

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Thanks to Dave for reminding us that the hard drive on a Mac is just as likely to fail as the hard drive on a Windows machine—and to his wife for letting him copy his financial data to her laptop.

Technorati Tags: Super Duper,eMac,EAR/Rational Music

Backing Up Over Coffee: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-22-08

It wasn't until I was listening to Marketing Over Coffee last night that the subject for this week's Backup Reminder crystallized, but the idea started with a question from Loyal Reader and Mac user Mike Van Horn:

When we buy a new Mac, the first thing we do is to “clone” the old model we are replacing. Makes an exact copy of whatever we select on the old computer, including applications with needed registration codes. Is this an example of a “hardware independent restore?” We've never done this with an intervening hard drive. It may have to go from one start up disk to another.

(It's actually not me who does this, but Matthew my Mac guru. But there's just a simple keyboard command he uses upon initial startup of the new computer.)

It's been a while since I owned a Mac (System 7.1), but John Wall and Christopher S. Penn reminded me that it's easy for Mac developers to create “hardware independent” products, because there are so few possible hardware variations in Mac land. Apple makes all the hardware and determines all the specifications. If you're developing something for the Mac, you know pretty much all the possible combinations of hardware that your software might have to deal with. Apple strenuously discourages people from running the Mac OS on anything but a Mac.

Windows, on the other hand, does not have “native” hardware. Anyone can manufacture computers for the Windows operating system, and darn near everyone does. That means people who develop disk imaging software have a real challenge in creating a product that works reliably for everyone. As the Ur-Guru said in his comment on last week's post:

The problem with restoring an image is drivers. Anything with specific drivers can/will fail. However, sometimes you get lucky and Windows sorts half of it out. You end up with a semi messed up OS with drivers failing left and right and being replaced but it does sometimes work.

Hence the differing experiences of Mac and PC users in this area. The Mac owners can gloat about it, but it's simply a fringe benefit of Apple's hardware monopoly.

So how do you clone a Mac? I found some instructions online in (of all places) the theoretical biophysics department at Urbana-Champaign. Apparently all you need is a FireWire cable and Carbon Copy Cloner, a freeware product for the Mac. You start the target Mac in FireWire Target Disk Mode, hook up the cable, mount and reformat the target disk with Disk Utility, run Carbon Copy Cloner, unmount the target disk, and reboot the machine. Voila! Your new Mac is now a duplicate of your old Mac.

For bootable Mac backups, you can also use Super Duper (extolled by Christopher S. Penn in MOC 48 as a digression from a discussion on backing up your “house list”). You can get a free version with limited functions or pay $27.95 for the full version. This is chump change in comparison to most Windows disk cloning programs.

I'm in no position to tell you which of these two options is better, since I don't have a Mac to test them with. (Anybody who wanted to provide me with one would, of course, be welcome. Bloggers are allowed to accept bribes.) If you're a Mac user, I recommend you download them both and try them out. When it's that easy to make workable drive images, you really have no excuse not to.

Technorati Tags: Carbon Copy Cloner,Super Duper,Marketing Over Coffee

Time Travelers Wanted: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-02-07

People have been asking me about Time Machine, the backup program built into Mac OSX Leopard. I'd be more than happy to write about it, except for one small problem: I don't have a Mac. (I realize some of you may think that's a big problem, not a small one. You are invited to buy me one. Laptops only, please.) That means that the closest I can get to firsthand experience of Time Machine is to go to the local Apple Store and ask for a demonstration, and I haven't had a chance to do that. Besides, in-store demonstrations never run into the same kinds of issues people have in real life.

What I can do is collect a few other people's (and publications') opinions, and I'll share some of those here. But what I'd like to do is have a real Mac user, preferably one of my regular readers, write about his or her experience configuring and using Time Machine. Any volunteers?

Those without Macs may want to stop reading here and just go run your backup programs for this week. On the other hand, I know some of my Mac-owning readers faithfully read the column even when I'm writing about Windows software, so you're certainly welcome to keep reading.

