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

The World’s Cutest NAS Drive: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-13-08

There are advantages to being a blogger. The main one is that people give you Free Stuff because you’re part of the media—and when you’re not actually a journalist, you don’t need to have any qualms about keeping said Free Stuff.

Last night I got to meet my BFF Jay Pechek (the man who sent me the free hard drives in ’06 and ’07) in person, along with his new boss at Buffalo Technologies. When your favorite tech PR guy changes jobs, it means new toys to play with.

Enter the charmingly petite LinkStation Mini. It’s a fraction of the size of my Maxtor Shared Storage II, and does the same thing. Admittedly, the one I got is only a 500 GB model, but there is a 1 TB model with just as much storage capacity as the MSS-II, which is approximately the size and weight of a cinderblock. You can see the two side by side for comparison here:

That’s the difference between starting with two 3.5” drives and starting with two 2.5” drives. And then there’s the fan, or rather the lack of one. Notebook drives rarely get as hot as desktop drives, because they don’t spin as fast. (These are 5400 RPM drives.) Instead of putting a fan into the LinkStation Mini’s case, Buffalo’s engineers designed the housing with a heat sink between the drives and plenty of ventilation on the sides and back.

Not having a fan means the LS Mini is quiet, and also that there’s nothing drawing dust and cat hair through those nice big ventilation grilles. (Theoretically. In actuality, nothing is proof against cat hair unless it’s airtight, and possibly not even then.)

The normal reason for using 2.5” hard drives is to allow for portability. It’s unlikely, however, that even I would pack a NAS drive along on my trips. However, I could fit six of the LS Mini into the space occupied by the MSS-II. That means people who don’t have room for a cinderblock on their desks can still use network storage.

I have seen Apple’s Time Capsule. (My stepmother has one.) It’s got that sleek white Apple look to it, and it doubles as a wireless router, which is a neat trick. But while more elegant than the MSS-II, it’s still substantially larger than the LinkStation Mini.

Buffalo hasn’t quite mastered idiot-proof simplicity the way Apple does. Basic setup of the LinkStation Mini is easy enough—plug it in, connect it to the router, turn the power switch to “on,” and insert the setup CD. But despite the fact that it told me it had installed the Memeo backup software, it didn’t; I had to go into the CD and manually install that. And I’m still working out the Web Access setup. (Heck, I’m still recovering from going out with the Buffalo PR team—and I don’t even drink.)

This was my first encounter with Memeo’s backup software. One thing I noticed right away was wide array of specific backup destinations, including iPods, USB keys, and Memeo’s own online backup service. In this case, I wanted my new network drive, L, and had no trouble choosing it as a destination.

Having a new NAS drive gives me the opportunity to back up my D drive: the second internal hard drive on my laptop, the one which contains recent backups of business files and a number of other things as well, like fonts, icons, and sound effects. While drives other than “C” are normally excluded from backups, it was easy enough to remove the exclusion and set up a backup from D to L. Backing that drive up is something I’ve done manually when I’ve done it at all, so this will be a good thing to have.

The initial backup of this nearly-full 80 GB drive is taking a long time, in part because it’s running in the background and in part because there are a lot of small files in there, and nothing slows down a network like hundreds of small files. (Except thousands of small files, I guess.) Plus, while the LinkStation Mini is equipped for gigabit network connections, I don’t have a gigabit network card in my laptop, so I’m restricted to ordinary 10/100 transfer speeds (slower than USB hi-speed).

And speaking of things that run in the background, my system tray is getting ridiculously crowded with all these assorted backup drives and utilities: NASNavigator, Memeo, Mozy, FreeAgent Launcher, and Maxtor Status Icon. It’s got to be safe to shut some of these down when backups aren’t actually running, though the biggest drain on functionality seems to come from AVG Free version 8, which puts tentacles into places previous versions kept themselves out of, like Firefox.

Stay tuned for future explorations of some of the more advanced features of the LinkStation Mini.

Technorati Tags: Buffalo Technology,LinkStation Mini,Memeo AutoBackup,Maxtor Shared Storage II

How do YOU Back up Your Computer? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-28-07

Here it is the end of another year of backups—almost time to make those special year-end copies of your important data to store with your tax records. I thought I’d do something a bit different for today’s column, so I put a question out to my LinkedIn network asking the people I know what they do for backups. (And no, this is not what “networked backups” means.)

Most of the answers came as private messages, so I won’t quote them in their entirety here, but I’ll list the different tools people are using and write a bit about each, so you can decide which ones might be good for you.

• Amazon S3. The person who mentioned this isn’t using it yet; he’s got a couple of 250 GB external drives. S3 stands for “Simple Storage Service.” It’s fairly inexpensive: $0.15 per GB per month for storage, plus similar rates for data transfer in and out. Jeremy Zawdny has made a list of S3-compatible backup software, since otherwise S3 isn’t really a backup solution, just a storage solution.

• Buffalo TeraStation. This is network storage for people who have serious data to back up. It supports full RAID 5 configuration, which offers protection from disk failure (unless something kills off all the disks at once), and comes in capacities up to 4 TB. It’s big, solid, and expensive: about $700 for the 1 TB version. The TeraStation comes with automated backup software called Memeo AutoBackup, about which I know nothing, but will try to find out more. If you’re a photographer, musician, or videographer, or just run an office that generates masses of data, this could be the product for you.
  
