FileSlinger(TM) Backup Blog

Wait a Minute! Back Up! FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-18-08

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:07:00 +0000

Our first guest columnist of the summer is Elizabeth Rodgers from Ben’s Ranch. (The original Ben did have a ranch and was really a cowboy, but the Ben’s Ranch that Elizabeth co-founded with Ben’s grandson is a tech support company based in Los Angeles.)

Elizabeth, as you’ll see is a big fan of Mozy’s online backup service. I’ve written about Mozy before, but it’s always nice to get a new perspective on a subject.

You know you should, and yet, you don't. No, I'm not talking about essential fatty acids, I'm talking about backing up your data.

Imagine this scenario:

Your hard drive fails. You haven’t backed up your data because

You were too lazy

You were too lazy

You have been meaning to do it

All of your financials, all of your emails, all of your contacts, all of your digital music and photos are lost forever. Oh, wait! You could pay a company $750 to get that data back. Oh. They say that it actually can’t be done. It’s gone. Now you have to buy a new hard drive and totally reconfigure your computer and…

It’s a nightmare. And it’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when. You can easily avoid this. There are many ways back up your data:

You can get an extra hard drive, put it in your computer, and transfer the data.

You can have the extra hard drive external to your computer, or

You could backup online.

The simplest solution for the external hard drive is SimpleTech SimpleDrive. The software (StorageSync Backup) leads you through the setup, and once you’ve backed up the first time, the following backups will go much faster as it will be backing up only what is new or changed since the last time you did it. Some people love SimpleTech; some hate it.

Let’s get to the good stuff…

My backup of choice is online backup. No more external hard drives, no more CDs and no more fiddling with backup software. If you have a .mac account, you can get 1 gig of storage for $50 or 3 gigs for $100 for the year.

Another company that backs up online elegantly and less expensively is Mozy. Mozy is an exciting (because it’s) FREE new service that lets you effortlessly, automatically and securely back up your data OFFSITE. The first 2 gigs are free, if you want unlimited gigs (um, that’s a lot of space!), it’s $5/month.

Good story: I told an acquaintance of mine about Mozy and she spent the five bucks a month for the big backup. TWO DAYS later, her hard drive failed! Kaput. Totally dead. No biggie, because she bought a new hard drive (for $80) and downloaded her backed up data from Mozy onto her new drive. This woman LOVES me. And I barely know her.

Here’s how Mozy works:

Go to Mozy.com and click on “Get Mozy free.” You will give them your email and create a password. In moments, you will receive an email from Mozy with a link to click. Once you’ve clicked on the link, you will be walked through a series of easy instructions to get backed up. That's it! If you choose, it can be a continuous backup, so when the software sees that you’re not active on the computer, it will backup your data securely because it’s encrypted. Aaaah, the magic and mystery of online backup!

One caveat: “unlimited” storage is like “unlimited” bandwidth. There are limits somewhere. One is the amount of time it would take to upload the contents of, say, my 1 TB network drive. Another is that the $5/month unlimited home user account really is supposed to be for personal use. If you have a home office, you’re supposed to get Mozy Pro, which costs $3.95/month plus fifty cents per gigabyte per month. So that 1 TB of data, even if I could upload it, would cost $503.95 per month. Not very practical for a sole proprietor.

But as a painless way to get your most critical documents backed up off site, it’s pretty good.

You’ll be hearing about some other online backup, storage, and archiving solutions as soon as I can finish testing them.

Technorati Tags: Mozy,SimpleTech,StorageSync,SimpleDrive,Ben's Ranch

Hurray for HARO

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:15:00 +0000

The Ur-Guru is about to arrive for another visit, and in the interest of spending more time with him, I thought I would try to get some guest columnists for the Backup Reminder.

So I posted a query to Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out list.

I’d signed up for this thrice-daily e-mail full of queries from journalists in order to discover opportunities for me and my clients to get some media coverage. Some of the queries come from major mainstream media publications, but others come from bloggers and podcasters.

When I posted my request for stories of data loss disasters and pitches for SOHO backup products, I had a dozen responses—at least—in the first day. (Note to self: next time you do this, leave yourself more time to respond to the answers you get.) Wow!