What Time Machine does is create snapshots of your drive, pretty much the way other drive imaging programs do, except that once you set it up, it operates continually and automatically, making hourly, daily, and weekly backups. And then, to quote MacWorld's Rob Griffiths,

When the day comes when you need something back, you launch the Time Machine application and simply move backward through time to find the files or folders you wish to restore. [...] A Restore button copies the selected files from the backup drive.

Another MacWorld writer, Andy Ihnatko, describes Time Machine as a "freak app."

It’s a specific service that implements a single (but attractive) backup scheme: “infinite undo” for your whole drive. You desperately need a spreadsheet that you deleted months ago? No sweat: open the folder it was in, activate Time Machine, “rewind” the folder until the missing spreadsheet re-appears, and then drag it from the Folder of Yesteryear into the Folder of Today.

Cool.

Definitely.

But I can’t think of the last time I actually needed to do that.

No? Well, I can. Or, at least, I can think of several occasions when I've needed an earlier version of a file because I did something monumentally stupid with the later version, or overwritten or deleted something I shouldn't. Or perhaps someone else who was also working on the document did. Or I needed to know just which parts of a project I completed when, and the project is one long document that I didn't bother re-saving with edit dates on it. "Infinite undo" is a feature that can be extremely (if perhaps not infinitely) useful.

Nevertheless, Ihnatko considers Super Duper more useful, and it's quite possible some of you will, as well. The only problem with that? Well, according to Mitch Wagner at Information Week, the current version of Super Duper isn't compatible with Leopard, though an upgrade is expected soon.

Wagner also points out that Time Machine won't make wireless backups via Airport, and even Griffiths' rave review in MacWorld mentions a few other drawbacks, like the need for an external drive connected directly to your Mac or another Mac that runs Leopard, and the fact that the hourly backups get collapsed into a daily backup at the end of the day (which saves space, but may not save documents), and the length of time required for making the initial "snapshot."

That last is an issue with every drive imaging program I've ever used, though, and anything else that makes full backups to begin with and incremental backups thereafter. (With Ghost, in fact, every image takes a long time, since each image copies the drive in its entirety.) You just have to prepare for that and leave a couple of hours (or less, depending on the size of your drive and how full it is) for the initial backup to run.

The most detailed analysis of Time Machine that I've seen so far is in ComputerWorld, and it's worth reading their review before deciding whether this is the program you want to rely on.

I have heard, however, that there have been some problems with upgrades to Leopard. It might be safest to wait until those have been resolved, or, if you were thinking about getting a new Mac soon anyway, just wait to get a new machine which comes pre-installed with Leopard.

Since Time Machine isn't a stand-alone application, the real question isn't so much whether you want Time Machine as whether you want to (or can) upgrade to Leopard. And that's something that depends as much on the specs of your existing Mac, and the compatibility of the software you depend on, as on any features Leopard has to offer.

Technorati Tags: Time Machine, OSX Leopard, Super Duper

No One Is Spared: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-06-07

In response to my sulk last week about my dying disk drive, one Mac-using friend wrote:

Luckily for me I'm just a humble user now--and I've got a Mac. When I had a similar looking problem some time back it was quickly fixed the next day by a tech at the Mac Genius Bar. A firmware problem; remedied on start-up from the keyboard.

Signed:
Gloating in Berkeley

Of course, anyone who’s been reading long enough knows that Macs have disk failures, too. In case you didn’t, there’s a new article on the subject by Robin Harris over at ZDNet, entitled “Death of a Disk”. It’s actually about the death of two disks, both Macs.

And Apple has a policy of repossessing your dead disk if they replace it, which has rubbed a few people the wrong way, with some reason. But I’m not going to rehash that here.

Macs may or may not have more reliable operating systems and software than PCs. In general, Apple seems to build fairly good-quality hardware. But it’s also worth remembering that the only real reason there are so few Mac viruses is that so few people own Macs. If Apple had a larger market share in computers, there would be more viruses designed to attack them.