  
• Carbonite got two recommendations—or was it three? It’s been around longer than Mozy, and costs $50/year for unlimited online backup. They’re working on a Mac version, but it’s not available yet. Instead of backing up on a schedule, it backs up files as they change. That’s known as “continuous data protection” and has advantages and disadvantages. One potential disadvantage is slowing down your computer; another is backing up changes that you didn’t want to make. The advantage is that you’ll never lose a whole day’s data. Also, unless you’re working on several large files simultaneously, you won’t have to wait through endless uploads after the first backup is finished.
  
  
• Cobian Backup. This was a new one on me, but it turns out it’s been around for a long time. Cobian is free open-source backup software for Windows. It allows scheduling, encryption, and backup online via FTP. The user interface looks fairly similar to that for SyncBack SE and for Backup4All. I guess there are only so many ways to configure setting up a backup program. There’s a tutorial for version 7 online. (You need Internet Explorer to view it, though.)
  
  
• EMC Retrospect for tape backup. Retrospect comes in a lot of flavors and is compatible with both Vista and Leopard—or so their website claims. The Express version that used to come bundled with external drives is easy enough to use, but stores your data in a proprietary format and doesn’t let you browse through the backed up files. (Norton Ghost stores files in a proprietary format, but at least there’s the Ghost Explorer to let you retrieve individual files.) The Professional version supports tape drives, which most consumer backup products don’t. I’m not a huge fan of tape, but it does provide a way to get your data off-site, and it’s still common in enterprises.
  
  
• Genie Backup Manager comes with two recommendations, one from the owner of the TeraStation and one from a respected IT colleague. It comes in Home and Pro versions. Both of them seem to be pretty comprehensive tools for backing up everything on your computer to just about any medium you could imagine. The site also features a backup encyclopedia. The Home version is $50; the Pro version is $70, and the server version is $400—which is probably a good deal if you have 50 computers to back up. Windows only.
  
  
• Karen’s Replicator. Yes, there is someone besides me in the world who’s a big fan of this free program for Windows file backup and synchronization. I suppose I might be slightly biased in its favor because it was created by a woman, but it’s been doing a great job of backing up my files for years now, and it’s easy to use. Very handy for copying files onto one of those USB external drives mentioned above. It’s less sophisticated than Cobian, so which you use depends on your needs.
  
  
• Mozy. I’ve written about this online backup service before, and it seems it, too, has other fans out there. The free version gives you 2 GB of storage and is available for Vista, XP, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X. The Pro version is available for all flavors of Windows (including servers), but not for Mac. Pro licenses are $3.95/month plus a $0.50/GB/month charge.
  
  
• USB External Drive. Given all I’ve written about such drives already, I don’t think that needs a lot of explaining. But if you have an older machine with USB 1.1, consider getting an XHD with a FireWire connection instead. (Assuming you have a FireWire port, that is. You can use an external drive for manual drag-and-drop backups or with automated backup software.
  
  
• Windows Home Server. This is network storage and then some. I have read good things about WHS, and the person who uses it says it rocks. In addition to doing automatic backups of multiple computers, it acts as a media server. (Sort of like my Maxtor Shared Storage II, but more so; the interface on the MSS-II is designed for simplicity rather than flexibility.) You can install it on a not-too-old computer yourself, if you’re on the geeky side, or you can buy it pre-installed on something like the HP MediaSmart Server. The software costs about $189; the full rig about $600. There’s a good description with screenshots over at Tiger Direct. Best for those with multiple computers and lots of audio and video files.

If you use a backup service or program not listed here, feel free to post it in the comments to the blog or e-mail it to me. I’ll be happy to produce a second list. Indeed, I might try to twist the arms of my Mac-using friends to get a list of different Mac-compatible backup products that people actually use.

Meanwhile, try not to spill champagne on your hard drive when celebrating the New Year, and I’ll see you again in 2008.

Technorati Tags: Cobian,Genie Backup Manager,Windows Home Server,EMC Retrospect,TeraStation,Carbonite,Mozy,Karen's Replicator,Amazon S3,Memeo AutoBackup

Finally Restored: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-30-07

When I told the Ur-Guru what I was planning to write about today, his response was: “Seagate sure is getting a lot of exposure through you. :-) Hate to think what you'd write and how much if they sent you a full 100TB RAID rack.”

I'd hate to think where I'd put a 100 TB RAID rack, myself. Never mind what I'd do with it. I'm already running out of room for external drives, and I had to buy a new USB hub to keep them all connected and powered. I'm the wrong blogger for enterprise-level hardware and software, and most of my readers—the ones who send feedback, anyway—wouldn't know what to do with it, either.

But a Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive was something I did know what to do with, so when Jay Pechek (that's pronounced like “paycheck,” for those who care) of Seagate offered me one back in 2006, I jumped at it. And it worked perfectly for a year, whereupon it died rather dramatically. (You can read all about it in my “Sounds You Never Want to Hear” post from 9/21/07.)

Jay sent me a new Maxtor Shared Storage II drive (and a couple of OneTouch 4 drives for good measure) and I sent the dead one back to him so he could have the engineers see whether they could get my data back.

The inside of the MSS-II is actually two 500GB drives, and you have two options for formatting them: “spanning,” which gives you a 1 TB drive, and “mirroring,” which gives you a 500 GB drive in duplicate. I had set the old MSS-II to mirror, because I thought the extra protection against drive failure was more important than the extra storage space, and while you can back the MSS-II up onto a USB drive, I didn't have a USB drive big enough to back it up.

It turned out I'd made a good decision, since one of those drives did die, and the purpose of using RAID (which is what “spanning” and “mirroring” really are) is to protect against physical failure of the disk.

