Year-End Hard Drive Housekeeping

I download quite a few ebooks and other pdf files from the internet. A few months ago I took a couple of steps to help me manage these files.

The first step was to create a folder on my hard drive called pdf_to_review. I then created a shortcut to this folder and placed it in a prominent location on my desktop. My problem is that I download a ton of things and then I do not ever look at them.

By putting the shortcut on the desktop, almost in the way of other things, I gently remind myself that I have pdfs that I need to review. It is helping a bit, though I have about 100 pdfs to look at.

The second step I took was download and installing Google Desktop Search. I will sometimes print out a page from a pdf and then when I want to find the original PDF, I can never find it. With Google’s desktop search, I can index everything on my hard drive and do a quick search. It works really well. I can now find what I need.

As I was looking for a particular PDF this morning, I notice that I had quite a few directories that were filled with PDF files. I also has quite a few audio files, mp3s and wavs that I had downloaded from the web. Why were there so many different directories full of files?

I realized that before I had created my pdf_to_review directory, I had not had a common place for all of these files. I counted 6 directories and 176 files that were misplaced. To make matters worse, I had duplicate copies of many of these files.

I spent an hour or so doing a bit of housekeeping on my hard drive. I move all the files to either the pdf_to_review folder or to the archive folder, where the files go after they have been reviewed.

My plan is to figure out how to attach a note to each reviewed file to remind myself if it had any valuable information.

Let me know what you think,

Marc

Another Year Another Backup

With 2006 ending in a few days, I decide I should make an end of the year backup. As I looked at the data on my hard drive, I decided that I should archive the following:

Quickbooks Data File
Since most of my data entry is completed for the year, I am going to make a copy of my Quickbooks file.

Invoice PDF’s
Over the past couple of years, I have been using email to send some of my invoices. As I review the sub directory I created called InvoiceArchive, I realize that it has over a hundred invoices in it. I need to save this also.

Digital Photos
I took many digital photos this year and I am sure that they exist on a backup somewhere. I am going to burn each set to a CD and label it.

Audio Files
I started working on audio products in 2006. The last project with source and edited recording created about 1.5 Gigabytes of data. I am going to burn that to a DVD and store it along with the hard copy of the materials that go with it.

Downloaded Bank Statements
I do most of my banking online and receive statement via email. I am going to burn all of these statements along with any other bank information to a cd.

I suggest that you do this also. Remember that you can never have too many backups.

Any thoughts or comments,

Happy New Year,


Marc

Best Practices – Horror Stories

I talked with the more paranoid client about me posting about his system and he didn’t think it was a good idea. I’ve decided instead to share a few horror stories with you.

A few years back I got a call from a client who was in a panic. Her Dell system was giving her fits and she call Dell’s tech support and ended up putting the restore disk in and completely wiping out here system. We had just done a partial backup a few days earlier so all was not lost. It was a 5 hour project just to get her to the point that we could restore data.

Another client who had promised me that she was backing up every day and taking the zip disk offsite called with a problem with her Peachtree Accounting program. The program had “lost” an entire month of data and at the point I was called, she couldn’t even access the data at all. When I checked the backup I found that it was 2 months old. She said she thought about backing up a lot, but was too busy to do so. Fortunately, we were able to find a company on the web that recovered her data completely. It took them less than an hour and the charged her $450.

Just last week a client called and asked me to recover some data off her floppy disks. She had save a dozen or so time consuming reports to the floppies and for some reason all the data was gone. I was unable to recover the data. I suggested in the future that she store things to the hard drive and back them up to the floppies. Better yet, I suggested that she get a flash drive.

I was visiting a friend a few months back and she asked me if I would mind looking at her laptop. She said she was working on it the night before and it made a weird noise. It was late so she set it aside for the evening. In the morning, it never would reboot. The hard drive had crashed and was not recoverable. She did have backups from a month earlier. She had created several websites over the past few days that she had not uploaded. She figured she lost about 20 hours worth of work.

What’s your horror story…

Let me know,

Marc

Best Practices – Case Study #1

Let me use on of my long term clients as an example of how we make sure that his office system is protected. This client is a small law firm with 3 attorneys and 5 staff members. The firm has 10 computers and a Novell file server. One of the attorneys lives in another state part of the time and logs in remotely from a laptop.

The law firm has a proprietary case management database that by itself (data only) is just under 100 MB. The firm also has another program that is used for filing bankruptcy claims what has about another 100 MB of data. Also, the groupware program that the office uses for its calendaring and internal email has another 325MB data.

