A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from my stepmother, who converted to Mac some years ago when she left the corporate world. As I wrote back in November, she brought my father into the Apple fold after his retirement.

For the most part, they are very happy with their Macs, but sometimes trouble rears its ugly head in paradise. Though Macs are well-constructed pieces of hardware, they’re not immune to drive failure—and some of Apple’s products exhibit other flaws. “You might be interested in writing about Time Capsule failures,” Pam wrote.

I was totally unaware of this problem until mine died on Friday as it had been operating flawlessly up to that point. It was not until I did the usual round of troubleshooting per the manual that I Googled time capsule failures, to know that I was not alone. I am off to the store today to get my replacement time capsule, but word on the net is that Apple still has not fixed the underlying flaw so now I am looking at a second backup drive or cloud backup as I can not rely on Time Capsule. If you Google “time capsule power failure”, you will find lots to write about.

Indeed, if you search for “apple time capsule power failure” (without the quotes), you get (at the time of this writing) 114,000 results. A November 2009 article from the Guardian includes a nice graph pegging the average life span of a Time Capsule at 535 days:

The problem is not disk failure, but the power supply. Theoretically, the data on the unusable Time Capsules could be fine, but you can’t get to it.

Frustrated Time Capsule owners have created websites like AppleTimeCapsule.me, which provides warranty-voiding tips on how to prevent your Time Capsule from croaking. (Warning: in addition to voiding your warranty, this solution requires power tools, or sufficient muscle-power to put holes in metal casings without power tools.)

And then there’s the now-famous, only-half-joking Apple Time Capsule Memorial Register.

Once the number of dead time capsules reached 2500, the site stopped accepting new submissions. That doesn’t mean Time Capsules have stopped dying, but Apple has improved its replacement policies.

Pam described her experience this way:

Got my replacement for my Time Capsule—a refurbished Time Capsule. I was told that if it fried again I should bring it back for another replacement. I asked the Genius what Apple was doing to fix the problem and he said that I would need to call Apple. When you take the time capsule back they plug it in with your plug and then their plug and when it does not power up, they just hand you the replacement.

Can anyone spot what Apple left out of this resolution? That’s right: what about your data? Your presumably still intact, possibly entirely confidential data, now in the hands of the “genius” behind the counter at the Apple store. Well, apparently, that’s not Apple’s problem.

Both the websites I mentioned above offer some suggestions, however. The memorial site has a “Now What?” page that breaks down your options into Replace, Repair, and Do nothing. (Hmm. Anyone remember “Abort, Retry, Fail”?) “Replace” is what Apple will help you do. For “Repair,” you either need to be something of a hardware geek, or to hire one. The site points to a list of Time Capsule repairpeople around the globe, but it’s a short list. Any competent computer hardware repair person should be able to get your disk out and put it into another drive case, though.

AppleTimeCapsule.me suggests taking your TimeCapsule disk out before returning the case for replacement, then putting your own disk into the new case instead of using the one provided to you. This is possibly not quite honest, but then again, neither is Apple’s just taking your data.

It would make more sense to me if Apple just provided you with a new empty Time Capsule case and stuck your existing disk into it, especially if it’s clear that the point of failure was the power supply. Admittedly they don’t look all that easy to take apart and reassemble, but it seems as though the company might need to address the design anyway.

Meanwhile, as convenient as a Time Capsule is, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to make it your only backup device. What do other Time Capsule owners out there use to back up their Time Capsules (or their Macs) with? Is there a favored external hard drive maker? A most popular online backup provider? Inquiring minds want to know.

When I was preparing for my most recent visit to Cleveland to see my parents (that’s Cleveland, Ohio, for any of you reading this from outside the USA), my father said, “Bring a PC.”

I haven’t traveled without a computer since the days when they made you turn your computer on at security, back when you had to hunt all over the airport to find a power outlet, long before wi-fi was invented. Now that I have this nifty netbook (on which I’m typing while waiting for the plane from Chicago to Oakland to fill up), there was no chance I wouldn’t bring it along, especially since I had an appointment to talk WordPress with my brother’s law firm. (I won’t link to their website; it would embarrass them. There’s a story behind the website, and it isn’t pretty.)

But what my father meant was “Bring something that runs Windows.” Dad retired at the end of 2008, and my stepmother had convinced him to switch to a Mac, something she’d done about a year before that.

Now, I have nothing against Macs. I used to own one myself. (Okay, that was back in the days of System 7.1.) The hardware is beautiful and  the UI (user interface) is slick, though I’m not sure it’s really so much more intuitive for someone with no experience.

Regardless, they have some definite drawbacks if you’re coming out of 40 years in corporate America, and one of them is the fact that Microsoft Office for the Mac does not work the same way as Office for Windows. (I know, they’re coming out with a new version of it. And I also know, and explained to Dad, that you can run Windows quite nicely in a Virtual Machine on a Mac—something you’d have a much harder time doing in reverse.)

The big problem, in this case, was Outlook’s famous proprietary PST file. Dad had three of them, given to him by the IT staff at BP when he turned in his company laptop (an undistinguished Dell). Outlook somehow (Microsoft experts, feel free to help me out) manages to store your contacts, calendar, e-mail messages, attachments, tasks, and everything else in a single PST file. But without a working copy of Outlook, getting anything out of that PST file is…just a bit difficult.

Not only won’t Entourage for Mac won’t open PST files, Microsoft appears to have entirely failed to make any kind of conversion tool. The “Genius Bar” at the  local Apple store couldn’t help either; they insist they know nothing at all about Windows programs. So it was up to Yours Truly, the family geek, to find a way to restore Dad’s e-mail from his backup CDs.