Except there was a little problem, notably the complete impossibility of opening up the MSS-II in order to switch the drives around. What's supposed to happen when the first drive fails is an automatic fail-over to the second drive and a few warning lights to let you know that one of your drives isn't working. But before that can happen, the software that controls the boot sequence of the drives has to get a signal that the drive is dead, and it couldn't get any signal at all from the drive. (That's why it was making those nasty clicking noises.) So it didn't work.

Because of that, and because I now had a 500 GB OneTouch 4 drive I could use to back up the new MSS-II, I have set the new MSS-II to span. And this was a good thing, too, because the Seagate lab was able to retrieve my data from one of the drives. Jay shipped it back to me as a shared folders backup file on a 750 GB OneTouch 4 Basic, which is black plastic all over instead of black plastic with brushed aluminum.

My first attempt at restoring the data didn't get anywhere, because the MSS-II wouldn't recognize the drive, even though it was properly formatted. A second attempt, made with some coaching from Jay, worked perfectly. It seems that even though the administration interface for the MSS-II has an equivalent to the Windows “Safely remove hardware” button, you have to power it down and restart it before it will recognize a new USB drive.

Anyway, once we'd done that, I clicked the “Shared Folder Backup” button, selected “restore,” and then chose the backup set I wanted. (In this case there was only one, which Jay had called "BackupBlog.") I then had the choice to restore the items to their original locations or to a temporary folder in the “public” share on the drive. (Each computer connected to the MSS-II has its own "share," which is accessible only to that computer, but all of them can use the "public" share.) I chose the temporary folder, and away we went.

Jay advised me to close the web-admin interface for the MSS-II and just wait until the light on the OneTouch Basic stopped blinking, because copying almost 350 GB of data takes a long time, even over a high-speed USB connection, because shared folder backups are compressed and each file has to be, as it were, re-inflated, before it's copied.

It was finished by the next day, though, so I was able to start consolidating the data. The fastest part was moving things that belonged in the “Public” folder into their proper places. As it happened, I'd had many of those things backed up elsewhere, but there were a few I was missing. I filled in the blanks and deleted the duplicates.

Restoring data to the different private shares is more time-consuming, because that data has to be copied over the network even though it's all staying on the same physical drive. (Jay may be able to explain why this is; I can't.) In addition to that, I have to go to my housemate's computer to copy data back into her share, and start up Star, my more-portable laptop, to copy data back into her share. And while the MSS-II is capable of transferring data at 1000 kbps, my router can only do 100 kbps—and Star's wireless card can only manage 11kbps. That's considerably slower than USB 2.0 hi-speed, which does about 360 kbps.

To make the job more finicky yet, unless I want to keep everything in a lump called “restored,” I have to copy files into their appropriate locations and decide whether I want to use the restored version (dating back to August of this year) or the current version. I'm discovering that as time goes on, my enthusiasm for tidily consolidating all of this data decreases, and I can see why automatic “de-duplication” is such a selling point in enterprise backup solutions.

On the positive side, doing the consolidating frees up space and means that I only have to look in one place if I need to restore a file. On the negative side, it takes a lot of time, and because there's still a ton of room left on the MSS-II, I don't have to do it. I probably will, though, even if I don't do it right now, because I tend to be compulsively tidy about my data and file folder structures.

Besides, I now have a spare OneTouch drive, but I can't convert the original OneTouch Plus (Mama Bear) for use as a Windows drive until I've restored all the data that was backed up there and go through this consolidation process again. Not that I'm really sure what I'm going to use Mama Bear for, but it makes sense to use the Basic drive to back up the MSS-II, because of its larger capacity.

So I'd probably better stop writing and get back to consolidating my data.

Technorati Tags: Seagate,Maxtor,OneTouch 4,Shared Storage II,deduplication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds You Never Want to Hear: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-21-07

Long-time readers will remember that it was just over a year ago that Seagate kindly sent me a Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive, which I gleefully installed and which has been performing faithfully ever since. Just a few days ago I had set it up as a print server, seeing no need to have a separate print server when this would work as well.

Unfortunately, my printer (an Epson Stylus Photo 1280, not in the first flush of its youth) doesn't really seem to like print servers. I had no end of trouble with the stand-alone Netgear print server, and yesterday I started having trouble using it through the network drive. So I started messing about with the settings on Teras (that's the drive, named for its 1 TB capacity) to see whether I could reinstall or otherwise sort out the printer.

Unfortunately, I had somehow mislaid the main administrative password for the drive. I have no idea how I managed to do this, since I store almost all my passwords in Password Prompter, and the only passwords I don't write down are the familiar ones I use all the time.

Fortunately, it's possible to reset the administrative password on a Maxtor Shared Storage II drive without affecting the data or even the other user information. It does require renaming the drive and setting a new password, which I did without trouble. (And this time I put it right into Password Prompter.)

When I'd finished doing that, the Ur-Guru went back to copying photos he'd shot that morning into the Public folder on Teras. I was examining the advanced settings to see whether I could find anything that would help me with the printer when Stefan asked "Did you just do something?"

No, actually, I hadn't. But the power light on the network drive had gone from green to amber (something I'd only seen during the reset) and the light indicating drive activity had gone off. The administrative interface stopped responding. Neither the power button nor the reset button produced any response.

I tried looking up the significance of the amber light in the Maxtor knowledge base, but nothing I found was very helpful, as they all referred to specific series of flashes, whereas this light was fluttering like a bad case of heart palpitations.

After a while, unwillingly, I pulled out the power cable. We dusted off the drive, reconnected it, and tried again. It appeared to go through a normal powering-up sequence, but there were some odd clicking noises.

