i hate crashes

Using Apple’s Time Machine Backups

Jeremy Reis — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:55:35 +0000

In Mac OS X Leopard, Apple introduce a nifty automatic backup software called Time Machine. Time Machine is probably the easiest backup software available and has a sexy interface to find files and restore them. In the video below, you will see how Time Machine works and how the interface allows you to easily recover files from the past. You can browse documents, or use Spotlight to search for files:

If you need more help setting up Apple’s Time Machine for backing up your files, we’ve found the best tutorials from around the web:

http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#timemachinebasics

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/04/how-to-make-the-best-of-time-machine-and-airport-backups.ars

Why don’t you backup your computer?

Hard Drive Crash Recovery

Jeremy Reis — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:47:16 +0000

Inevitably, hard drives fail. It’s a part of life in the electronic age. Unfortunately, it always seems to happen when you are a) in a crisis or business emergency and b) when the backups you thought you had, you don’t have. I’ve been there – the hard drive starts making a clicking sound or (worse) a scratching sound!

On our sister site, Learnthat.com, I’ve written a tutorial about what to do if your hard drive does crash and you have no backups. The tutorial explains options for attempting to recover the data yourself on a PC or a Mac and when to call a professional data recovery company.

If you’d like to learn the basics of what to do when your hard drive crashes, read this data recovery tutorial.

Using a Hard Drive Recovery Service

Mozy 2.0 Online Backup Service Review

Jeremy Reis — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:24:51 +0000

We’ve used online backup services for years, including Mozy, Backblaze, Carbonite, and Connected. Over those years, the evolution of the services has been slow and the features have not expanded greatly. With Mozy 2.0, EMC promises a much improved user experience. The biggest change to the software is a new feature called 2xProtect – a local backup copy can be retained on a local hard drive – a feature which surprisingly, other online backup service companies have not thought of in the past. This solves one of the biggest problems I’ve had in the past with Mozy – the slow backups.

First, let’s run through what’s changed in the software.

Online and Local Backups

First, and foremost, as we mentioned, Mozy now supports a local backup of your data while the files are being shipped off to some huge data center halfway across the country. This provides you some protection while your files are compressed, encrypted, and transferred. This requires a local drive be connected to your machine for backups, which often is not the case for us ultra-mobile laptop people.

Faster Backups

Mozy 2.0 claims to be 75% faster compressing and encrypting files while it is 25% faster transferring files. This was the primary reason we stopped using Mozy for our personal computers (I am still a business client for some servers): the initial backup never finished on my Mac. We have a lot of digital photos and in the months we had the service, the initial backup never finished so there were hundreds of gigabytes of photos unprotected. Despite leaving the computer on 24 hours a day on a fast Internet connection, the service was just too slow. I realize that we are an example of heavy users, but it got to the point of the ridiculousness and we moved to Backblaze – which backed everything up in a few weeks. Unfortunately, version 2.0 is Windows only for now, so this doesn’t solve our basic problem with the service.

New, Refreshed Interface

Mozy has a new, refreshed interface which is much cleaner than the previous versions. Unfortunately, it still does not provide information power users would like to know – such as which files are backed up and which are not. The software now allows some pausing and throttling (something other service providers have had for some time) which is very handy if you need to do something using your Internet connection or something processor intensive. You no longer must terminate the backup just to get your work accomplished.

Online Backup Service Pricing

Pricing has not changed for home users: it’s still $4.95 per month of $54.45 per year – a reasonable price and well within expectations for this market. If you’re looking for an online backup service, Mozy should be on your shortlist for consideration.

Easeus Todo Backup Review

Jeremy Reis — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:00:46 +0000

Backup software has to meet a few basic standards to be considered good: it has to be easy to use, it has to be quick, and it has to be painless. Backing up your computer is not sexy. It’s not exciting. It doesn’t make you want to drop everything and jump right on that. It doesn’t generate money for you or your computer. Sure, it has to be done, but its among the mundane tasks you have to do.

Fortunately, ease of use and friendliness are two things Easeus Todo Backup software has going for it. The software is wizard driven and created for users who want to backup their machines, but who do not want Microsoft Windows asking them a bunch of questions they don’t know the answer to. Easeus Todo Backup takes away this problem and presents an easy to use interface at the right price: free.

