Back Up Your Passport with Gmail

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. There are many e-zines and blogs about different aspects of writing and publishing.
2. Almost no one writes about backup.
3. I didn't actually start writing this Backup Reminder in order to make money.
4. 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.

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

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.

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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

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

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.

Backing Up Social Networks, Part 1: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-21-08

I've been using del.icio.us profligately in the last six months or so. It's a handy way to keep track of things I want to read, and things I want other people to read. But it suddenly occurred to me yesterday that whereas my Firefox bookmarks get backed up along with the rest of my critical data thanks to Karen’s Replicator, I had no backup of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

It turns out that it's just as easy to export bookmarks from del.icio.us as to import them: just go to “Settings” and check “export/backup” under “Bookmarks.”

Admittedly, the resulting HTML file is just a long list of links, rather than having the formatting provided by del.icio.us tags, but it beats losing the links altogether if you're still in the middle of using them for research. (Not that I've ever experienced a del.icio.us outage, but it's always possible.)

You can also export your del.icio.us bookmarks to an XML file by pasting the following link into your browser and entering your del.icio.us username and password: http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all. But unless you know what to do with an unformatted XML file, I'd recommend the first method.

Once I had my bookmarks backed up, I started to think about other “social” sites. I've been spending a lot of time answering (and occasionally asking) questions on LinkedIn. A few months ago I asked my network about their backup practices and got enough information to fill up a Reminder column. For today's column, I searched the existing LinkedIn Answers for information about backing up LinkedIn itself.

The easy part is backing up your connections: you can export them to a .csv (that stands for “comma-separated values,” if you wanted to pick up some additional jargon today) file and then import them into Outlook or pretty well any other contact-management program. If you go to your Connections page in LinkedIn and scroll to the bottom, you'll see an “Export Connections” button. This takes you to a page with instructions for exporting to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Mail, or Max OS X Address Book.

That's all well and good, but anyone I'm connected to on LinkedIn is pretty much guaranteed to be in my Outlook contacts already, because I'm scrupulous about not connecting to people I don't know well enough to recommend in some capacity, and if I know you that well, chances are I have your e-mail and phone number already. (And LinkedIn doesn't include phone numbers in their contact info anyway.)

I was more interested in whether I could back up my profile, my recommendations, and my answers to questions. It turns out that it's possible to back up your profile, after a fashion, by saving it as a PDF file. This includes recommendations people have written for you, though not recommendations you have written for others. You can do this with other people's profiles, as well, which may be more useful than just exporting their contact info, if also more cumbersome.

It's possible to copy and paste text out of this PDF, so having it would spare you from re-typing everything if something happened and you had to re-create your profile from scratch. And it would save you some typing if you wanted to re-use the information for another social network.

Curiously, this handy convert-to-PDF feature is not available for your recommendations or your answers. My recommendations page at least shows the full text of the recommendations I've written, so I can use the “print” function to create a PDF version. But the tab with my answers doesn't show the full text (perhaps because I'm inclined to give long answers), and if there's an option to subscribe to your own answers, I haven't seen it. (Besides, the feeds you get from LinkedIn aren't full-text feeds, anyway.) And it only shows the 30 most recent answers.

I guess I know what new features I'll be requesting from LinkedIn!

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn,del.icio.us,social networks,data portability

Are You Paranoid Enough? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-07-08

Now and again I talk about aspects of data security that aren't directly related to backups. I don't do it often, because I'm not a security expert, but there's more than one way to lose your data, and stories about backup tapes stolen from financial institutions and missing laptops with confidential information on them show up in the news pretty often.

The security of your backups can be an issue for everyone. If someone broke in and stole your external hard drive, would they get everything? Most small and home office users have at least some information that shouldn't be available to anyone who finds a USB key lying on a taxi seat. So we should all take basic precautions and not make it easy for those with harmful intent.