"Is that normal?" Stefan asked.

"I've never heard it before," I responded, "And I don't like it."

I liked it a lot less when it devolved into a rhythmic rocking sound. Tock, tock. Tock, tock. The Ur-Guru explains that this is the sound of the head trying to read data across the disk and then returning (tock!) to the "park" position.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, very bad. Listen for yourself.

It was at this point that we realized that the RAID-1 option on the drive isn't all that helpful, as there's no way to tell the Maxtor Shared Storage II to use the other disk. Unlike traditional RAID boxes, the drives in the MSS-II are sealed into a single container—one I'm not about to try opening. So my data may be intact, but I'm in no position to get at it.

Now, being me, I have other copies of most of what's on that drive. My active business and financial data, not to mention my Outlook PST file, gets backed up at least once a day to other places, notably the new FreeAgent Go drive and the second internal drive. (Some of the client data also gets backed up online via Mozy.) I have most of the older client data on DVDs that I make at the end of the year. At least some of the software install packages exist on their original CDs, and some of the rest is freeware I can download again. Much of it, indeed, was probably obsolete; I download a lot of things in order to test them. The stuff I use most is also on the F drive.

If I've learned anything in four years of writing this Backup Reminder, it's that one copy does not make a backup. So I don't think I've lost anything irreplaceable.

But I'm two weeks past the drive's measly one-year warranty period. And even though I didn't have to pay for it in the first place, I'll almost certainly have to pay to replace it. And while the price has come down considerably since the drive was introduced last year, I'm not at all sure that I want to turn that into an annual investment.

The main reason I went with Seagate's FreeAgent Go instead of the Western Digital Passport was the 5-year warranty on the Seagate drive. Given what just happened with my Maxtor Shared Storage II drive, I'd hesitate to get a replacement NAS drive—from any manufacturer—without a longer warranty.

The moral of the story: just because you have a large drive that can serve as catch-all backup and storage for every machine in your house doesn't mean you don't have to keep additional copies of your data. Any drive can fail, and every drive eventually will. If it's important to you, make sure you keep it in more than one place.

Next Friday I will be at the Podcast and New Media Expo in Ontario, California, so it's a good bet that the backup reminder will focus on something related to backing up audio and video files--or perhaps to making backups while traveling. (It will be the first time my FreeAgent Go drive goes someplace with me.)

Meanwhile, I'm really hoping to hear something from Seagate.

Technorati Tags: Maxtor Shared Storage II, Seagate

A Vacation from Backups? Not So Fast! FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-08-07

I’m getting on a noon flight to the East Coast for the biennial Goetsch family vacation. This has made the past couple of days a bit crazed, and yesterday was particularly overwhelming. I had to finish a client project first thing in the morning, then go out to take care of a few things that absolutely had to be done before I left, then come back for two back-to-back phone conferences with clients, and then go out to work for a client on-site until dinnertime.

So I didn’t get a chance to write this reminder yesterday. I might have managed to squeeze it in there somewhere, but I was too distracted to think about what to say. I considered just pointing you over to the lengthy discussion of a hapless consultant’s attempts to retrieve hundreds of lost photos from a friend’s machine at ComputerWorld, but I kept getting interrupted when I tried to read it.

The Ur-Guru suggested I should write something entertaining, in honor of the impending vacation, such as “Ten Reasons Not to Back Up.” I was much too stressed out to attempt to be funny (not something I’m all that good at under the best of conditions), but he gave me a start:

1. If your office or home gets raided by what passes for some kind of enforcement these days, no incriminating evidence will be found.
2. Saving money on storage media like CD's and DVD's.
3. Some hacker probably has made a backup of all your important data anyway and you usually can buy it for a small fee which would balance out with the cost otherwise incurred by the backup process.
4. Never again have to say "the backups were unreadable". Since there were no backups, they can't be unreadable either. Save yourself the frustration.
5. Backing up is for people who prefer not to move forward.

You get the idea. :-)

But, as it happens, I did get presented with a backup-related situation. Good timing as far as this Reminder is concerned, if not so great otherwise. Indeed, it pointed out the real disadvantage of storing files on a friend’s computer as a backup method, particularly if you have to go get them in person.

I have a friend who is about to move out of the place she’s renting and put everything in storage for a little while. That includes her computer. She asked me to store her files for safekeeping. Since she mostly has Word docs and a couple of photos, and I have this big network drive, I said “Sure.”

On Wednesday she handed me a borrowed memory stick; I brought it home and copied the files onto my Z drive. This took all of about 5 minutes and was no problem. Later she came and picked up the memory stick so she could return it to the person she’d borrowed it from.

Yesterday I came home with ten minutes before my first phone conference and found two agitated messages on my answering machine. It was my friend, on her way to buy a memory stick of her own, wanting to know “how many megabytes it should be.”

So I called her back and said “512.” Not that it would hurt to have a bigger one, but she’s on a limited budget and she only had about 140 MB of files.

I then unplugged my phone, grabbed my headset, and dialed into my phone conference with Skype. (Among other things, it’s easier to record that way, and since I have a memory like a steel sieve, sometimes I need to go over and check on what we said.) We were about 20 minutes into it when my doorbell rang.

It was my friend, memory stick in hand—well, in package. I was not feeling very sociable, and of course I missed the most interesting topic of the entire business meeting when I went to answer the door. (Good thing I have that recording.) But when else was she going to do it? I’m about to leave town for a week, after all, and she’s moving today.

So after I put the headset back on, I sliced the new memory stick out of its package and stuck it into a free USB port. It turned out to be a U3 memory stick, so it had to go through a few extra hoops during the course of the Add New Hardware routine—which appeared at one point to think that it was a CD-ROM drive.