The software is available for Windows 2000 through Windows 7 and includes some nifty features such as creating bootable CDs with Linux or Windows Pre-installation Environment (Windows PE). This is a great improvement over other backup software solutions which force you go into MS-DOS – something few new computer users have had to do in a long time.

The software has large, easy to read buttons and detailed instructions to help anyone who needs to backup their computer system. It backups the entire system and includes a Disk Cloning feature to help you migrate from one computer to another if you’re upgrading.

The biggest complaint from users is the lack of a scheduling feature and some of the instructions are more technical than they need to be. For example, some users didn’t understand the terminology “image” for a cloned computer system. Overall, though, the software was received quite well by our test group of users.

Overall, for a free software tool, Easeus Todo Backup is a fine software backup tool and for novice users, should do quite well.

You can download the freeware backup utility here: http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Todo-Backup/3000-2242_4-10964460.html

Mozy 2.0 Online Backup Service Review

Tips to Keep Your Photos Secure

Jeremy Reis — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:01:10 +0000

If you take a lot of photographs with your digital camera, you know that storage and backups can become a major problem. My wife is a professional children’s photographer and has just shy of 1 terabyte of photos stored on her Mac. Can you imagine the years of photos she would lose if that hard drive failed? Fortunately, there are steps we can take to keep her digital photos secure – and steps we can recommend you take to retain those memories of your kids.

Mirroring the Storage Device

Her Mac is equipped with an external hard drive for all of the photographic storage she could desire. Currently, she has a 1TB external hard drive which will shortly be upgraded to a 1.5TB drive. A second 1.5TB drive will be used and syncing software runs nightly to create mirror copies of the photos on the two drives. We use a software package called ChronoSync which supports everything from backups to mirror copies of files. It’s a Mac only software package, but there are plenty of similar utilities available on the PC.

Occasionally, I will purchase a new backup drive and retain the previous backup drive as an “archived version.” Every month, we switch the backup drives so the archive is no older than a single month. This can get expensive and you will find you have a lot of old hard drives lying around as you run to the brim of capacity and upgrade. I’m still contemplating what to do with all those old USB drives.

Buy Small, Cheap Memory Cards

If you think the days of film are behind us, well, they are, but you can duplicate some of the safety of film by buying large quantities of memory cards and using them as secondary storage. The way this would work is pretty simple: you buy inexpensive 1GB memory cards (about $10 each on Amazon) and fill it up. Download the photos to your computer, but leave a copy on the memory card. Retain the memory card with the original photos on this. This is a very expensive way to do backups, but a pretty secure one – as long as you keep those memory cards in a fireproof safe!

DVDs – Maybe Even Blu-Ray Discs!

DVDs are a very cheap storage medium and can store about 4GB of photos each. DVDs don’t last forever, but likely longer than your average hard drive. If you’re going to use them as a long term solution, burn multiple copies that are stored in different locations, and make sure you replace them with refreshed copies every couple of years.

As Blu-Ray drives become more common place, you will soon have 25 or 50GB of storage space available per disc. The drives are still a little expensive, but the expanded size of storage will help quite a few photographers with a lot of images to retain.

Online Backup Service

We have used several different online backup services over the years for Windows and Macs and have found Backblaze to be one of the best. It backs up external drives – which is very important for our photos – and offers easy recovery options. We use this as a secondary backup solution since it is off-site and happens without any involvement from us. Plus, it’s only $5 a month so it’s really cheap.

Choose Several Solutions

We’ve lost some photos and data over the years as we were trying to come up with the right solution and it hurts. Above all else, we select redundancy as a goal. If I can add another layer of backup to our model, it is worth not losing all of the memories of our girls and all of the photos and videos we’ve collected for many years.

Recover Your Photos with ZAR

Recover Your Photos with ZAR

Jeremy Reis — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:39:57 +0000

If you’ve ever lost photos on your digital camera memory card, you know how devastating it can be – the perfect shots may be gone forever. Fortunately, there are many software solutions available for digital camera media recovery – and one of them is free!

Zero Assumption Recovery is a software package designed for computer data recovery and RAID recovery, and it also provides free image recovery. The software is available as a free download from http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm. The company has provided step by step instructions on how to recover photos from your multimedia memory cards.

