Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends: Before you go out to ring in the New Year, take some time to prepare your year-end backups. Why do you need a year-end backup? Primarily for tax purposes. Just in case you're faced with the dreaded audit, you want all your financial information readily available. (The more organized you are, the faster the IRS will go away.) So the first … [Read more...]
FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-17-04: Backup Madness in Europe
Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends: There was a time when it was difficult to find a new backup subject to write about every week. Thanks to the research I've been doing lately, however, it's become difficult to choose which backup talk about to write about this week. I'm drowning in white papers about enterprise storage solutions. Today I want to talk about a data retention … [Read more...]
Backups Don't Get No Respect
That's the title of Bill Howard's November 30th column in PC Magazine. The article describes Howard's own backup preferences, including a few Geek Extraordinaire extremes. Overall, the approach to backups is one I recommend myself: keep some on-site and some off-site, and above all keep them. Backups may not be exciting, but they're important--kind of like auto insurance. … [Read more...]
FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-12-04: How far would you go for backups?
Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends: First, thanks to those who have made comments and suggestions. I'm working on following up on them for future issues of this newsletter. This past week I had a heart-rending chance to experience what not having backups can mean—but I'm not ready to talk about it yet. It's still too painful for me, and I doubt very much that the client it … [Read more...]
FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-3-04: Bits, Bytes, and Backups before SP2
Dear FileSlinger™ clients, colleagues, and friends: I'm about to make some very major backups indeed, because I'm going to reinstall my computer from the ground up in order to put Windows XP Service Pack 2 on. (There are some 200+ programs known to function incorrectly after the installation of SP 2, mostly those which download automatic updates from the internet.) For those of you using XP, you … [Read more...]