It kept asking me if I wanted to install the U3 software, and I kept refusing. It’s not my computer that the thing needs to emulate. Eventually it stopped asking and I was able to drag my friend’s files from the Z drive onto the memory stick. That only took about five minutes—during which the quality of my Skype connection notably declined, which you’d think I might have expected since it’s a network drive and using the same ethernet connection that ties me to the Internet.

Then I had to figure out how to eject the thing, because it didn’t show up in the usual “Safely Remove Hardware” dialogue. Of course, if I’d been less distracted, I might have noticed the large red “Eject” button in the U3 window sooner.

My friend asked me about U3, which the clerk at the store had recommended. I’d read about it sometime back, but my current memory stick doesn’t have U3 capacity, and I couldn’t remember very much about it. The idea is to put software (and things like bookmarks) on the memory stick, as well as your documents; you can find out more about it on the U3 website. But for me, since it was now past the time I was supposed to meet a client on WebEx, the idea was to get my friend out the door as fast as possible.

Now it’s time to get myself out the door. That means disconnecting and packing Enna, and disconnecting and packing my X drive. (I’ve already packed the webcam which will let the Ur-Guru join us on vacation.) I’ll only be down one backup method, since I should still be able to do my online backups, and of course the second internal drive travels with the computer. The network drive is definitely staying home.

NASty Surprises: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-23-07

Those of you who have been reading for a while may remember that Seagate gave me a Maxtor Shared Storage II drive a few months back, and very excited I was about it, too. It’s still working perfectly. In fact, I haven’t turned it off once since I installed it. It does a good job making scheduled backups of my computer and my housemate’s, and I’ve had good luck using it for storing Ghost backups on when I make those (which I confess is less often than it probably should be, right now).

Not everyone has had such a good experience with the Shared Storage II, however. About ten days ago I got a message from someone who’d found the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog while searching for a solution to the hair-raising problems he was having. I’ll be quoting some of the ensuing discussion in a minute, but I’ll say now that the upshot of it is that Network Attached Storage is not right for all kinds of backups.

I cut some parts of the messages for brevity and edited here and there for typos, then ran the article past both the unhappy drive owner and the Ur-Guru to make sure I hadn’t misrepresented anything.

On 2/10/07, PT wrote:

I (optimistically, it turns out) purchased two Maxtor Shared Storage II (1Tb NAS) units, but they seem I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-Y S---L---O---W, to the point of being impractical (well—actually, virtually unusable).

There's a long story behind it; I've had one of them replaced THREE TIMES (yes, that's THREE [3] times!!) because of drive failure [within a period of weeks]. I am extremely disappointed with the product (and its virtual lack of documentation, or useful software). At any rate, the point of telling you all this (which—believe me!—is the very SHORT version) is to let you know that I have, in fact, been working diligently to try to figure out how to make these work.

The problem is that it is taking WEEKS (of 24-hour-a-day file copying) to get 1Tb of data copied to the drive, or (perhaps even worse yet—don't know how to benchmark speed, and neither does {evidently} the senior tech) from one of these MSSII drives to the other. This is seemingly orders of magnitude slower than USB2.

I'm running this from a dual-processor, fairly recent (Gateway 836GM) machine. Neither the processor nor the network usage is anywhere near strained (typically ~5%, and 0.5% [gigabit-speed network, Netgear switch], respectively).

Copying more than one file at once sometimes (not always) makes throughput even worse. The Seagate tech says something about the processor on the MSSII being slow—but jeez, this is craziness.

Somehow, this just doesn't seem right.

It didn’t seem right to me, either, so I wrote back to say so. Then, since I had no relevant experience, I passed the question on to the Ur-Guru. He, too, was puzzled, but he had more insight than I did:

That's not how those things are supposed to work. I'd say try the drive on a completely different system if you have a chance to do so, in order to isolate whether this is a continuous problem with the drive or related to the system. Another option is to hook the device directly to the machine and cut out the Netgear switch to see if perhaps that is causing trouble.

Config of the NIC and/or switch could also perhaps be an issue, like, maybe the switch and NIC are set to use Jumbo frames and perhaps the NAS doesn't like that (don't know, I'd have to look it up, I have no clue about the MSSII in that area).

Based on the description I'm seriously inclined to think it is definitely network related, not MSSII related.

PT promised to check out these suggestions and get back with us. When I saw Friday looming this week, I thought I’d ask him how he’d made out. Here’s what he said:

Initially, I reset my network switch and everything went very fast for a short while. I think this was just coincidence, though. Later, I spent an HOUR on the phone with NetGear to see if we could isolate a network problem. Bottom line is: for single-file-at-a-time huge files (we tried >300Mb), it's pretty dang fast. But for realistic use—in my case, tens of thousands of small [ca. 2k] files—the MSSII just dead-dog slow. Smaller drives could be slow with less consequence; but huge drives have GOT to be fast!

When he read this, a light bulb went on for the Ur-Guru. (Which is good, because it didn’t illuminate anything for me.)

Ohhhhhh....

Yes, that would explain a lot. Tons of tiny files are murder on any network load and disk performance. But even if you widen the network to 10Gbit, it'd still perform quite badly.

Lots of my source code trees are riddled with tons of small files and the sync/copy over the network got so slow as the amount increased that I wrote a script that would first zip all the trees and then copy the zip to the other side (zip in this case since it is faster in packing and the size of the resulting file is less of an issue). I don't remember any statistics I ran but... 400,000 small 4K-50K files were zipped into an approx. 500MB file and that goes over the network in a few seconds. Copying those 400,000 small files, however, takes about 22 minutes. Huge difference there. And we're talking very fast RAID systems in my case, not a drive with a slow processor like the MSSII.