It’s possible that I could take my ailing X drive to my favorite repair person and get the problem sorted out. I could, indeed, try putting the drive in a different case myself, and see what happens. (Possibly I could have avoided the on-again, off-again problems I’ve had with it by buying a more expensive case in the first place.) If I were a serious hardware geek, I’d certainly do that. But then, if I were a serious hardware geek, I’d probably have half a dozen 2.5-inch drive cases just lying around my office.

There does come a point at which you have to decide not to throw good money after bad. Not that I consider the X drive a bad investment. The poor thing has been in constant use for several years now, and it’s come along on several trips and thus withstood being squished into overhead bins on airplanes, not to mention surviving my car accident last September.

But having a professional diagnose and correct the problem will almost certainly cost more than buying a new drive which has twice the capacity and a 5-year warranty. And I’d still have a four-year-old hard drive nearing the end of its natural lifespan, which would substantially undermine my trust in it. And you have to be able to trust your backups. So even if I get a new case for the old drive, I’d want to get a new drive.

And in the meantime, I don’t have to panic, because I have the data on two other drives. Some of it is also on CD or DVD. Some of it is in my Mozy online storage account. So even if I can’t recover the data from this drive (and I think I probably will be able to), I’m safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give the Gift of Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-24-06

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest Christmas-shopping days in the U.S. That means it’s time to start giving the gift of backup.

This past Monday, the author of the Securosis blog recommended computer backup systems as “The best gift for non-geeks that isn’t on their list (and they won’t appreciate, but really need.” This followed a post from November 16th about why backups are a pain and what he(?) thinks would make them better. (I’m only assuming that “rmogull” is a “he,” but it is statistically more likely.)

Both posts are well worth reading. Rmogull is a Mac user, so a likely sort for those of you who want to know more about Macs than I can tell you. (My last Mac ran System 7.1 and my experience with OSX comes from brief interactions with clients’ computers.) The basic concerns he(?) raises apply to both Mac and Windows machines, and I’d guess to Linux as well, though I’d rather hear more on that from a Linux expert.

So why are backups a pain?

As it is I own AT LEAST one external hard drive for every PC/Mac, not counting my small NAS. That’s a lot of drives and a lot of manual backups, and I don’t backup on the road. Eventually I’d like to have all my home systems automagically backup on the network every night, but that has to wait I can move to gig Ethernet and get a bigger, faster NAS.

This is well beyond the average home user’s capabilities. As our entire lives and family histories move to fairly unreliable PCs (and Macs; they lose hard drives too) we could be destroying our social records. Despite constant warnings I still can’t get ANY of my family members to reliably backup their digital photos.

Hence his(?) inspiration to write an article recommending backups as a holiday present. (Or birthday present. Or un-birthday present. There’s no time like the present for a good backup system.)

But if really effective backups are beyond the average home user’s skills (or budget), how do we go about giving the gift of backup?

First, as with oxygen masks on airplanes, make sure you have a backup system for yourself first. If it works for you and you don’t think of yourself as a geek, then it will probably work for your less-technical friends and family members. (You might persuade your more-technical family members to help out.)

Rmogull suggests:

In many cases your best bet is to get an external hard drive and some basic backup software (I use SuperDuper on my Mac). […] A bunch of the external drives now include basic software for free, and you can plug in the drive, install the software, and just check up on it every now and then.

I would tend to agree with that. It may not fit your budget (or their needs) to give you nearest and dearest NAS drives like the Maxtor Shared Storage II that Seagate’s clever PR department sent me, but I have to say that its automatic backup works quite well and it’s a practical solution for the young parents taking digital video of their offspring’s every step, or a family which owns several computers. I actually like the fairly basic file-oriented backup on the Shared Storage II better than Retrospect, which comes with many of the One-Touch backup drives.

Unless you’re buying for a geek (who should already have a backup system), simplicity is the key. You want it to be easy to use, and preferably automatic, so it doesn’t matter if the person doesn’t remember to back up. The Ur-Guru recommends Acronis True Image 9 for complete system backups (you can also recover individual files). I haven’t gotten his verdict on the just-released True Image 10 (US$49.99). But you should still be able to get True Image 9 cheaply online if you want to stick to the tried and true (er, sorry about the pun) version.