Several years ago the firm started scanning all incoming and outgoing correspondence. At this point, anyone who needs to access a client file can do so via the network. The attorneys and staff no longer have to track down a physical file. This data has grown to almost 40 GB. The scanned data grows every day by about 1 MB.

The system has grown over the years and we have always tried to keep it simple, and also, we have not replaced things that did not need replacing. The Novell server was put into service in early 1993 and other than replacing a hard drive a few months ago, has never upgrade or for that matter, turned off.

When the firm started scanning documents, a new computer was purchased that was used only to store the scanned documents and run the scanning software. This system has a 100 GB hard drive in it. Originally the system had Windows 98 though that was replaced several years ago with Windows 2000. Instead of upgrading the existing OS, a second hard drive was installed with the newer OS and the old drive with all the scanned data was made a secondary drive.

As you might imagine, the data is a bit scattered around. In addition to the main shared data, each computer has it’s own data that needs to be backed up. Internet email is stored by Outlook Express in a hidden folder on each machine. Most of the users also save documents in the local “my documents” directory.

Ok, it’s a mess and a gigantic pain to make sure that everything gets backed up. Trust me, it does and we’ve used our backups many times to save someone’s bacon.

We have setup a machine on the network that works primarily as a backup system. This machine has 2 hard drives installed in the system and a third hard drive that is in a removable tray. We have two drives that we rotate into the removable system.

The primary data that we are concerned with is on the Novell server. This is the case management system, the bankruptcy system and the groupware system. This also is our smallest amount of data.

Due to the nature of the programs and the data, we make a complete backup of this data to a separate directory for everyday. These programs grow each day and over the years we have experienced corruption in our data files. Experience has taught us that sometimes we have to go back a few days to find a backup that has not been corrupted. Data corruption can occur and unless you try to access data in the corrupted area, you may not learn about the corruption right away.

On a daily basis, this same data is backed up to our removable drive. Just to be safe, we also backup the case management data to a USB flash drive, we have two or three of them, which we rotate and take off site.

The data on each local drive is backed up to one of the hard drives in our backup machine. This data is then backed up nightly to the removable hard drive.

The scanned data is also backed up nightly, both to one of the internal hard drives and then again to the removable drive. The hard drive in the server, which is only 4 GB in size is then backed up in it’s entirety to one of the internal hard drives.

To add to the confusion, we also have several images of the server backed up in different locations. At the present time, we do not have images of each local machine. We are in the process of upgrading up to 5 of the machines and as soon as they are configured, an image will be created. And we will take a copy of each image offsite.

Does this sound like it is overkill to you? Sometimes I think it is, and if I were starting from scratch, I would certainly do things a bit differently. I do like the fact that we have data backed up in more than one place. This has saved us several times over the years. I do like the fact that we take the data offsite. The primary database is taken offsite everyday. The rest of the data is take offsite at least once a week, usually a bit more often.

Using the removable drive tray allows us to quickly swap out the offsite storage drives. We recently upgrade the trays so that we don’t even have to turn the systems off.

Our next step is to set up a hard drive in a remote location onto which we copy the data that we take offsite. We are still trying to work out the details on this one. We tried using a USB drive that we could store somewhere a bit farther away from the main office, but someone, OK it was me, dropped it and it crashed.

In the next post I will tell you about another client, this one was a bit more paranoid about losing his data.

Best Practices – Where do we backup our data to?

In the previous posts we have figured out what data we need to back up and we have learned that a program that provides the ability to synchronize our data is a good way to go.

We now need to find a place to synchronize our data to. We also have to plan on whether or not we are going to take a backup offsite. We should also take a look at who will be responsible for making sure that the backups have completed successfully, and if the are to be taken offsite, that they actually are taken offsite.

The amount of data that we are backing up will play a very important part of deciding what type of device we use. I try to stress to my clients that they should have both onsite and offsite backup devices. Redundancy is a good thing. Let’s take a look at what our options are.

Internal Hard Drive – If you have just a single computer it is possible to add a second hard drive to your machine and use that drive as a backup device

Local Area Network – If your office has a LAN you can configure the program to synchronize you data to a shared network drive. Shared drives could be on another machine, a file server, or a dedicated Network Attach Storage device.

USB Hard Drive – Many companies now sell a self-contained USB hard drive that you can attach to any computer system.

Removable Hard Drive – You can purchase a package that includes a hard drive tray and a docking bay the stays in your computer. You then can copy your data to the hard drive and then remove it from the docking bay.