Over the next few weeks, you’ll be hearing real-life stories from people who have learned about backup the hard way. (Some of them were so traumatized that they went on to start backup companies.) In fact, there’s so much material that I’ll be posting more often than usual, though the Backup Reminder e-zine will only appear once a week.

What’s more, I already have a new client as a result of this outreach, so thanks to HARO I’m finally going to be making some money from my blog.

Technorati Tags: HARO,Peter Shankman

Back Up Your Passport with Gmail

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:01:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:53:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

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

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

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

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

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

The Drawbacks of Dell DataSafe: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-04-08

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:16:00 +0000

Yep, this is late again. Sorry. I had a completely insane week last week. Part of the insanity gave me the topic for this week’s Backup Reminder, but I had to sleep for two days before I could write it.

I hardly do any computer consulting work anymore, but I have a few legacy clients (not to mention the occasional friend or family member) who can persuade me to wade into the trenches now and again. In this case, the client had temporary custody of my Maxtor OneTouch Plus drive (otherwise known as Mama Bear, but designated “P” for “Plus” in my drive lettering system), so I had an added motive.

In any case, most of the job was more than usually straightforward, and I was starting to feel pretty good about everything. The new machine is a perfectly decent piece of hardware, running XP with 2 GB RAM, which meant it was a lot speedier and easier to work with than the old one. (We will pass over all the problems the client had setting it up; I was spared involvement at that point.) Copying data from Mama Bear onto the new machine and the laptop—no problem. (It just needed a new USB cable, as someone had stepped on the connector for the old one and bent it into an interesting but non-useful shape.) Consolidating Outlook data into one file—easy. Replacing the expired trial anti-virus—made easier by recommendations from the LinkedIn community. Etc.

Then we came to setting up the Dell DataSafe™ online backup account that my client had purchased with her computer back in March. Supposedly, a free year’s subscription had been included in the package, but either she never received the username and password necessary to access the account, or it had gotten lost in the course of previous disputes with Dell Tech Support. The invoice listed the account as a line item, but provided no useful information.

My client ended up spending 90 minutes on the phone with Dell, bouncing back and forth between Customer Care and Tech Support, who insisted that she was supposed to activate her account within 30 days of purchase. That was after I’d led the Tech Support guy through all the appropriate screens and files to show him that no, really, we hadn’t been given any information and there wasn’t an option for “I already got a subscription with my computer” in the sign-up section.

Now, given that a one-year’s subscription for 3 GB storage costs all of $9, trying to get credit for what my client had already paid for was almost certainly not worth the cost of either my time or hers. But I wasn’t about to hand Dell her money without her permission, either.

I went through the process of setting up the free 30-day trial account, and that was easy enough to do. You enter your e-mail address and create a password, and then download some software. (You don’t have to provide credit card information at that time.) It’s no harder than setting up, say, Mozy.

But I ran into a problem fairly early on. Among the various files I’d copied onto the 500 GB hard drive of the new PC were several backups of Outlook data files, with varying dates on them. Even though none of the individual .pst files was unusually large (for a .pst file), the combination of those files with the ones already in the folder with the current file meant that there were more than 3 GB of .pst files alone.

I’ve run into the “over quota” problem with Mozy a few times—and I don’t even back up my .pst files online. It’s not that hard, in this day and age, to accumulate more than 2 (for Mozy’s free service) or 3 (for DataSafe’s free trial) gigabytes of data. Online backup always requires prioritizing your data.

With Mozy, I usually collect large files that push me over quota and don’t really need to be backed up offsite into a sub-folder and then exclude that sub-folder from the backup configuration.

I could not find a way to do this with Dell DataSafe. There are two options for selecting the files to be backed up: by overall type of file (documents, e-mail, financial, photos, music, video), or by file extension. So I could either tell it to back up all the Outlook data files, or none of them. “All” wouldn’t fit, and “none” isn’t such a good choice for someone who doesn’t have another backup system in place.

In the short term, my client’s options are either to increase the size of her account (10 GB is only $19/year) or to copy the older Outlook files onto a DVD and then delete them from her hard drive to keep her within her 3 GB.