I saw an announcement about a new service called BlogBackupr the other day and flagged it as something to investigate. As a backup blogger, I'm certainly in favor of backing up your blog. (I'm not at all in favor of that awkward name; even "Blog Backer-Upper" would be more euphonious.) Before I could check the service out, however, I saw a post from Ike Pigott warning readers about a the way any provider of such a service could abuse the login and password information for your blog.

And just in case I wasn't feeling paranoid enough after reading Ike's post, I got a link to a new white paper from Bitpipe this morning: “How to Fully Protect Your Storage Environment.” (You'll have to register to download it, if you're interested.) The section that caught my eye was “Why and How Your Storage Environment Will Be Attacked,” by Kevin Beaver.

While the guide addresses enterprise storage, a few points apply to smaller businesses and home users as well:

1. Storage security does not equal redundant systems and good backups. These two elements are only part of what’s going to keep your data safe and sound, so it’s important not to solely rely on them as has been done in the past.
2. Storage encryption is not the silver bullet. Not for data at rest and not for data in transit.

The truth is, we all have to trust someone with our data sometime. Even if you run your own web and mail servers, even if you avoid online backup services, the only way to protect your data against fire, flood, and theft onsite is to move copies of the data offsite—which means it's vulnerable in transit and at its destination. And most companies providing backup and storage solutions limit their liability pretty severely.

The malicious hackers are way ahead of most of us, too. They know more ways to attack than we're aware we should defend.

So what's a sensible person to do?

If you work with really sensitive data, it's probably worth hiring a security expert. Otherwise, take the obvious precautions. If it's small and portable (and even my twelve-ton, 17-inch laptop qualifies for that category), put a password on it. And store your passwords in a password-protected program. Don't leave your data unattended. Do provide someone in your company or family with your master password in the event you are injured or killed and they need access to your data, but make sure that person knows how important it is not to hand out that information.

Check out any storage services you're thinking of using before you sign up: search on Technorati and in places like Yelp to find out what people are saying about them. One or two negative reviews is normal, but if you find pages and pages of complaints, stay away. If a storage company is making headlines because of lost or stolen data, choose someone else.

At least most of us SOHO users can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we are just too insignificant for serious hackers to bother with. The payoff for stealing your PIN number is fairly small. The payoff for stealing millions of credit card numbers from a bank is a lot higher.

But don't let that make you careless.

Technorati Tags: BlogBackupr,Ike Pigott,data loss,security

Backing Up to...Paper? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-25-08

After last week’s discussion about the relative merits of paper and electronic storage for text and photos, I was particularly intrigued to come across a blog post about paper as a backup medium. Someone has actually gone and invented a program that will back your data up in the form of zillions of squares of tiny black dots (90,000 per square inch of paper at 300 DPI). You can get all of about 5 KB of uncompressed data on a page if you’ve got a 600 DPI laser printer. (Inkjets don’t work as well for this.) To restore data, you need a high-resolution scanner.

Now, I can remember when a Mac’s entire operating system ran on a 4 KB diskette. And I’m sure some of you remember the days when computers were the size of a building and ran on punch cards or punch tape. But given the size of even a short Microsoft Word document these days (last week’s Backup Reminder is 57 KB), you’d be well advised just to print the file, then scan it into an Optical Character Recognition program.

So you won’t be too surprised that this program, PaperBack, was created as “an open-source joke.” But it’s a real program, and Karl Gechlik over at Ask the Admin went and tested it. He backed up a 13.7 MB program called PC Tools AntiVirus Free Edition to an 88-page, 100 MB PDF file. Is there an antonym for “data compression”?

I passed this link along to the Ur-Guru with the comment “Now that is weird.” His response (as so often) made me feel slightly foolish:

No it’s not, actually.

Do you remember how my exit-slip looked, the one I got not the last time but the one before, when I left the US? That paper thing with all those weird dots like a mashed up barcode in blocks? Same thing.

Various of those things have been used to store data as “print,” so extending it to full sheets makes sense.