CD/DVD – You can burn your data to a CD or a DVD. I prefer to use the read only instead of the read-writes.

USB Flash Drives – If you have a limited amount of data you can use these flash drives for your backups.

ZIP Disks – Though limited in capacity, ZIP disks are still a viable option.

Floppy Disks – If you have any, throw them out now

In the next few post I will share some case studies with you.

Marc

Best Practices – Data Synchronization

I’ve had a few questions about how often you should create a clone of your hard drive. I’ll answer that in a later post, when I tie everything together.

We now should know where all of our data is saved, hidden or otherwise stored. We are now ready to create a plan of attack to backup our data.

We have two primary types of data. Static and dynamic. Static data is data rarely or never changes. An example would be downloaded programs, PDF files, videos or audio programs that you purchased on line. Your music that you ripped from your CD collection or the digital photos from last summer’s vacation are other examples.

Dynamic data is constantly changing. Your email is a database that grows every time you use it. Your word processing and spreadsheet files change all the time. Your accounting software is another database that grows and grows. The problem is that not all the files change every day. Backing up the changed files is crucial to your “best practices” plan.

I have struggled over the years to come up with a fool proof way to make sure that your files are being backed up. As the size of our data files has grown, almost out of control, I have had to find better faster ways of backing up.

In just the past year, I have come up with what I believe is a great way to automate and simplify to a point, your data backups.

Synchronization has made backups much easier to complete. I have found a few programs that allow us to backup only the files that have changed since the last backup, without major brain damage on our part.

With the synchronization programs, we identify the data we want to back up and also where we want the data to be backed up to. With most of my clients I am recommending a removable backup system, something that they can take offsite on a regular basis.

After selecting the files and the backup location, an initial backup is created. The next time a back is run; the program checks the local drive and the backup drive and compares the files. The program is designed to backup only the files that have changed.

The programs all have a way to schedule the backups to run automatically. I set the backups to run in middle of the night so that the files for the previous day are saved. The program will email me with the results of the backup. I check the email every morning and if a problem exists, I can contact my clients or stop by and check things out.

At this point our data is backed up. In the next post I will discuss the different types of devices that I backup to.

Marc

Best Practices – Types of Backups

OK! We know that we are not backing up our data enough or in enough different places and it is starting to keep us awake at night. What are we going to do to solve our problem?

Let me talk a little about backups and how to make them. We learned before that our computer is made up of the OS and the programs we have loaded on top of them and of course our data. Our data is usually the smallest component though certainly the most valuable. Without our data the computer is just a big dumb box.

When I suggest to a client that we think about backing up the entire system, OS, Software and Data, I at times meet with a bit of resistance. A client recently asked me why if I was just going to make a complete backup of everything, had I made them gather up all their software and serial numbers. If they had all the software, they didn’t need to back it up, right…wrong!

What many people don’t know is that your software is continually being updated. Windows gets updated almost every week as do most other programs. You also have many customized settings that would be lost if you had to complete rebuild your OS and programs.

So what types of backups are there? Glad you asked, you man not be when I am done.

The two primary types of backups I teach my clients about are images or drive clones and data backups. There are full and differential backups that are often discussed though I will leave those alone for now.

What is a drive image? A drive image is a snapshot of your computer OS, programs and data at the moment you create the image. I use Norton Ghost as my drive image software. With Ghost I am able to create an exact duplicate of the current configuration of my computer system. Ghost has many options for me to store this image by writing it to another hard drive, a CD/DVD, to a network drive, and many more.

Ghost also lets you clone a drive to another drive with little or no brain damage.

Great! So what?

I’ll tell you why this is important to both of us. Last week I got a call from a client who had trouble booting his computer. The system wasn’t recognizing the hard drive and was actually booting from a second, older drive that we had left in the machine when we upgraded to the newer drive.

My first inclination was that the drive was bad. I did a little hocus pocus and I was able to get the drive to function. I ran a Windows check disk and soon had the drive running like new. I booted and rebooted with no problem. Convinced that the drive was fine and that something had corrupted the boot up process, I left the client an invoice and went on my way.

I got a call a few days later and the problem had occurred again. I went by my vendor and picked up a replacement drive. Fearing the worst, that the drive had crashed and everything was gone, I packed up my bag of tricks and headed to the not so happy client.

When I arrived I did a little more hocus pocus and got the drive running again. I loaded my Ghost program on the system and created an image of the drive to my USB hard drive. I was able to reload this image onto the new hard drive without any problem and within an hour my client was up and running and happy to see me leave.