ZAR is a wizard driven software program which will automatically detect and recover your digital photographs. The company recommends using an external media drive, not your digital camera. The software recovers in GIF, JPEG, TIFF, CRW (Canon Raw Data), MOV, AVI Movie, WAV, CR2 (Canon CR2 RAW Format), ORF (Olympus RAW format), and others. It recovers .CR2 files as TIFF – which can be opened in Adobe Photoshop CS.

As a free solution, you should try it if you experience a corrupted memory card – or even if you accidentally delete images. I’ve deleted photos before on accident and have been able to recover them.

Find the information here: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm

Tips to Keep Your Photos Secure

5 Reasons to Not Store Data on a Flash Drive

Jeremy Reis — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:16:34 +0000

I’ve used a number of USB Flash drives over the years to carry data with me, transfer it between work and home, or store school papers to print at the lab. USB Flash drives are immensely useful – and with storage in the multiples of gigabytes now, can store more data than common hard drives from just a few years ago. Though despite the benefits of the Flash drive and the common use for data storage, there are great reasons to not use a flash drive for document storage and transfer.

1. USB Flash Drives are Easy to Lose

As USB Flash drives have become smaller and smaller, they are much easier to lose. I’ve lost a few over the years and can attest to them falling out of my pocket or disappearing from my things. Flash drives are very easy to lose – a 2010 survey by CNN found that 33% of corporate users lost a USB flash thumb drive containing sensitive corporate data. Some Flash drives have built in encryption software. If you’re using a Mac, the OS contains an easy to use encryption software called FileVault. Windows 7 offers BitLocker encryption, but its less friendly for portable devices.

2. USB Thumb Drives Are Not Backed Up

If you do lose the thumb drive and you have any sensitive or unique data on it, chances are those files are gone for good. Most users do not have a backup strategy for their thumbdrives and once its lost, its gone forever. You should find USB flash drives that have some kind of automatic backup software on them.

3. Flash Drives Are Easy to Steal

Being so small, someone could walk off with your Flash drive and you’re not likely to notice until its too late. These drives are useful little tools and common thieves love easy to steal gadgets. In Virginia, an employee reported a theft of an unencrypted USB flash drive with the data of 100,000 current and former Virginia Tech students on it. The state spent quite a bit of money notifying those students.

4. Flash Drives Can Become Infected with a Virus

If you carry a flash drive to easily work on your files on multiple computers, you may find yourself spreading viruses between the machines. Flash drives are great carrier devices for viruses and many worm writers have taken advantage of them to get past a hardened wall by security administrators. Many companies and government agencies ban the little storage devices for just this reason: too many virus infections by clueless and unprotected users.

5. Your Files Are Not Personal on a USB Thumb Drive

If you connect your flash drive to a shared computer, you are not provided for a reasonable expectation of privacy for your files. If you mix personal and work files on your thumb drive and your network administrator installs a program to backup your thumb drive on connection, you could be liable for illegal files copied to your computer. Also, if you’re not authorized to transport company data on a thumb drive and you lose one, you could be liable for the data lost.

There are countless reasons to use a USB Flash Thumb Drive – they are portable, easy to use, store lots of data, and easy to carry in a pocket (or even built into a pen). If you do decide the risks are worth it considering all of these positives, make sure you encrypt the data and back it up frequently.

Tips to Keep Your Photos Secure

Windows 7 Backups

Jeremy Reis — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:48:05 +0000

Microsoft has improved the backup experience quite a bit in Windows 7. Backup and Restore, a much improved backup utility, is more than enough for most users to backup their PC to a local storage device. The improved backup software uses shadow copy features of Windows 7 to make iterative backups when necessary. This reduces the amount of time necessary to backup the computer and is less interruption for you as you use the PC.

It supports backing up the computer to local storage devices (i.e. a local USB hard drive) and to network storage devices. Unlike Apple’s Time Machine, Microsoft gives you more options to setup the backup process. Apple understands that most people do not want to take the time to figure out what to backup, and instead automatically backs up files for you. Microsoft wants you to have a little more control in the process and gives you the option to either select your own files and folders, or just use the recommended settings.

I think Microsoft misses the boat a little on the scheduled backup – you can select what schedule you would like to backup on – daily, weekly, or monthly. Apple backs up the files as you change them. With the wide range of instant (or very quick) online backup services available that backup data as it changes, Microsoft should up its game and offer near real time backups – as long as the backup device is connected.

Recovery is simpler than previous versions of Windows and it is easy to find a specific file and recover it.

No related posts.