Sure enough, as soon as he mentioned his travel documents, I realized that I’d seen something similar when printing my own Southwest boarding passes. (You can do a Google image search for “print boarding pass” if you’ve never seen one.)

But the next comment really surprised me:

I once wrote a tool that did something similar, trying to compress actual data into color bitmap images. The idea was to print in color and scan them back in as a backup but scanners and color reproduction was not good enough [in 1997] for the full 0-255 range of integers and as a result it wasn’t viable or practical for large amounts of data.

It was, however, very viable at 0-32 ranges of color (RGB per pixel or dot printed at up to 600 dpi) as a means of encryption and to travel with data that would not appear to be data. :-)

I’ve talked about encrypting backups occasionally, but I’ve never thought about attempting to disguise my data as something other than data. Though I will say that if I were a customs inspector and someone had a heavy suitcase full of paper printed all over with tiny black dots, I’d start to suspect that something funny was going on.

If you have a funny story about backup—or a tragic one—and would like to write a guest column for this newsletter, just e-mail me.

Technorati Tags: PaperBack,Ask the Admin

Upgrading Your Archives: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-18-08

After last week's column about creating annual archives, one Loyal Reader wrote in with the following question:

Old codgers have old archives on old disks. I have disks and files going back into the 1980s. I have no computer that can read these disks. (Anyone have an operational Mac Classic that can read 256k disks?)

But even files from the late 90s sometimes come up with a "This file is unreadable" message.

What is a strategy for keeping your archives recoverable? Of course you could go back every few years and re-record them on up-to-date media. But that's a lot of trouble compared to keeping a shoebox full of old photos under the bed for decades.

And even then, sometimes you get the "unreadable" message that brooks no appeal.

What does one do? What does your panel of gurus suggest?

Before the twentieth century, there were very few ways to record data, and they didn't change often or quickly. These days, file formats and storage media become obsolete with breathtaking speed.

I'd love to hear suggestions and recommendations from readers, but I'll tell you what I've always done, and that's transfer my data onto new media once it became clear the old media were going to disappear—and sometimes just to save storage space.

For example, when I got a ZIP-100 drive back in the mid-1990s, I transferred a lot of things from floppy diskette onto ZIP disks. Some ten years later, when ZIP disks became obsolete (and my old ZIP drive started suffering the Click of Death), I transferred that data onto CDs. By that time, floppies were also nearing extinction, so anything I still had on floppy diskette also went onto CDs. Much of that data, if it's important to me, is also on one or more external drives.

And speaking of floppy diskettes: I had some of those 256K Mac diskettes, myself. And my PowerBook 145B (the first and so far only Mac I owned) no longer hand a functioning floppy drive. However, I had a friend who had a PowerBook only a little newer than mine, and she was able to put the data on high-density floppies that my PC laptop could read. Those files, too, got copied onto CD.

A few of them did get corrupted and lost along the way; I just checked one file that now lives on my NAS drive and got a warning message from Microsoft Word that I'd never seen before, about opening files in earlier versions being prohibited by my registry settings. Curiously, I can open the file with WordPad, though the formatting is messed up. This is a reminder that if the files are important, it can be a good idea to re-save them as newer versions, or to keep a copy of the older version of the software with them.

That's the strategy I have. It takes a bit of effort, but I'm not at all sure that I'd call it "a lot of trouble." Trying to do it years after the time you should have does make it more trouble, of course. (It is possible to find people with functioning "antique" computers; Charles Lee at McTek in Berkeley is one of them.) If you no longer need the data that's on the about-to-be obsolete media or in an about-to-be-unreadable file format, then don't bother.

But let's look at the ways used to preserve data prior to the era of computers. For centuries, the only way to produce even one copy of something was to write it by hand on papyrus, parchment, or clay. In the right conditions, papyrus lasts a long time, but most places don't have the right conditions. Fired ceramic is pretty near indestructible (you can break it, but not dissolve it, and the glaze doesn't fade), but not practical for long documents. Parchment, which is made from animal hide, is subject to various forms of rot. None of them is especially compact and easy to store, and all are limited in terms of the type of data they can contain.