In the longer term, however, the inability to tell DataSafe which specific documents are critical and need backing up is going to be a problem. Even with duplicates and archives cleared out, data will start to accumulate. Everything takes up more storage space these days, and with families owning multiple digital cameras and videocams, it starts to fill up. And those photos and videos are just the kind of thing people don’t want to lose, whether or not they have any intrinsic or business value.

Because online transfer speeds—particularly for uploading data—are inconveniently slow, backing up an entire 500 GB drive online isn’t likely to become feasible any time soon. So it would probably be a good idea for my client to get an external hard drive or a NAS drive as an offline backup method.

But as long as DataSafe doesn’t let you decide exactly which files and folders to back up, she’s also going to need a different online backup service.

I’ve already put Mozy onto her laptop.

Technorati Tags: Dell DataSafe,Mozy,Maxtor OneTouch Plus

My Wordle! A Tag Cloud for the Backup Blog

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:02:00 +0000

There’s a new Web 2.0 tool out there called Wordle that creates pretty tag clouds from text or RSS feeds. Here’s the one I made for the Backup Blog. The most common words are largest.

There aren’t any real surprises in here “backup” and “drive” are the terms that appear most frequently.

Click on the thumbnail image to see a larger version.

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:13:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: KittySingle,Apple IIc,file conversion

That’s Not a Hard Drive, It’s a Weapon: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-20-08

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:45:00 +0000

The pre-release MiniStation DataVault seemed so light, so airy, so harmless, as Jay Pechek passed it to me in the Market Bar in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

“The Defense Department actually classified this as munitions because of the level of encryption,” he explained. Unlike many devices, where you can bypass a Windows password by accessing it through DOS, there is no backdoor on this drive. Either you know the password, or all but the first 150 MB of the drive is invisible to you. (So make sure enter that password into your password-storing program, because you will be in big trouble if you lose it.) When you copy data onto the drive, it gets encrypted on the fly.

Mind you, it was somewhat less than intuitively obvious how one went about changing the password. It turns out that if you click the “options” button, you’re prompted for the old password and then a new one, and can provide yourself a hint. But once you’ve logged in with the initial (woefully obvious) password, you can only get to the login screen by disconnecting and reconnecting the drive. Other attempts to get at the password program result in the following error message:

(Um, yes. Buffalo is a Japanese company. And yes, they’re the ones who had the WIDnows error message in the DriveStation Duo user interface. And yes, I’m an incurable pedant. Plus, of course, it just enhances my credibility immensely that I’m willing to point out mistakes made by people who bribe me. Right?)

The point of the encryption is not really military, despite the export restrictions. It probably wouldn’t take a whole lot of interrogation to make most of us reveal our passwords. What the super-security of the DataVault protects against is loss and theft. The thing about portable hard drives is that people carry them around. That means an increased likelihood of leaving them someplace. And if the drive you forget on the subway has confidential corporate information on it—or worse yet, confidential customer information—you’re probably out of a job, and your ex-employer’s PR staff is going to have a lot more to worry about than bloggers picking on their grammar and spelling.

So now that I have a new, stronger password on the drive, I can travel with it and use it to back up things like Quicken data and Outlook and client projects, and not worry that someone could pocket the drive and get me in trouble. (They’d have an easier time breaking into my laptop, but a much harder time fitting this 17-inch monster inconspicuously into a pocket.)

Another thing that makes the DataVault a good drive to travel with is its shockproof design. Rather than make the drive paper-thin, Buffalo put shock absorbers and plenty of air space around the drive. (I imagine that helps with cooling, too, though the drive does get warm to the touch.) It’s still less than an inch thick and seems fairly dainty to me, but can reportedly survive a fall of 50 inches. One presumes that’s while it’s not spinning; it seems unlikely anyone would be attaching it with a 50-inch USB cable in any case.

I have not tested this claim myself. Perhaps I should, for the sake of thoroughness, but I’m hesitant to mistreat equipment—or damage the wood floor, for that matter.

The DataVault mounts like a U3 stick: Windows interprets it as two separate drives, one of them a “CD drive.” I hadn’t thought about that when choosing a name for the drive, but it worked out anyway. Since the “CD” partition calls itself “Utility,” designating that as drive “U” and the data partition “V” was a fairly obvious move. I already have a “D” drive and an “M” drive, so it’s “V” for “vault” and into the Who’s Who in Classical Mythology for some inspiration on naming.