If money is tight this holiday season (or you just know dozens of people without backups), you can donate some of your time to help them set up free software like Karen’s Replicator or SyncBack Freeware, or an online system like Mozy. You’ll need to sit down and do some prioritizing before signing up with an online backup system, because of size limits. And, of course, online backup won’t work for anyone who is still using dial-up, which is about 40% of the U.S.

You can also hire someone else to set up a family member’s backups. The Geek Squad charges $229 to come to your house and set up an automated backup system. That seems a trifle high to me, but it depends a lot on the individual circumstance. Setting up Mozy takes about 10 minutes, though the actual time to run the first backup depends on your upstream Internet speed. The last time I did this for a client, the whole process, including uploading and checking the status of the backups, took less than an hour.

Even if you don’t choose to give your family a backup system, give them a little backup awareness. Send them a copy of the newsletter or point them here to the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog.

FileSlinger™: Backup Reminder 09-08-06: CD Backups in Mac OS X

Last week I arrived at a client’s place for a non-IT-related job and found a note saying “Do you know how to do CD backups?”

In the circumstances, the answer was “maybe.” I know several ways of getting data onto a CD, but only on PCs, and my client has one of the new Intellimac/Macintel machines. The last time I owned a Mac, it had System 7.1 on it. OS X is mostly a mystery to me. I can operate programs like Word and Quicken, but overall I’m not too comfortable. And I had never tried to burn a CD.

I decided to see what happened when I inserted the blank CD-RW to which my client had attached the note. A dialog box popped up asking me what I wanted to do next. There were decidedly fewer options than when I do the same thing on my Windows machine, which always includes several options for burning a CD (because I have several programs that can do so).

Dragging files to the CD icon on the desktop didn’t seem to work, either. I eventually fumbled my way into the Disk Utility and made my way through the slightly convoluted procedure of first creating an image from a folder and then burning a CD from the image. It worked, and my client (who only recently upgraded from an ancient iMac and can fit all her documents onto one CD) was happy, but it seemed to me that there had to be an easier way. “Easier” is what Macs are known for, after all.

There is, in fact, an easier way, and if I’d been thinking clearly I would have discovered it before I started in with the always-dubious BullYourWayThrough technique. A Google search conducted this morning revealed several detailed descriptions of how to make various kinds of CDs using the built-in software. Boston College starts at the very beginning, with a description of what CD-ROMs are and where to find the “eject” button on a Macintosh keyboard.

When presented with the “You have inserted a blank CD” dialog, instead of opening Disk Utility, open the Finder and drag the files you want to put onto the CD over to the CD’s Finder window. (This drag-and-drop approach will be familiar to anyone who has burned a CD using Windows XP’s built-in software.) Then you just select File|Burn Disc (again, similar to Windows’ File|Write these files to CD).

Now if someone could just explain to me why the OS X “burn” icon looks like a radiation warning symbol…

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-18-06: And in Backup News...

Last week NBC San Diego ran a short piece called “Computer Backup Tricks Revealed.” The tricks aren’t new (though I don’t think I’ve talked about the Lojack laptop-protection system here), but it’s so rare for backups to make the headlines that it’s worth going over to watch the video (you must have javascript enabled).

Equally surprising is a piece in Tech Republic extolling the virtues of Windows XP’s built-in backup software. The author, Erik Eckel, claims that “Although many criticize Microsoft's native Backup tool for its lack of sophistication and flexibility, the Windows utility's lack of complexity is its greatest strength. Windows Backup provides a simple and proven method for safeguarding data. Further, it's a capable tool for backing up data to a medium that's easily stored offsite.”

The primary advantage, of course, is that if you own an XP machine, you already have this tool installed. Eckel provides 10 tips for effective use of the program, including “The Wizard Is Your Friend,” “Advanced Options Are Key,” and “You Needn’t Overcomplicate Schedules.” If you currently use, or are thinking of using, the XP backup tool, head on over to Tech Republic for all the details.