Does anyone remember the Xerox commercial where the two monks are saved from their laborious work in the scriptorium by the photocopier? The ancient literature that remains to us today had to be painstakingly copied letter by letter (often by scribes who didn't really understand what they were writing), again and again over the centuries. Not surprisingly, these scribes frequently made mistakes; part of the job of more modern scholars is comparing these early manuscripts and trying to decide which one is correct in cases where they disagree.

If you remember that commercial, you probably also remember re-typing things on a typewriter because you made a mistake. Then came typewriters with correction keys, and those with single-line displays and memories. For all of my high school and undergraduate years, I wrote out all my student essays—and three or four novels—by hand before typing them up on whatever the technology to hand was: "programmable" typewriters in my high school days, and the campus mainframe when I was in college. (Oh, yeah, and my 160-page undergraduate honors thesis, too. I used to post the empty pens on my dorm room door. You can imagine how popular I was with my hallmates.)

Due to my own oversight, I never collected a computer tape with that work; I have only paper copies of some of it. But then, the only thing I really need it for now is nostalgia. It's true that it's easier for a human to read the printout of that thesis than it would be for my HP Pavilion laptop to read the tapes they would have given me of the mainframe data if I'd gotten them before I left Providence.

If all you want to do is look at something occasionally yourself, you may just want to print it, and then try to keep the printout in a waterproof, fireproof location. I've got a bunch of handwritten journals in a metal filing cabinet downstairs. I haven't looked at them for years, though I'm starting to be a bit curious (and to realize I no longer remember those years as clearly as I once did), so I might pull a few out. I can only hope that the paper hasn't gone moldy and the ink faded. Mildew is a terrible book killer, but so is too much dry heat. And in this case there's also handwriting to contend with. Unlike the monks in the scriptorium, I don't write in a gorgeous calligraphic hand.

And then there are photos. My paternal grandmother gave me some family photos back in 2000 when I visited her. Many of the ones of her parents when they were young were in remarkable condition. The photos of my own childhood—from the early days of color photography—were almost all badly faded. I've been able to scan them and touch up the color some, but at the time they were taken, the only way to make new copies would be to have the negatives. Negatives are rather fragile things and need to be stored carefully. The negatives for these photos were long gone. The photos themselves might be faded almost to invisibility by the time I'm a great-aunt.

You'll find that there are a lot of things you have no need or desire to keep beyond the time the IRS requires you to have them. But if there's something you want preserved for posterity, make a point of transferring it onto new media whenever you see that the old media are on the way out.

It's Time for the Annual Archive: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-11-08

This is the post I was planning to write last week, your annual reminder that you need to archive your data at the end of each year. (If your fiscal year is different from the calendar year, you should create these archives then.)

I've written about year-end backups on several occasions before. Because (as I pointed out in December 2005) these aren't really backups, I'm going to stop talking about "year-end backups" and start talking about "annual archives." At the end of 2004, and again in December 2006, I described the kinds of data that goes into one of these archives. My focus up to this point has been on archiving your data for tax purposes, so those posts address primarily financial and business data.

The need to back up--and archive--all supporting documents relating to your business income and expenses has not gone away. I've just made 4 DVDs to add to the tax box. There's one for each of my business personas (the FileSlinger, the Author-izer, and the Podcast Asylum) and one with the new promo photos the Ur-Guru took this year. (You can see some of them on Flickr.) The most time-consuming thing about making them was isolating 2007 data. In some cases I had already done this, but I haven't been completely consistent.

Once it was done, I removed all finished projects from 2007 from my C drive to make room for 2008 projects. I'm not that pressed for storage space on my machine, but it's annoying to have to look through folders for clients I'm finished with, or previous versions of documents I'm working on, when I want to get to my current work. So I use making the annual archive as an opportunity to tidy up my hard drive.