I ended up calling the drive Vesta, for the Roman goddess of the hearth. The Vestal Virgins not only had a small, charming temple in the middle of Rome, but they guarded wills and other important documents. Plus there are all those literary associations between virginity and unbreached walls.

As far as utilities go, I had expected something more like U3 or Ceedo, but this particular DataVault drive, at least, came with the SecureDisk Tool, TurboUSB for maximizing connection speed, a couple of PDF manuals and an Adobe Reader installation package, and Memeo AutoBackup.

Of course, the DataVault is designed to be plug-and-play with both Windows machines and Macs, and U3 only works on Windows. This could have something to do with the fairly primitive 1990s-style menu of options.

Since I had already installed Memeo along with the LinkStation Mini last week (and more on that in another post), I just created a new backup job. This time I decided to check out the “smart picks” backup option, which finds and backs up files by type. Even though I checked all the obvious types of files on my C drive, the total only came to about 6 GB, and Memeo found and copied them in sprightly fashion. (Maybe that TurboUSB stuff really works.)

I’d say that there’s a good likelihood I’ll bring Vesta with me on my next trip, instead of either of my other two portable drives. (Hmm. Maybe I should call that FreeAgent Go drive “Freya.” Somehow it escaped getting a proper name.) For one thing, Vesta only needs one USB port, and the others need one each for power and data transfer.

That’s all the time I have for playing with toys this morning, but I’ll be reporting back in with more details about Memeo and the LinkStation Mini.

Technorati Tags: Buffalo Technology,DataVault,LinkStation Mini,Memeo AutoBackup,Ceedo,U3,TurboUSB,FreeAgent Go

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:59:00 +0000

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

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:59:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:37:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

That was enough for me. Time to ditch SP3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wherever you go—back up. Even on vacation.

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

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:42:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

“Or maybe your sanity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:41:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: Iomega,REV 120 GB,ZIP drive

I’m Crushed: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-02-08

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:50:00 +0000

I thought I knew what I was going to write about for this week's reminder. A few days ago, someone contacted me (through the Podcast Asylum, natch—perhaps I need to make my FileSlinger™ e-mail address easier to find on the Backup Blog) to ask about online backup, which has been the theme of the past couple of weeks.

The specific problem, however, involved an intersection of factors I don't know enough about to explain: Vista x64, Office 2007's .docx format, and Mozy, or rather why Mozy didn't seem to want to back up .docx files from a Vista x64 PC.

I don't use Vista, and don't plan to, at least not for as long as I have this particular machine. The Ur-Guru says that the x64 version isn't bad now that Service Pack 1 is available, but the overall Vista adoption rate is so low that the only pressure to “upgrade” comes from Microsoft. (Even the Ur-Guru only has it installed on one system, and that's only because the software he develops has to work on it.)

As for Office 2007, while the Ur-Guru has been using it happily for some time, none of my clients use it, and I would be creating more problems than I was solving if I switched now. So I don't know much about the new .docx format for Word files which Office 2007 for Windows shares with Office 2008 for Mac, except that it's based on XML. And while I found a number of articles and blog posts talking about the difficulty people with older versions of Office have opening .docx files, I didn't find anything that would explain why uploading them through an online backup service should be a problem.

Likewise, I found some “don't use Mozy” stories from a few dissatisfied customers who had experienced file corruption or other problems, I didn't notice anything specific to Vista. So that was the end of that idea.

This morning, however, while catching up on my C|Net newsletters, I saw an item in Gearlog that I couldn't pass up mentioning: EDR's Hard Drive Crusher, billed as “a new spin on destruction.”

Though this is by no means a data security blog/e-zine (blogzine?), I have mentioned before that if you are giving away a computer or a hard drive, you want it thoroughly erased. There have been special shredders for CDs and DVDs at least since I wrote about destroying outdated backups in 2003. And computer recycling facilities have powerful electromagnets designed for completely wiping the data off any magnetic drive.

The Hard Drive Crusher is not a home-office solution. For one thing, it weighs 85 lbs. For another, it costs $11,500. Even the Ur-Guru doesn't go through enough disks in a year to make it a sensible purchase. But it's the kind of thing your local electronics recycling center or data protection service might want to invest in, and let you use for a small fee if you don't think a magnetic wipe or repeated overwriting of the drive is sufficient.