The other big backup news is Time Machine, the backup software built into the latest OSX release, currently known as Leopard. Sci Fi Tech calls Time Machine “the future of data backup.” Adam Frucci, author of the “Shift” column, explains: “What makes Time Machine so noteworthy is the fact that it backs up data automatically, and then allows people to recover it, piece by piece, very easily.” He goes on to add “With Time Machine, the only hassle is buying a second external hard drive to dedicate to backups — after all, you'll need enough space to store everything twice.”

Now, I’m a big fan of external drives, and looking to get a new, larger-capacity version for myself. And a good backup tool that ships with a system can only help. I do know that some people balk at the idea of buying an external drive (despite relatively low prices for high storage capacities), and that external drives are just as vulnerable to hardware failure as internal drives (though they usually suffer less wear and tear). And I’d like to wait and see how Time Machine stacks up against the other Mac backup options.

I’m not in any position to compare Time Machine to Windows Backup, because I don’t have a Mac, never mind a beta version of Leopard. If anyone out there can write a feature-by-feature comparison, I’ll be more than happy to publish it here.

If nothing else, though, Apple gets credit for giving their new product a great name.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-23-06: Celebrate Backup Awareness Month

June is Backup Awareness Month. Hard-drive manufacturer Maxtor (now Seagate) added this holiday to a calendar already crowded with such little-known gems as National Punctuation Day (September 24th) in 2005. I only wish I’d thought of it first.

Then again, I work to raise awareness about backups every week, not just one month out of the year. If you only backed up for one month out of the year, your backups wouldn’t be very helpful during the other 11 months.

But hey, let’s enjoy it while we have it. Maxtor is trying to make Backup Awareness Month entertaining. Go to www.backupawareness.com, click on your location/language, and play the save-the-data superhero video game. (I am not making this up.) How this will improve your actual backup practices, I’m not sure.

There’s nothing wrong with their list of best practices, though there’s nothing new in it, either. And “back up everything,” while it can be a good idea, is definitely a self-serving policy for a hard-drive manufacturer.

Maxtor is sponsoring a drive-a-day giveaway. In exchange for all your contact information, you get a chance to win a One Touch III Mini Edition (that’s the 2.5” external drive) every day for the month of June. (Hurry--there's not much time left.)

Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus has an entertaining article in the Mac Observer about the Backup Awareness promo package he got. You could subtitle it “I was hoping for a new hard drive, but all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” Gosh, Bob. They didn’t even send me a T-shirt. Not that I wear T-shirts, but I’d’ve liked to see the “How much stuff can I store” calculator.

You can also listen to “Dr. Mac” discussing Mac backups and the peculiarities of Dantz Retrospect on the Mac Geek Gab podcast (free MP3 download). Then you can read Dr. Mac’s Guide to Backing Up Your Mac online or pay $3.99 for the PDF version.

Windows users won’t be too excited about that prospect, but remember, the Mac-using readers have to read a lot of articles about Windows-only backup software.

How will you celebrate Backup Awareness Month?

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-10-06: Apple's Dead Drive Repossession Policy

Yes, it’s true—Macs can suffer hardware failure. Many years ago, when I had a PowerBook, something went wrong with the RAM and fried the daughterboard, resulting in many adventures sending the machine to an authorized repair shop. I was lucky, though—my drive was unharmed and my data intact.

Trade show presenter, podcaster, and Mac user Heidi Miller was not so fortunate. When her iBook G4 died on February 16th, the drive was scrambled beyond the ability of Apple’s “Genius Bar” to repair.

A week later, when she went to collect the now-functioning computer, Heidi was astonished to discover that Apple wanted to charge her $300 so she could take the old drive to a data recovery service. That was on top of what she’d paid for the repair and the replacement hard drive.

This bizarre claim that Apple now owns Heidi’s dead drive resembles the attempts by telecoms companies to charge two and three times for the same service (that is, charging ISPs and charging users). The phrases that come immediately to mind are “What a rip-off!” and “Highway robbery!” The implication is that when you buy from Apple, you’re actually just renting from them.