That's all business as usual. But more and more people are using computers to do more and more things. You might well want to make an annual archive even if you don't have to worry about tax audits. Here are a few examples of data that it pays to be able to save each year even if you're a student, a stay-at-home parent, or retired.

Coursework and Student Records

You might want to go back and use that essay or project for something else one day, and chances are you're going to remember it by what class you had to do it for. You might need your grades and transcripts in order to pursue an advanced degree or get a job. And you might need to provide someone with evidence that you really did take such-and-such a class. But you're probably not going to need it all on your main hard drive, and you may not even need it on your main backup drive. Burn it to a CD or DVD, label it with the year, and archive it. (Preferably off site.)

Some class projects take up more space than others. If you're studying video, you'll probably need more than one DVD per year. You might consider using an external drive to store your annual archives. Toshiba has just announced 1.8-inch hard drives with capacities up to 120 GB. I wonder how long it will take before someone comes out with a tray, rack, or box designed to store them safely.

And Speaking of Photos and Video...

Film cameras have all but disappeared. Digital cameras mean we take more pictures, because we don't have to worry about running out of film, and if they don't come out, you can always delete them. How are your photos organized? In some cases, it might make sense to sort them by subject, but if you archive each year's photos into a folder with the date, you'll have a much easier time when it comes to showing your grandchildren what you looked like in high school, or embarrassing your child by showing his baby pictures to his first girlfriend.

Also, if you take a lot of photos, your hard drive starts to fill up. Keep the best ones on your hard drive and store the rest on DVDs or an external drive. Then you won't have to look through 1000 photos to find the two you actually wanted to print.

If you use a photo-sharing service like Flickr or Photobucket, those can act as backups of the pictures you upload, as well as helping you organize them and letting you show them to other people. There are even programs to back up your Flickr photos.

E-mail and Contacts

Even if all your correspondence is personal, you might want to save it--and to save the e-mail or postal addresses of the friends and family members you write to. If you make a copy for each year, it will save you a lot of time and trouble when you decide to write your memoir or family history. Your calendar information can be useful there, too. Even if you never write a memoir, your children or grandchildren might want to know what your life was like back when. If you're like me, you forget a lot of the details.

Your Blog

Most of the blogs I read are business blogs, but many people do use blogs to write personal journals. If you think you're going to want to read what you wrote on LiveJournal or MySpace or Blogger, better make a copy of what you've posted. It's good to back these things up regularly, but even if that's too much trouble, save your blog onto a CD or DVD at least once a year. (Most blogs don't take up a lot of storage space.) If you want more details about backing up your blog, see my previous posts on the subject or do a Google search for "backup <name of blogging platform>." There are even tools like Blurb BookSmart to let you back up your blog in hardcopy format by turning it into a book, though they don't work with all blogs.

That should be enough to keep you busy for a while. Remember to store your annual archives somewhere other than the place you keep your working files: in another room, at a friend's house, in your safe deposit box.

Technorati Tags: Flickr,BookSmart,LiveJournal,MySpace,Blogger

Backups Are Del.icio.us: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-04-08

I had a different post in mind for starting off the New Year, but that one is going to have to wait until next week, because I'm sick enough to have very limited brain function at the moment.

For those of you not familiar with it, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. That means that instead of creating bookmarks (a.k.a. favorites for those of you using Internet Exploder) that live in your browser, you create bookmarks that you can share with other people, and you "tag" (label) them according to subject or any other scheme that makes sense to you.

I started using del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) a couple of months ago, though I had known about it for years. (You just have to memorize that wacky URL--or bookmark it in the old-fashioned way.) One thing I've been using it for is collecting useful articles about backup that turn up in my Google alerts. So far I've tagged 74 items as potential source material for this column, and made use of a handful of them.

Today I'm going to send you over to my del.icio.us account to read some of those articles for yourself. (They're public, so you don't have to create an account or log in to see them.) If you're curious, you can do a search of the site to see who else is tagging items "backup." If you're not curious, just get on with backing up your data, and I'll see you next week.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us,tagging

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

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

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

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

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