And it has to be a pile of fun to operate if you're suffering from computer-induced frustration.

Technorati Tags: Hard Drive Crusher,Mozy,Gearlog,Aleratec,Vista x64,docx

Jumping on the Online Backup Bandwagon: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-25-08

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:28:00 +0000

Everyone seems to be jumping on the online backup bandwagon these days. Enterprise software giant EMC bought SOHO online backup provider Mozy a while back. Now EMC is flogging Mozy Enterprise for all it's worth. I've received links to no fewer than four white papers about Mozy Enterprise, the first of which boasts a provocative title: “You're Not as Backed Up as You Think.”

EMC is coming late to the online backup game, and has the likes of LiveVault (bought by Iron Mountain in 2005) to contend with for the enterprise market. (Though there's a difference between LiveVault's Continuous Data Protection, which updates files as they change, and Mozy's scheduled backups.)

Most of the new online backup providers seem to be targeting the consumer and home-office market, however. I've written before about Mozy Home, Carbonite, and other online backup providers. Do a search for “free online storage” in Google and you'll be overwhelmed with possibilities. (Tip: read the reviews, and the fine print of the license agreement, before signing up with any of these services.)

The amount of storage space you get for free is usually modest even for a home or home office user, and certainly not suitable for the enterprise. But there are more and more home users producing data that needs backing up, and more of them have high-speed connections, so everyone wants to be in on it.

There's Dell's DataSafe™, now offered free with the purchase of a new Inspiron or XPS notebook. The first two types of files they recommend backing up are photos and music, followed by Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slide shows. 100 GB of storage costs $119.00 per year, which doesn't dent the small-business budget too much. It isn't clear whether it's possible to back up more than one computer to a single DataSafe™ account, but I suspect it's not. (This is also true for Mozy Home.)

If you want to back up your network drive online, you probably need either an enterprise product or a geeky homemade hack to upload the files to a server. My own network drive, to which all three of the computers in my household (my two laptops and my housemate's desktop) back up automatically, backs up to a USB drive. I shudder to think how clogged our cable connection would get if I tried to send 617GB up that 6Mbps connection every week.

But I digress. (Gosh, how unusual.)

Not to be outdone by its rival, HP has also launched an online backup service, HP Upline, complete with glossy website. It even offers multi-user options. Unfortunately for HP, Upline suffered a week of downtime, with security issues for good measure. TechCrunch and its readers had some fairly pungent things to say about that, and one wonders whether the service will survive the bad publicity long enough to establish credibility. I can't see myself signing up for the one-year limited-storage free trial.

Computer Technology Review provides a good overview of what an organization should look for in an online backup service. While not all the same considerations apply to home and home office users, it's still worth reading the article before signing up with a service provider.

Online backup is a good supplement to your other backup methods. Unless you can guarantee that you'll always be able to connect to the Internet in the middle of a data loss crisis, however, I wouldn't rely on it exclusively. Especially if it's free.

Technorati Tags: DataSafe,HP Upline,Mozy Enterprise,LiveVault. Carbonite

More about the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:53:00 +0000

The Ur-Guru has kindly pitched in with some sources for the use of “the cloud” to mean the Internet. (He had the sense to look in more places than Wikipedia, which has a pretty confusing entry.)

PC Magazine has a dictionary entry defining cloud as a network infrastructure and showing a diagram using a cloud symbol, while Infovark describes the Internet as a cloud of clouds, with a pretty CGI rendering that looks like nothing so much as a star cluster. Certainly it's not a nice, neat, geometric shape.

Just as you always suspected, the Internet is unruly, chaotic, and not particularly linear.

Is Your Data Safer in the Cloud? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-18-08

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:38:00 +0000

The other day I attended a presentation by someone who works for Google Sites, the new incarnation of JotSpot. He told a story about how he'd dropped his laptop and had to replace it, but it didn't matter, because the presentation was “in the cloud” and he could get to it from any computer that had an Internet connection.

