That Sinking Feeling

That’s the question I usually ask when confronted with a drive failure, or a malfunctioning system. More often than not, the answer is usually a no. Its a tough lesson to learn, and backup is such an easy thing to do these days. Just remember all hard drives will eventually fail. There should be no more excuses, having a backup is an essential part of daily life now, everything is kept on a computer these days right? Along with installing an anti virus program, there should be some sort of backup process happening.

So let’s talk about backup, what can you and should you be doing about this? Yes I know trying to perform and maintain this boring task is hard, but as they say an ounce of prevention yadda yadda. These days backup software is designed to do it for you and you won’t even notice it running. I can’t tell you how many times a good backup has saved the day, from accidentally deleting that file to restoring entire drives. As a general rule, you want to have a least 3 copies of every important file. One on the computer, one on an external drive, and another somewhere not near the physical location of the computer (ie in the “cloud”). I’ve experienced this first hand when my house flooded. There goes my computer..along with the backup drive sitting right next to it. Lucky for me I had a 3rd copy of everything important stashed elsewhere online and not in my home.

While there are several decent and affordable 3rd party software vendors out there that can do this job, I will focus on the ones that you already have installed and you probably didn’t know it comes with your OS. If you are a Windows Vista or Windows 7 user, Microsoft has included a built in Backup and Restore program, much improved over its XP predecessor. As for Apple users, it should be obvious that there is something called Time Machine begging for you to configure it if you have not already. To get started with either, please go and invest some money in an external drive that attaches via USB and get one that will be large enough to hold all your data off the internal system drive and any additional stored data on the computer you would like to backup.

Windows 7 Backup and Restore

To get started using the built in backup software all you need is the external hard drive as I mentioned (or for the tech savvy a network file share on another system). There are two ways to invoke the Backup and Restore screen; one is to simply search under the start menu (the Windows bubble on the bottom left) for ‘backup’ and it should eventually bring up the listing above for Backup and Restore or click the long way and go to Start->Control Panel->System and Security->Backup and Restore.

To follow the prompts to get an initial backup is quite simple. Click the “Set Up Backup” option and another dialog will open that looks like this screenshot:

The first step is to choose the destination for where the data is to be stored, hopefully your external drive will be listed here. Or, for the advanced user one can choose a network share located somewhere else on the local network. Keep in mind the amount of data stored could be huge so it will take longer for the initial backup to complete. The next screen will ask you what data to backup, there are two options here. If you are not sure, you keep stuff locally in your profile folders (Documents, Photos, Music etc folders called Libraries) and you trust Microsoft to do it for you, choose the first option “Let Windows Choose”. This option also creates a system image and saves all installed programs as well. If you have additional data on another internal drive select the “Let Me Choose” option and on the next screen a layout of all your folders and drives is displayed. Make sure you check off all your user folder libraries, any other folders with data outside these and check the “Include a system image of drives: C:”

Clicking next will bring up a confirmation screen. Before clicking on finish however make sure you click on “Change Schedule” as by default it is set to run on Sundays at 7pm only. A backup is only as good as the last time it ran so once a week is not enough. I like to schedule mine for twice a week at a minimum and at a time when I know the computer will be turned on. Also note that if the backup window is missed, the program will run the next time the computer is on. Make the appropriate changes and save them. If this is the first time being setup the backup process will start. You with me so far? It may seem complex but really its not.

Next Steps

To make things even more easy for restoration purposes, Microsoft also provides a method of creating a System Repair Disc that ties into this backup system. If you machine has a fatal hard drive failure and cannot be brought back to life, simply boot off this CD/DVD and follow the prompts to restore the system onto a new drive. On the same screen for Backup and Restore off to the left is the option to create one with a CD/DVD burner. Make that and keep that in a handy location in case you ever need it.

Cloud Backup, The Third Copy

On top of running a local backup, I also recommend keeping a third copy of your data somewhere else that’s not local.  You don’t have to keep absolutely everything out there, just the files, photos and other data that definitely should not get lost. For the paranoid, most services offer secure encryption so no one can get at this stuff without knowing your password.  From the services I’ve seen, many have a scheduled backup option so again there is nothing to remember to do. A cursory Google search yields many options to go with from free to monthly costs, so read up on features and reviews accordingly. I personally use Jungledisk backup with Amazon S3 storage as the storage backend, which is an older service now powered by Rackspace and may not be available anymore.

The estimated retail prices for upgrade packaged retail product of Windows 7 in the U.S. are:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Upgrade): $119.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Upgrade): $199.99
• Windows 7 Ultimate (Upgrade): $219.99

And the estimated retail prices for full packaged retail product of Windows 7 in the U.S. are:

• Windows 7 Home Premium (Full): $199.99
• Windows 7 Professional (Full): $299.99
• Windows 7 Ultimate (Full): $319.99

Aww boo! Even though it less than what Vista costs today, this is still too expensive for my tastes.  Two other tidibits of info, if you are a diehard first in line type Microsoft will be offering a Pre Order discount of about half off starting tomorrow (Friday June 26th 2009) at select retailers like Best Buy, Amazon etc.  But only until July 11th!  Fear not if you don’t want to take the early plunge, also starting tomorrow if you buy a new computer ” from a participating OEM or retailer with Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate on it will all receive an upgrade to the corresponding version of Windows 7 at little or no cost to customers.” This is good until January 31st 2010.