The tons of small files explains the problem he's seeing quite well. The ethernet packet wrapping overhead for that is more than the file data combined so it really starts to slow things down, and unless you have some serious heavy hitter RAID on the other end of the network, it'll be slow as hell. And even with heavy hitter RAID on the other end, copying 1GB in 100.000 small files is easily 100 times slower than copying a 1GB file as a single file (very rough number here, non-scientific). It's also murder on disks in terms of seek time and fragmentation and... just about everything. :-)

So there you have it: network backups are not good for huge numbers of small files. I passed the bad news on to PT, who said:

I guess my expectations were just too high—and the disappointment (other than the multiple returns of defective drives!) was primarily due to my lack of experience with large amounts of data being transmitted over networks. (I've had several PCs networked for years now, but I guess I've only transferred large amounts of data via USB2/Firewire-type drives—and, until recently, I only had a 10/100 system anyway (so the network would max out before the drives did anyway for transfers of large files.)

The idea of zipping the files pre- (and post-) transfer makes a lot of sense. Not sure that I'll be able to be as fancy as writing a routine to do it for me, but I'll definitely use the (manual) technique to circumvent some of the problems I've had.

I pointed out that even without a custom routine it might be possible to get the zipping automated, as there are various backup programs that will zip the files before copying them to their destination.

As for the multiple defective drives…I wonder whether they burned out trying to handle those many files? It seems like resoundingly bad luck to have. Maybe I got the only reliable drive in the batch. I have to admit I’d hesitate to buy one of these after hearing that story, even though I’ve had no problems whatsoever with my own Shared Storage II.

In any case, it’s clear that size matters when it comes to network backups. The Ur-Guru thought everyone knew that, but I didn’t, and neither did PT. And I’m betting we’re not the only ones.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-01-06: Maxtor Shared Storage, Part II

I asked my housemate, with whom I’m sharing the new Maxtor Shared Storage II, for a quote for this week’s Backup Reminder. Once I’d figured out how to set up user accounts for different machines, I created one for her, and then set up the Maxtor backup software to back up her work files into her disk share every night. So far it seems to be working, because the Maxtor icon in the notification tray is green and says “Backup complete!”

My housemate is also a business owner with a home office, so her work data is on that machine—as are the revisions for her book. Until I set up her drive share, she’d been making Ghost backups to an external hard drive every week or so. Or rather, her geek boyfriend (notice that her boyfriend is a geek but mine is a guru) had been making the backups. The DOS version of Ghost isn’t all that difficult to operate, but it’s foreign-looking to anyone used to operating within Windows.

Anyway, she’s immensely relieved to have this setup, because getting her data backed up no longer depends on remembering to do it or having someone else available to help. I don’t think she’s actually gone and looked at the backups, but what the EasyManage backup software lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in simplicity.

As for me, I’ve kept the drive running nonstop all week, and I’m amazed at how cool it stays and how quiet it is. The fan on my laptop is definitely noisier. (The drives get hotter, too, though they don’t spin as fast. But I’m using more of their capacity, more often.)

It was only last night that I figured out how to make the ghosts of the non-functional user accounts go away. Despite the fact that there was no sign of the deleted accounts in EasyManage or the web administrative interface, I would still see “Sallie Goetsch on Maxtor Shared Storage” when I opened up “My Network Places” in Windows Explorer.

There was nothing in the User Guide about this problem (in fact, it seems to lack a “Troubleshooting” section altogether, which seems more than a bit optimistic on Maxtor’s part). I went online to look at the support website, and there was nothing there about it, either. Then it occurred to me to try just deleting them from within Windows Explorer, and presto! Away they went, and they haven’t been back to haunt me. The duplicate config links have also gone away—for a while the drive was appearing both as “Maxtor Shared Storage (Teras)” and as “Maxtor Shared Storage (MSS-number-number)”. I think those might have cleared up earlier, but I don’t actually remember.

Although I’d been coveting a drive like this, I hadn’t really been planning for it, and I didn’t know how they worked. What I decided to do was put things that both my housemate and I might use (like software installation packages) into the “Public” share (where everything is labeled “Our” instead of “My”) but keep my data in the “Enna” and “Star” shares. Most of my data lives on Enna, so all I have in the “Star” share is drive images in case I have to reinstall her.

I’ve copied my photo and video files over from the X drive, which I’m still using for my on-startup file backups, into the “My Photos” and “My Videos” folders on Teras, and made a Ghost image of Enna over the network. That’s a bit slower than the USB 2.0 backup to the X drive, but reasonably speedy given the size of the image. I even pulled out my quirky, unreliable K drive (salvaged from my previous laptop, Keramat, when her power supply connection broke), managed to get it to talk to Enna, and copied the Ghost files from there over the network to Teras.

I wiped the K drive clean after that—my likelihood of needing to restore anything from an April 2005 Ghost image of Keramat is very small, so I certainly didn’t feel compelled to keep those copies. Anyway, I’m not sure what I can use that drive for. The drive itself appears to be okay, but the connection is unstable. Depending on what I’m connecting it to, it either won’t work without the power connector, or won’t work with it—and I’m not sure that’s the only problem. So now I have a blank 30 GB drive and no clue, but enough space on the X drive to ensure I can make backups when on the road.