It would actually make more sense for Apple to charge if you don’t take the old drive away with you, because there are usually fees to recycle anything as toxic as computer components. That would be analogous to the disposal fee mechanics charge when they replace the fluids in your car. You can’t just dump petroleum products or computer parts down the drain.

Heidi persuaded the store manager to cancel the $300 charge, but so far no one in Apple’s PR department will tell her anything about this policy and where or whether she got any notification that if she took the machine in for repair, any replaced parts would belong to Apple. Other bloggers and podcasters are picking up the story. If Apple doesn’t respond soon, this could turn into the equivalent of Jeff Jarvis’ “Dell Hell” experience—a PR nightmare.

From the backup perspective, though Heidi lost the podcast she was in the middle of editing, she did have many of her files backed up onto an external drive, and she’s hoping the data recovery company can retrieve enough of the rest to make it worth the expense of their services. On the down side, her XHD was a recent acquisition and she hadn’t realized that there were whole categories of files that the software didn’t back up automatically.

The moral of this story is threefold.

First, if you use a Mac, see what you can find out about whether you really own your drive, and even if it’s dead, don’t return it to Apple without degaussing it (disrupting its magnetic fields) to make sure they can’t get at any of your data. (Computer recycling facilities provide this service for a fairly modest fee; repair shops might, as well.) Maybe they really do have a legal right to the hardware, but nothing entitles them to your data.

Second, make sure that your backup software really is backing up all of your important data. I prefer a combination of complete drive images and frequent file backups. If there’s anything I’ve overlooked in the file backups, I can retrieve it from the drive image. (But see last week’s reminder regarding the reliability of drive imaging software.) This avoids having to seek out the expensive services of data recovery companies.

Third, make sure your own policies about purchases, refunds, cancellation fees, etc are clearly stated and readily available to your customers and clients. This will help avert PR nightmares. It’s entirely too easy for dissatisfied customers to spread the word about any bad experiences they have. (The good news is that it’s also easy for happy customers to praise you on the web.)

More info:

Read Heidi’s own account of her Apple adventures

Haven’t heard the Dell Hell story? Check out Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-23-05: Pick Any Two

I just found a link to a two-part MacWorld series on OSX backups. The articles are excerpts from Joe Kissell’s e-book Take Control of Mac OSX Backups. Part one includes a handy table which compares the risks and trade-offs of different approaches to three major objectives: saving money, ease of use, and data safety.

Joe makes a very important point when introducing this table:

“You know the old saying: ‘Cheap; good; fast—pick any two.’ The same goes for backups. I can tell you how to do them effectively or how to do them quickly and cheaply, but the less time and money you’re willing to spend, the less safe your data will be.”

Before moving on to more specific subjects such as remote backups and backing up iTunes, Part two starts with a discussion of backup schedules:

“If you use your computer heavily every day, and often install new or updated software, you might opt for weekly updates of your duplicates and daily updates of your archives. On the other hand, if you use your computer only occasionally, the schedule could become once a month for duplicates and once or twice a week for archives. Under no circumstances do I suggest backing up less frequently than once a month or more frequently than twice a day—the risk is too high in the former case and the aggravation too great in the latter.”

To my mind, that reinforces the need to back up at least as often as you get this reminder.

You can buy Take Control of Mac OSX Backups (version 1.2) for $10 at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backup-macosx.html.

MacWorld articles:

Part 1: http://www.macworld.com/2005/02/features/takecontrolexcerpt1/index.php
Part 2: http://www.macworld.com/2005/02/features/takecontrolexcerpt2/index.php

Merry backups to all, and to all a good night!

Better Backups Coming to .Mac

In the September 2nd MacCast, Adam The Mac Geek says that Apple's recall of unsold copies of .Mac means the new release will be hitting the shelves soon. He's looking forward to Backup 3, a substantial improvement over .Mac's existing backup capabilities in that it allows both incremental backups and scheduled backups to any destination. iTune in to his show to find out more.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 8-5-05: The Family that Backs Up Together, Part I

Here as promised is the first installment in the reminder miniseries “The Family that Backs Up Together.” The truth is that my family doesn’t actually back up together, or even all on the same schedule, but with three generations of computer users spread across the U.S. and beyond, my family provides a kind of microcosm in which to explore different backup options as applied in real life.