Dad had already had his contacts exported to an Excel spreadsheet (though he didn’t know how to import them into Entourage, and it turns out that the contact fields in Entourage and those in Outlook don’t match, so you have to map them onto each other by hand), and the calendar didn’t matter, but he wanted the e-mail attachments. Someone had turned him onto a program called O2M (for Office to Mac) by a company called Little Machines. (Based in San Francisco, as it happens.)

The program is only $10, primarily because it relies on a working copy of Outlook (and, of course, a Windows computer to run it on) for most of its function. I imagine that its creators envision their customers using it before they get rid of their PCs, rather than afterwards. I downloaded the Outlook XP/2003 version onto Mena (since I’m still using Office 2003 on her, so as not to tax her more limited resources), tested it, and then paid for the license. Then I copied Dad’s PST files onto a USB stick (no, not the one that got smashed), opened them in Outlook, and started up O2M.

As you can see from the screenshots, the interface is very straightforward.

Once you’ve checked the mailboxes you want (in this case, I excluded all my own mail, contacts, and calendar items), O2M asks whether you want to include all your attachments or just those under a certain size or in a certain date range, and then proceeds on to calendar and contact items. Dad’s PST files only contained mail items, so they were easy to export, but it took a while for the program to process the messages. (It seems to run pretty fast, but it has to handle them one by one.)

The output of O2M’s e-mail conversion is mbox files. I remember those from the days when I used Eudora. The curious thing about Entourage, however, is that even though it will, allegedly, import mbox files, the import process didn’t work; the files on my memory stick remained grayed out. So I decided to RTFM (Read the Freaking Manual, which you get to by clicking that little “Help” button in the top left of the O2M window), and discovered that there are special directions for importing the O2M files to Entourage.

Here’s how to import mbox mail files into Microsoft’s Entourage program:

1. Start up Entourage. If this is your first time using it, you might want to create one or more folders where your imported emails can be dragged and stored.
2. Drag the mbox file you want to import into Entourage’s folder list and drop it. Entourage will turn the mbox file into a new mail folder. Open the new folder, and you’ll find all of your imported emails inside it. If you like, you can move one or more emails from the new folder to other folders to organize them.

Dad had a folder for “Imported Mail” in Entourage already, so I dragged all the mail into that, renamed the mail folders to something less clumsy, re-created the subfolder structures—and we were in business. All the attachments had come through.

So if you’re leaving the corporate rat-race and want to switch from Windows to Mac, I can recommend O2M. And I definitely recommend getting it before you dispose of the Windows machine. Otherwise you might spend almost a year waiting around for your geeky offspring to help you turn your backup CDs from useless pieces of plastic back into your e-mail.

This week’s backup reminder comes courtesy of Noel Saw, organizer of the East Bay WordPress Meetup.

Full disclosure: I was a hardcore PC (Windows) user for over 10 years. Ironically, I began my computing career with the black and white Macintosh SEs with a gigantic 20-meg hard drive in my journalism classes in high school. As I began my graphic design career, the companies I worked for were still gung-ho about Macs. But as most people grow up and had to buy their own computers, the price delta between Macs and PCs were too great…at least for me. Recently through some haggling and bartering I got my hands on a 15.4″ Mac Book Pro (the previous generation to the latest and greatest).

For me one of the most fascinating things about OS X Leopard (10.5) is the built-in back up tool called Time Machine. It’s an almost-no-brainer set it once and forget it type thing. It does what Apple does best with a simplified user interface and few options, ultimately delivering only what the customer needs—without confusing the hell out of them.

What can you do with Time Machine? Imagine having something automatically backup revisions of the files and folders on your hard drive into “snapshots” that you can restore with the click of a button. Yes, it’s that easy.

Time Machine can be accessed on the menu bar of the OS X interface.

The first thing you’ll need to do is set up a separate hard drive volume just for Time Machine. I think Apple recommends that you have an entire physical hard drive for it and that it not be a partition of a bigger drive. You’ll want to have an external hard drive that’s at least the size of your boot and data drive. Once you pop in a new drive, go to the Time Machine interface and set that drive as your Time Machine backup drive.

As you can see, there’s not much to the Time Machine interface. Once you have the selected backup drive set, there aren’t many other options other than “on” or “off”. Time Machine will automatically detect the presence of your backup drive and start backing up almost transparently in the background without much lag. That’s one good thing about OS X versus Windows: background tasks are much less of an obtrusive drain on your system.

Time Machine takes snapshots of your drive as sessions determined by the the date and time, so backup sets don’t have file names. There’s nothing that prompts you to do anything. Set it and forget it. Amazing, huh?

Say you do want to restore something; how does it work? Click on the “Enter Time Machine” drop down menu. You’ll then see whatever desktop finder window you already have open. So from this one desktop window, you can navigate the contents of your hard drive from the most recent backup.

There are forward and back buttons on the bottom right that will let you navigate chronologically through your snapshots as saved by Time Machine. To restore a file, simply navigate to the folder you want to restore the file(s) from, highlight the desired files and go click on “restore”. Then Time Machine will pull that file out of its magic archive cloud.

It will then ask if you want to overwrite the current file(s) that are there or keep both. Most of them time, to be safe, just select “both”.

In short, Time Machine is an indispensable tool that is sorely lacking as part of Windows’ built in suite. Windows’ built-in backup tool seems so ’90s by this standard.

Yes, well, Sallie reflects a trifle sourly, if PCs all had identical hardware, it would be much easier to make such a tool for Windows. But there are some companies doing their best to rival Time Machine’s simplicity, as we’ll see in future posts.

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

Backing Up your Mac

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

Back to the Future

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

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

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

I think I’m a clone now…

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

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

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

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

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

Put it in the cloud

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

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

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

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

Mac and Me

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

Other tips and tricks

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.