The Shared Storage II is an impressive drive, but portability is not its strong point, and the reason I got a 2.5” external drive to start with was so that it wouldn’t need its own luggage.

Having Teras is making me rethink my previous approach to backup. So far, in addition to the drive images, what I have on the network drive are second copies, or rather extra copies, of things I have on other drives, like the 4 GB of icons that live on the D drive, and the photos, which are also on DVD. I’ve deleted some of the software from the X drive, leaving only the most critical programs, things I might find myself needing on the road if something went wrong. Likewise, I’m only expecting to keep one Ghost image on that drive. Or maybe…one of each computer. And then the backups of my current working files, but not necessarily all my data going back to the dawn of time.

A few months ago, a speaker recommended using a data-free laptop when giving presentations or traveling, because there was so much risk of having it stolen. I reinstalled Star with just that intention. (Besides, she weighs a lot less than Enna—3 inches of additional screen size adds several pounds.) That seemed fine for one-day outings, but if I go away for a week, I need my data, or at least what I’m working on now, and my Outlook PST file doesn’t fit on my thumb drive (which in any case is entirely too easy to lose).

But if I have that data on the X drive, which is small enough to lock away as well as to travel with, then I don’t need to load it onto Star and bring it into public places. The only down side to that plan is that Star only has USB 1.1, not FireWire or Hi-Speed USB, but for a few days or a week that’s by no means unendurable. (I survived just fine with Star as my only machine for the better part of a year, after all.) Yes, I think this is starting to look like a plan.

Next week we’ll return to the outside world, but you can look for a revised version of my Seagate Saga on Kickstartnews.com before then.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-25-06: Seagate Surprise

Last Friday I got an unexpected response to the FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder. In fact, this response was not just unexpected: it was unprecedented. The message was from Jay Pecheck at Seagate.

“How are things going? I just read your blog as we always do here at Maxtor/Seagate and saw that you are going to upgrade to a larger external drive. I hope that you were not thinking about going out and getting one yourself!”

Well, yes, actually, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Frye’s had a good offer a couple of weeks ago.

Jay’s message continued:

“What are you looking for? Do you want a 1TB Maxtor OneTouch III, Turbo edition with raid capabilities? Or maybe a 750Gb Seagate Pushbutton external storage solution? Or even going NAS with a 1TB Maxtor Shared Storage II. Let me know!”

I was flabbergasted. Gobsmacked, as we used to say when I lived in England. I knew I had a subscriber from Maxtor—the autoresponder system says she signed up at the beginning of July 2005. But I’d never heard anything from her except the occasional “out of the office” automated replies. I’ve mentioned Maxtor and Seagate products and initiatives occasionally in the newsletter (as well as the merger which joined the two companies), but certainly had no expectations from them.

I said as much to Jay, who responded with:

“Well Sallie, you have covered our programs such as Backup Awareness month and for that we are grateful. But mostly because you preach what we preach…Backup your data! We feel that you have a great site and we want to help get the word out so…to the good stuff…I run the World wide reviews program for Maxtor and Seagate Branded Products and you have your choice of anything we make. Let me know what you want to look at and I will send it out.”

As it happens, I’ve been coveting a baby NAS drive since I first read about them. Given that there are a whole three computers in this household (two for me, one for my housemate), I don’t have a pressing need for such a device, and I would probably have bought a less extravagant hard drive. The Shared Storage II retails for over $700, and while my nearly-full 80 GB 2.5" external drive was no longer sufficient to back up my new 160 GB laptop, a 300 GB USB 2.0 drive would have done just fine.

Given a chance to get my hands on the NAS drive, though, I grabbed it. (NAS stands for “Network Attached Storage.”) A NAS drive connects not to your computer, but to your router. NAS on a consumer/small-business scale is fairly new, but companies with larger IT setups have been using $10,000 NAS devices for years.

Apart from having a drive that I could use for both computers at once, and that my housemate could also use, the real appeal of a network drive was for storing drive images of my old laptop. That machine, Astarte, has one measly USB 1.1 port and no FireWire, and making Ghost backups was always a painfully slow process. And while I no longer keep data on that machine, I still don’t want to have to go through reinstalling it from scratch if something goes wrong with the system. Even a 100 megabit ethernet connection is faster than USB 1.1. The Shared Storage II has gigabit network capacity, though my laptop doesn’t, and neither does our router.

Seagate shipped my new drive out Monday and it arrived on Tuesday afternoon. (I thought the water-soluble cornstarch packing peanuts were a nice touch.) I’d had time enough to figure out where to put it and to think of a name for it. “Teras” is Greek for “monster” and is the root from which we get “terabyte,” the size of the drive—a little obvious, but certainly appropriate.

Teras resembles nothing so much as a car battery. At four inches in thickness and six pounds in weight, it’s got about twice the heft of ordinary external drives and utterly dwarfs Bluelight, my 2.5" XHD. Like a car battery, its purpose is to be solid, reliable, and powerful, rather than beautiful.

The basic setup, which creates the drive’s public folders, is very simple: connect the network cable to the router and plug in the power supply, then install the software and reboot. Voila! A new machine appears under “My Network Places.”

I definitely recommend reading the user’s guide in detail before you start transferring massive quantities of data over to the drive, however. And going through the administrative interface to check things out, too. Since the box said “Automatic RAID 1 mirroring,” I assumed the drive defaulted to RAID 1 configuration, but I was wrong: it was set for “Spanning” instead of “Mirroring.” There are two drives inside that gray-and-black box, each with 500 GB of storage space. “Spanning” means they imitate one big drive. “Mirroring” (RAID 1 to the geeks out there) means that the second drive automatically and exactly duplicates the first, and if the first drive fails for some reason, the second will take over.