In this case, “in the cloud” means that it's on servers at Google. More generally, the phrase refers to data stored on hosted applications. I'm not sure where clouds come into it; somehow I think of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and probability clouds, but that's probably me mis-remembering high school math and science. Naturally, if you're sitting at a computer in your home or office and your data lives on a server at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wordpress.com, Typepad, or somewhere like that, then there's a lot of information moving back and forth whenever you edit those documents, and some of it gets transmitted by satellite through literal clouds.

Anyway, the etymology doesn't matter for the purposes of this backup reminder. What matters is that even the storage and processing capacity of personal computers increases, hosted services proliferate, meaning that more and more people keep quite a bit of data “in the cloud.”

We talked a few Reminders ago about how hard it can be to back up your data if some of it is in Facebook and some on TypePad and some in your Google Reader account and some in your Yahoo! Mail account and so on. But there's also a positive side to not storing data on your own computer. The server rooms at Google, Yahoo!, and your own web hosting company are almost always better designed to resist theft, fire, and hardware failure than what you have at home. Data centers have security guards, sprinkler systems, and Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks locked into air-conditioned cages—much tougher for someone to walk off with than your laptop.

On the other hand, if you get cut off from your Internet connection for some reason, you can't get to any of your data. Back when I was in college, I used the university mainframe for word-processing, e-mail, and chat. (Swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, anyone?) The computer center was full of “dumb terminals:” screens and keyboards designed to let you log into the mainframe, wherever it was, and use the programs it ran. If you wanted your own copy of anything from the mainframe, you had to ask for a tape of it. (I never did, which I sometimes regret, except that I doubt I could ever have gotten the data off it.) If you wanted to print something, you sent a command to the laser printer and then went to the print window to pick it up in an hour or so.

And if the mainframe went down, there would be a few dozen students sitting around in the computer center, and more scattered across the campus, who were unable to do any work at all. (The first thing to do when walking into the computer center was to look at the handwritten status board to see whether it said "Up and Running.")

Some of today's hosted services do let you work offline, and then sync up as soon as they have a connection. But before you decide to keep all your data online, you need to be sure you can get to it when you need to. That almost certainly means having more than one way to get online.

And, of course, you have to be willing to expose that data to the people who work for Google, Yahoo!, and the like. Google probably knows more about us than we know about ourselves already, but that doesn't mean we want to turn everything over to them. (Are they reading your mail? Probably not, but they're sharing a lot of information about your online behavior.)

It can be a sensible precaution to keep very little data on any device that's at frequent risk of being lost, stolen, dropped, or having coffee spilled on it, but that's not the same as putting all of your data online and using your $3000 Vaio as a dumb terminal. If you're going to do that, you might as well get a $300 ASUS Eee instead.

Technorati Tags: Google Sites,cloud computing,Asus Eee,hosted applications

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:49:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re Number 205

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 17:17:00 +0000

I got a message yesterday saying that the Backup Blog ranks #205 on Wikio's list of top business blogs. (That means if you go to their top blog list, you won't see it, because that only shows the first 100.)

Even to rank 205th among business blogs is pretty good when your topic is something as un-sexy as backup, so I figured I'd go ahead and add the code for the Wikio vote button to the blog template. It's always nice to get some recognition. (Of course, they didn't say what the total number of blogs is, so it could be that this one is number 205 out of 206.)

The message explained the Wikio ranking system as follows:

“The position of blogs in their Wikio ranking depends on the number and value of links that other blogs point toward them. The value of these links depends on the ranking of the blog publishing them. So in our algorithm, the value of a link published on a highly ranked blog is more important than a posted link on a blog with a lower ranking. This way, we hope to produce a ranking more representative of blogs' influence.”

That would suggest that there are at least a few influential blogs that link to this site. Blogger doesn't provide a nice list of those the way WordPress does (one reason I'm considering switching platforms), so I'm not sure which ones (apart from TechDispenser and TechTarget, anyway). Personally, I'm happy to get links from anyone who thinks the site is useful.

Technorati Tags: Wikio,TechTarget,TechDispenser

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:23:00 +0000

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

###

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Technorati Tags: APC,UPS,battery backup

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

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Backup Resources from Tech Target

noreply@blogger.com (The FileSlinger) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:46:00 +0000

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

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

Happy reading.