Using a Hard Drive Recovery Service

Jeremy Reis — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:37:06 +0000

First a grinding sound. Then came the clicking. Now nothing. Your PC sits frozen, unable to boot. You’ve rebooted a dozen times and nothing. You boot into the Windows XP installation disk and it doesn’t even see a hard drive in your system. All of your files are on there, oh no, all of my digital pictures are on that drive. What am I going to tell my wife?

Unfortunately, no backups. You’re sitting with a dead hard drive with no hope in sight. You call one of your “techie” neighbors to come help, but he can’t seem to get it working either. What do you do next?

Hard Drive Data Recovery Service

Fortunately, there are many hard drive data recovery companies out there that can likely rescue your data. First, stop using your hard drive! Continuing to use can cause further damage if the problem is mechanical. Second, you will need to know how to remove the hard drive – or find someone who can – to ship it to a firm to recover your data.

A data recovery service typically disassembles the hard drive and uses advanced equipment to read the data on the individual platters. This equipment is very expensive, so you will pay to have the data recovered – often between $500 and $1,000. Many of the firms offer a money back guarantee if they are unable to recover any data from the hard drive.

What to Expect from a Data Recovery Company

The process is a fairly simple one. Once you contract for a data recovery firm, you will ship your hard drive to them. Most offer service within a couple of days and many will ship the hard drive to a competitor if you desire if they are unable to recover the data. The hard disk recovery service firm will first examine the drive using software to see if they can recover the data. If not, the company will take apart the drive in a clean room environment and use special equipment to read data directly from the hard drive “platters.” If the company is able to recover the data, it will be copied to an external USB drive.

The company will then ship the USB hard drive to you. On the drive is the data they could recover – but many times, it is missing the file names. An operating system records the filenames in a special place on the hard drive and they are often not recovered with your data. So you will get all of the Word documents recovered in a folder with filenames such as doc001.doc, doc002.doc, doc003.doc, and so on.

Not a big deal if you have a dozen Word documents or Excel spreadsheets – but start to think about your photos and you can see this will be a new hobby – renaming and categorizing your photos. In the JPG folder, not only will you have all of your photographs, but you will also have any other JPGs on your system – stock clipart, images associated with software programs, and so on. Recovering your data – and then sifting through it all – will take some time.

Avoid Using a Data Recovery Company

We highly recommend you use some sort of backup solution for your computer. We are customers of Backblaze, an online backup service (only $5 per month!), and love the service. It’s a “set it and forget it” type solution – once you set it up, you don’t have to worry about it. For $5 a month, we have some peace of mind knowing our data is backed up. I’ve had my laptop hard drive die before and was able to recover everything simply by ordering some DVDs (we have a lot of data). We can also recover files online or have it shipped on a USB hard drive. Highly recommended!

Why don’t you backup your computer?

Jeremy Reis — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:33:49 +0000

For years, I wondered what was wrong with me? Why didn’t I feel it necessary to backup my computer on a regular basis? I wanted my data safe, but I didn’t take the time to implement a good backup strategy. I often searched for the holy grail of backups, but never found one. So why don’t people back up their computers?

1. People are lazy about backups

One answer proffered by many is that people are lazy about backing up their computers. I don’t buy it. I don’t think it’s a matter of laziness. I think it’s an unfair assumption that most people are lazy. We all work hard – perhaps we’re exhausted from work and family life and don’t want to think about one thing more?

2. It’s Too Much Hassle to Figure Out

Fortunately, over the years, Microsoft has figured this out and has tried to make backing up the PC easier. Mac users have it best – Apple has made it extremely easy with Time Machine and a Time Capsule to backup the Mac. I envy my wife – what I don’t envy is the terabyte of pictures she has (she’s professional photographer) and trying to come up with the right backup solution for her.

3. I Can’t Find the Right Solution

This has been my problem for years – I couldn’t find the right solution to back everything up. We produce a lot of data – and a lot of valuable data. I would either have to spend quite a bit of money for a solution, or be stuck with mediocre solutions. We used Mozy for some time, but it never seemed to finish backing up my wife’s Mac. Finally, we settled on BackBlaze for the PCs and the Mac, combined with a “syncing” hard drive solution for the photos.

There are many reasons why people do not backup their PCs or their Macs, but in the end, finding a good solution is extremely important – for your sanity!

Mozy 2.0 Online Backup Service Review