As I mentioned in my previous column, I spent the week of July 16-23 in the company of 14 relatives by blood and marriage: my father and his brother and sister, their respective children and grandchildren and spouses and in-laws. Even though I’d pre-loaded a newsletter to go out while I was on vacation, I spent some time on that Friday hounding my family members about how they backed up their computers.

“I don’t have one,” my sister-in-law Donna said. “Alex has one and the kids each have one, but I don’t have one, so I let him take care of that.”

My not-so-little brother wasn’t there to ask at the moment, but his e-mail response arrived in the nick of time: “We do nothing to back up at home. I occasionally have burned pictures to CD, but found some that became unreadable after a few years.”

I can see I’m going to have to work on Alex.

My uncle Robert, last of the family to get online, doesn’t own his own computer either, though he uses them at work. (Very few people these days can avoid using computers at work, even if they want to. Auto mechanics and laundromats have computers.)

Alex, like Robert, works for a law firm, but Alex has a company laptop and Robert doesn’t. Alex is spared backing up any data on the laptop by virtue of the fact that there isn’t any data on it: everything is kept on the company network.

That’s a sensible approach for companies to take, given the frequency and ease with which laptops are stolen. The data on the machine is definitely more sensitive and probably more valuable than the hardware. Alex’s firm, in fact, uses a web-client based system, so the data actually lives at the IT company’s facility and not on the law firm’s premises. As far as Alex knows, the IT company backs up to tape every night and sends the tapes to a secure facility for storage.

My father’s sister Jean (mother of my cousin Jason the Mac geek) also uses a laptop provided by her employer to work from home, though in her case she’s restricted to dial-up connections and didn’t feel any need to bring her work with her on vacation. (Given the fact that the land line only seemed to work in one room, and that was Alex and Donna’s bedroom, it’s just as well.)

Because Jean’s employer takes care of backing up its own network, Jason doesn’t do anything with her laptop. He does back up his mother’s desktop machine (which runs Windows 98 SE), though it’s a bit tricky.

Jason, as I said before, is a Mac person. The software on his network/firewire external hard drive (which he keeps plugged into the router) doesn’t work with Windows computers. So before he runs his own backups, Jason has to back up Jean’s hard drive over the network. He does this by copying her drive (about 6 GB in total) onto his own hard drive. That way Jean’s data gets backed up along with his when the software does its thing.

“And what about you?” I asked my cousin Amanda after her brother had finished explaining this. After years of working multiple jobs in restaurants, salsa bars, and real-estate offices, Amanda and her husband Jose-Luis now run a business buying, fixing up, and re-selling houses in the Los Angeles area, so their business data is on their home computer.

“I haven’t set anything up for them yet,” Jason said. Since getting laid off from his job as an Earthlink help desk staffer a few years ago, Jason has been helping out with the construction business, so it would be natural for him to be interested in the technical side even if not for the family connection. But Jason lives with Jean in Pasadena and Amanda and Jose-Luis are in Santa Monica, so he can’t supervise their computer 24/7.

“I don’t know,” Amanda answered on her own behalf. “Jose-Luis does it about once a month. Onto disk, I think. Our housemate the computer expert set up the scripts.”

At eighteen months, Amanda’s son Andrew doesn’t have his own computer yet, but he’ll happily sit in Amanda’s lap at the keyboard. Still, he’d rather watch Elmo on DVD. At seven, my nephew Zachary explained to me the dinosaurs-versus-dragons game he’d popped into the computer in the office at Grouse Nest. I wonder…is it too early to start educating Zachary about backups?

Tune in next week for part two of “The Family that Backs Up Together,” when you’ll get to Meet the Parents. But first—go make your own backups!