I’d already moved about 40 GB over to Teras before I realized that it wasn’t in mirror mode. That meant moving it off again before switching modes, which reformats and thus erases the disks. And if I ever decide that I want to switch back to spanning mode so I have more room, I’ll have to move all the data off and back again, and I’m not looking forward to trying that. (Of course, it will be years before I have to worry about it, since I’m not creating video or high-res poster-sized images like the artist friend who complained that Seagate should have given the drive to her instead.)

The other little hitch was in creating user accounts. In addition to the public share (in which the folders have names like “Our Software” and “Our Photos”), you can create separate private accounts on the drive. I’ve set up one for each of my computers and one for my housemate, but it took a couple of tries. This is because the user name the software suggests violates its own rules. When I went to set up a new user account, Maxtor EasyManage suggested “Sallie Goetsch” as a name. Logical, and probably pulled from Windows, as that’s my logon name. But spaces aren’t allowed in user names, as the manual told me when I went back to consult it in detail. Instead of refusing to create an account with an invalid name, EasyManage created an account and mounted it as my Z: drive—but wouldn’t let me put any data onto it.

Once I figured out the problem, deleted that account, and created a new one with an appropriate name, it worked fine. Except that I still see that supposedly-erased user name when I use EasyManage or Windows Explorer. And since switching to RAID 1, Teras shows up as both the Y: and the Z: drive on my other laptop. I’m thinking one might better call it Not-as-easy-as-it-looksManage. Of course, if I had RTFM (that stands for Read the F***ing Manual) ahead of time, I could have avoided most of that hassle.

I set up the EasyManage file backup on Astarte mostly to see how it works. It exactly duplicates the directory structure surrounding the folders you’re backing up, rather like an old freeware backup program I used to use (and now can’t remember the name of) before I latched onto Karen’s Replicator. That means that if you check “My Documents” as something you want backed up, it appears in the “My Backups” folder as “C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\My Documents.” That’s pretty limiting, and there are no filters to say, for instance, “Don’t back up X type of files.” Plus the schedule is limited to once per day, though you can go in and press the “Back up now” button at any time. On the plus side, it offers “Historical Versions”—you can save several different instances of the same file. Overall, I’d class it as “better than nothing, but nothing to write home about.”

The Ghost backup over the network using my Bart-PE CD worked a treat, though. I had to go through an extra step to map the network drive within the PE environment, but it was fast. In fact, I’m going to go make another one right now, because there’s a ton of software I forgot to install before making the last one.

The story will continue next week—by which time I expect to have things figured out a little better.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-07-06: Geek Up for Backups

Yesterday morning I got a message from my brother—the one who lost most of his photos to a hard drive crash a few months ago (05-19-06 Backup Reminder). Unlike many people who lose their data because they don’t have backups, he’s taken some action to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“Well, I really geeked it up this weekend in an effort to avoid future data loss from HD failure. I took an old PC that was gathering dust, and converted it to a NAS by using a neat little open source program called FreeNAS. Really works great with the handful of old, small HDs I had, and seems to transfer data much faster than a USB drive. I am waiting for delivery of 2 new 300gb SATA drives that I will install in the FreeNAS device in a RAID 1 configuration, which should give me adequate protection.”

This is indeed considerably geekier than I expected my not-so-little brother to get. It’s geekier than I’ve gotten myself, though the Ur-Guru tells me it’s a relatively simple procedure if you’ve got an old computer sitting around. You do want it to be an old computer, one you’re not using anymore, because once you convert it to a NAS device, you can’t use it for anything but storage.

NAS, for those not familiar with the term, stands for Network Attached Storage, and we’ve discussed it a few times in this newsletter. The basic idea is that instead of attaching the storage device directly to your computer, the way you do with external hard drives, you attach it to your network and transfer files to it that way. There are a number of advantages to this, such as being able to back up more than one computer to the same drive and not having to keep your computer and your backup device in the same room.

For the DIY model, you can use any old PC as long as it has at least 96MB of RAM, a bootable CD-ROM drive, at least one hard drive, and someplace to install FreeNAS: a floppy, USB, or additional hard drive. My brother had an old eMachine that fit the bill, so he downloaded FreeNAS from www.freenas.org and followed the instructions in the 41-page PDF manual.

If you don’t have an old computer gathering dust, or just don’t want to attempt anything that geeky, you can easily buy a NAS device—but it will cost you. The Buffalo TeraStation (which looks like a safe and provides 1 TB (1000 GB) of storage) goes for about $800; a 400 GB Mirra Personal Server will run you about $500. Both come with backup software.

The homemade FreeNAS model does not, so my brother concluded his message by saying “What is the best way to automatically back certain folders to the network drive? I'd like some sort of set it and forget it method. Any ideas?”

Backing up to a network drive isn’t really any different from backing up to any other drive, but I consulted the Ur-Guru before sending the following response:

“Karen's Replicator should do the trick—another freeware program, the one I use for my own file backups. I've also been quasi-testing something called SyncBack to do periodic backups from my main interal drive to my secondary internal drive. In either case there's a bit of setup time where you pick the directories to be backed up and then tell it the schedule you want it backed up on.”

And if you’re tempted to think of all this effort on my brother’s part as locking the barn door after the horses have escaped, bear in mind that he’s got two young children and will be taking many more pictures. We keep generating new data all the time, which is why it’s never too late to start backing up—and why it’s never too early, either.

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 6-3-05: Mirra, Mirra on the Wall

Mirra, as you might have notice