OK, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me.

Out of the box its very simple and straightforward to setup, seemingly at first glance. When the phone is first powered up it starts a setup wizard asking for your google account information or gives the option to create one. This was my first roadblock. I did not have 3G service enabled yet on my account, and there was no way to bypass this wizard in order to enable wireless. So, after some failed attempts I went online to enable the service, and was forced to go upstairs to get a better signal. Finally! Contact was made and it imported everything from Google including my Calendar, emails and contacts. Neat.

It took me some getting used to using the interface (coming from Windows Mobile 6), but once I learned how to run around the screen its quite easy.  Access and downloading from the Android Market is fantastic, and even though its so early in the game there are many apps already available.   Three apps I have gotten and work very well are Compare everywhere (comparison shopping), Twitdroid (Twitter client), and Shazam (music tagging). Compare everywhere is a fantastic idea, scan a barcode with the camera and coupled with GPS will tell you how much it is elsewhere and online. Shazam is neat because it will actually listen to music playing (even from the phone itself) and identify the song and artist and link to the MP3 on Amazon. How cool is that?

The only complaint so far is the battery life. In order to use the phone all day you need to turn off the GPS, Wireless and dim the screen to almost nothing (which is fine because its very bright).  Hardware wise its very similar to the Wing, they are both from HTC. Its thinner than the Wing and has a wider screen. At least they got rid of those awful flaps that cover the SD slot (although there is one over the USB port). People complain there is no headphone minijack and must use the USB adapter to plug in. Really, thats what my IPod is for so I don’t care.

This is only the beginning, and I love the concept of a Linux phone. I can’t wait to see what else is capable with this platform the sky is the limit.

You can download Chrome and test drive it yourself, although it is only available at this time for Windows users. Don’t worry, the Linux and Apple versions are promised to be not far behind.  In fact I’m wirting this post through Chrome, and I have to say that my first impressions are very positive.  It is lightning fast in redering pages, imports bookmarks from Firefox and has a clean simple interface. If a thriving plugin community starts making add ons for this, Firefox will have a run for its money.  You can read all about Chrome’s features on this page, and there is certainly some cool innovative stuff that will make this browser stand out from the crowd.  

Hey you other browsers, looks like Google is now gunning for your place at the table. We’ll see where this leads, this is going to be interesting time on the web. Its the dawn of a new browser war!

Definitely do plan on upgrading to 3. Its worlds better than 2.0 ever was and most plugins (if you have any installed) are Firefox 3.0 compatible. If not, the install process will tell you which is really handy.  So if you have not made the leap I strongly suggest you do so.

Email is probably the best example of cloud computing. At first I was using gmail online only as a throwaway address. Because I have multiple email accounts, it was becoming harder to manage all of them in Outlook, on multiple computers so I decided to forward everything through my to Gmail account. Gmail is great because it has plenty of storage, its free and has fantastic spam filters. The final stroke came earlier this week when I reconfigured Outlook to use IMAP. Now all email is accessed remotely through Outlook, or the web or any other compatible client (Thunderbird on linux for example) and it stays on there. No email is downloaded locally anymore, I just look at it through Outlook or browser. This technology has been around for a while though, only just now have I found a use for it since I use so many computers. Its just easier to do it this way.

Remote file storage is also another tehnology that I have recently started using. There are plenty of services out there, both for free and subscription based. Although I backup to another drive regularly, the recent flooding we had this past year at the house opened my eyes to the realization that the data for both the backups and originals could have washed away. I now subscribe to the Amazon S3 storage service which has been a great investment. Now all my digital photos and important documents (in encrypted form using Truecrypt of course.) are stored up in the cloud. Its very cheap and it has unlimited data. The more you store the more you pay. So far 6 gigs worth of data is only costing about $1. One buck! Thats amazing. S3 is a bit trickier to setup than other services as it requires another client to access the service, Jungledisk. Once its setup its very easy to use and its also cross platform.

Applications that have traditionally been on the computer are also making their way to online versions. You don’t even need Office anymore, as Google has an entire suite of applications for word processing and number crunching for free. There are also a few others out there in this rapidly expanding segment. Even Adobe is getting in on the act with creating a Photoshop type tool for online photo manipulation.

I could go on about all the social applications that can be integrated into this as well. Sites like Flickr and Facebook are changing the way we interact and share such data but thats a post for another day.

Update: Well now its been a few days since release, and Firefox has been downloaded over 8 million times on its first day. Wow. Awesome. Its probably safe to get back in the water now. After using this final version for a few days, I’m really liking it. Especially since almost all of my plugins are now compatible. I’m still waiting for All In One Sidebar though.