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NOTE: You have permission to reprint and distribute this article free of charge as long as it remains complete and unaltered and you send a copy of or link to your reprint to sallie@fileslinger.com. Online reprints should link to the FileSlinger(TM) Backup Blog.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-26-04: Mac Backup Utilities

Thanksgiving is over and it's time to get back to your backups. This week we're having one of our rare Mac features, thanks to feedback from readers and a little research. If you're not a Mac user, you may want to skip the contents—but don't skip the backups.

Mac backups used to be a very simple thing—you could just drag and drop your entire hard drive onto another drive (or, once, a floppy—I remember those days). But with the advent of OS X, things have gotten more complicated, so making a backup which includes program files as well as documents and data is more difficult.

The main commercial software for making complete drive mirrors (along the lines of Ghost or TrueImage for PCs) is Dantz Retrospect. Some version of Retrospect is bundled with many external hard drives, and there is a Windows version in addition to the Macintosh version. You can compare the features of different versions of the product on the Dantz website. (Retrospect will also work with earlier versions of the Mac operating system, if you're one of those who hasn't migrated to OS X yet.)

I also found a great review of three Mac backup products on AppleLinks.com. The author discusses Synk 5.0, Prosoft's Data Backup, and LaCie SilverKeeper in depth, with screenshots. All of these utilities allow you to schedule file backups and to make drive mirrors. At least one of our readers has used SilverKeeper, which is freeware, with good results. All three of these products get positive reviews. Most require Mac OS X 10.2 or later.

Readers of the article also recommended the following Mac backup software:

Carbon Copy Cloner (donation-ware from Bombich Software)

YouSynchronize ($49.95 from You Software)

iMsafe (free beta until September 2005, $19 after that)

I'm not in a position to recommend any one of them above the others, but would recommend trying the freeware products first. Some of the others have free trials, so you can check them out before deciding whether to purchase.

And remember, the most important thing about any backup system is that you USE it!

More backup news next week,
Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-7-03: FTP, Labels, & Mac Backups

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

I've been shifting files from my ancient Mac PowerBook over to my new(ish) Windows XP machine in order to put them onto ZIP disks and be able to take the PowerBook (still completely functional apart from a damaged floppy drive) to the computer recycling people.

In the course of going over these files, I came across something that might interest y'all: a Technostress questionnaire which I used to use when teaching Intro to IT at the University of Warwick. If anyone wants a copy, just ask.

I believe I was actually making backups when one of my floppies got stuck in the PowerBook's floppy drive. It was my attempt to get it out that unseated the drive cable. (Apple does not advise you to open up your Macintosh. Neither do I.) I was preparing to move back to the US and had also quite recently bought a new PC and had a lot of information to transfer. After the floppy drive broke, I had to move everything by e-mailing to myself or uploading it to an FTP file server and downloading it again. (This was all by dial-up, too.) It's a trick you might want to keep in mind in case one of your removable disk drives starts acting up—though most computers these days take more than one kind of media.

Speaking of problems with disks and drives, a geek friend sent me an article about yet another potential threat to your data CDs: homemade CD labels. Despite the fact that these are supposedly designed to be put onto CDs, the author of the article discovered that the glue had eaten through the top layer of the CD and down into the dye layer where the data is stored, and the CDs were completely unreadable.

I have put labels on my CDs for some time, and so far none of them appears to have taken any damage—but they are all less than 2 years old. Personally, I'm wondering what Avery and Fellowes have to say about this.

The other thing that this final cleanout of my old PowerBook prompted me to do was consider the fact that about half of you on this list are Mac users, and many of my comments so far have been generally Windows-related. So I thought I'd do a little checking into Mac backup software.

From what I can see, the main drive-imaging program for Macs is Dantz Retrospect. Iomega Automatic Backup and Apple's .MAC get honorable mention in the search engines. Like Windows programs such as Norton Ghost, these are designed to allow you to restore your system—software, data, and all—in a very short time. I haven't tested any of the Mac programs personally—comments are welcome.

Next week I'll talk more about restoring from backups.

Thanks for reading!
Sallie