backup

Backing up digital photos in the field

A post earlier this year by CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland pondering how he should store photos while traveling got me thinking about the same question.

I can't claim to have come up with "the answer," but I've thought about the issues, read through some discussions about what people consider best practices, and have tried to roughly quantify relative failure rates. What's right for you will depend on priorities and circumstances, but hopefully the following will offer some food for thought.

Real-world failure rates are hard to come by. However, having been the owner … Read more

DriverMax gets an Agent

Freeware driver back-up utility DriverMax gets a full point upgrade, but the big feature promised for this version doesn't seem to be quite ready for prime time. DriverMax Agent, which is supposed to bulk out the program with a customizable driver update check, currently only works on the Windows Vista 32-bit operating system. Sorry, XP users.

The irony of this product update coming during a week when Redmond has spectacularly backtracked on Vista isn't lost on me.

The agent does seem to work well on Vista, in so far as I can both manually check if my drivers … Read more

A somewhat new twist on backup: PutPlace

At the Under the Radar conference earlier this week, the pitch from Joe Drumgoole, CEO of PutPlace, was tragically misunderstood. Drumgoole pitched his product as the one true glue to bind all a family's media together. Webware's Josh Lowensohn saw through it, but the judges and the audience did not, and neither did I. So I followed up with Drumgoole the day after the conference to give him another chance to make his case. See also the video interview at the end of this post.

PutPlace is backup. That's really it. It competes with services like Mozy … Read more

Featured Freeware: SyncBack

SyncBack is a straightforward backup utility that makes it a snap to safeguard and synchronize your files. Surprisingly flexible for a free program, SyncBack can save your files anywhere: on external hard drives, in ZIP archives, write them on CDs (using UDF), or transfer them via FTP. Recovering from a drive loss is also cinch, with a convenient restore tool that replicates folder trees along with the files in them.

It lets you define multiple scheduled backup jobs so you can just set 'em and forget 'em, too, allowing users to create specific backup jobs for certain folders or file … Read more

Why don't you back up your computer?

Most computer users know they should back up the files on their computer, yet many don't. Why not?

Leo Notenboom raised this question recently, see "Why don't people back up?"

No computer techie can answer this question, which is why both Leo and I have to ask. We're computer nerds and, as such, backup is part of our DNA. Techies can't put themselves in the shoes of the millions of computer users who don't back up their computers. We're different.

So, those of you who don't back up your computer, but … Read more

Featured Freeware: iDump

iDump offers freeware fans a quick and slightly dirty way to copy music from an iPod to a Windows machine. Of course, by "dirty" I mean "unclean," as in, iDump runs a bit unstable.

Regardless, the app shows you the song's iPod path, cracking Apple's unusual file-saving protocol. A main window tab takes you to output options, and from there you just have to choose your songs and hit Copy. Clicking once on a song selects it, and there's also a smart feature that plays the song you've selected in iTunes.

The … Read more

Judging techies

It takes one to know one. So, how can non-techies form an opinion on the abilities of a computer nerd? There is a language gap, a knowledge gap and, likely, a personality gap to overcome. Here's a tip.

Ask the techie about the system (meaning hardware, software and manual procedures) used to backup the computers they are responsible for.

I see three possible answers.

The techie will brag about what a great system they devised or inherited. The techie will gripe about how management has held them back from implementing a much better system than the one currently employed. … Read more

Power Downloader restores Mozilla applications

Last week when Microsoft released Windows XP Service Pack 3 unto the world, a few "lucky" XP users had their computers come to a screeching, brain-jarring halt. Kitty Kilobyte's best friend Penny Penryn was hit badly by this bug, and she had to do a full reinstall of her operating system.

As frustrating as a crash of this magnitude can be, Penny Penryn was surprisingly as cool as a fan for a quad-core CPU. She didn't lose any of her important documents because followed Power Downloader's advice and backed them up using SyncBack. She didn'… Read more

Protect your PC with Windows Live OneCare 2.0, free after rebate

Sure, you can safeguard your PC with various freeware security apps, but there's something to be said for having a single program that protects you from viruses, spyware, phishing, hackers, and so on. Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare 2.0 is such a program, and Amazon has it on sale for $30--minus a $30 mail-in rebate. Shipping is free, bringing the grand total to zero dollars.

Windows Live OneCare 2.0 (wow, what an embarrassingly bad name) combines real-time anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-phishing tools with a managed firewall, a data backup utility, and system optimization. You can protect … Read more