Had I not been able to clone or image the drive, I probably would have spent 3 hours trying to recreate the bad drive. I would have had to format the new drive, reinstall the OS and then all the programs. I would have had to recreate all the network shares and remap network drives. I would have had to reconfigure the email and the internet logins.

Three hours of rebuilding compared to less than an hour for the cloning.

I’ll have to tell you that I got lucky. Both times the hard drive responded and I was able to get to the data. I have had many times when the hard drive was deader than dead and there was nothing I could do.

I guess in hind site I should have made an image of the drive the first time I went out. This would have protected me in case the drive failed completely. Like I said, I got lucky.

More on backup types in the next post.

Marc

Dealing with 100 Spam E-mails Everyday

Greetings,

We all get spam. We all hate spam. Nobody reads the spam. Why do we still get spam if nobody ever reads it.

Spam must work, or they would stop doing it. I get a lot of direct mail piece in my snail mail box every week. I through them all out and the next week it seems like I am getting the same thing. But, direct mail works so they keep doing it.

The problem with spam is that the products they are selling are almost always offensive. When you think about the messages in most spam are for either “enlargement” products or “enhancement” products, it makes you wonder.

I get about 100 spam messages a day. Over the past few weeks I have made a few changes to my Outlook Express to help me deal with these messages. I use TrendMicro’s PC-Cillin as my Internet Security/Virus scanning etc, program.

Built into this program is a spam filter. The filter has 3 levels. I have chosen the highest level, hoping to filter out as much as possible. Another feature allows me to create an exception list to either always allow or block any email address.

I have been tweaking the exception list on a regular basis. I receive a ton of email blasts that I actually want, and many of those are tagged as spam. I also have had some emails from friends tagged as spam. Unfortunately the program isn’t perfect. Messages that are obviously spam are getting through.

I have setup a rule in my Outlook Express to automatically delete anything that has been targeted as spam. The problem is that since some good messages get tagged, I always look in my deleted box to see if anything good has been deleted.

Spam isn’t going away, I guess we just have to learn to deal with it.

Let me know how you deal with your spam issues,

Marc

Best Practices – Backing up your data!

After my last post I decide to give myself a backup checkup. I really am terrible at backing up my data. Do as I say, not as I do!!!!

Here is what I found when I started to look at what data I have and where it is and is it safe. I know that sounds like a lot to tackle at one time, well it is and it is important that you and I do this. And do it often.

My computer system is a bit larger than most would think for a one man operation. I have 2 laptops and a desktop system. I also have a Linux system in my office for some testing purposes and so I can surf the web from my easy chair. My wife has a system that she uses for her business and I use for quick backups. Each of my 3 sons have systems that are attached to the network. I have a wireless router for the laptops.

I have plenty of ways to backup my data. I have the Linux box configured so that every Windows system can access the shared drives. I could copy all my files here automatically. I have a few removable (USB) hard drives that I should backup to, but that would me connecting them to my main system. I also have a few ZIP drives that I could use. Also, I have an assortment of USB Flash drives – small ones 256MB that are always on my bookcase.

So I have no excuse for not backing up. I have the time, the technology and the knowledge of what I would lose if I lost my hard drive on my main system. Do I have a death wish of sorts? Am I above losing my data because I am a “Professional”? Nope, I think I am just lazy.

Let me share with you what I found out about my data. I have about 10 Gigabytes of data in my “My Documents” directory. I haven’t taken the time to research what data I have that would take up so much space. I am sure most of it is important, so I have to back it all up.

I have several programs such as Quickbooks that store data in subdirectories of the program. This makes it a bit of a pain to backup if you don’t know where the data is stored. Outlook Express, and Outlook for that matter, hides its data in a hard to find hidden directory. Microsoft forgot to build a backup program into either program. I also have many shortcuts and bookmarks that I have become accustomed to using. I know I should back these up, though I’ll have to dig around to find where they are stored.

My thoughts are that I should take the time over the next few days or even weeks to write down and track my computer usage. I should do a Google search first and see if there is any tracking software that would do this for me. As I learn what programs I use on a regular basis, I can then look at where the data is stored. I have several programs that work really well when it comes to data synchronization.

I also need to decide how best to backup my data and where I am going to store the backups. At this time I don’t have anything stored offsite. Actually, I don’t have anything stored anywhere but next to the computer. I guess I have a lot of work to do! How about you?

Here’s your next assignment:

Write down what programs you use and determine where the data is stored


Once we know what data needs to be backed up, we can look at the many options available to us.

Let me know what you think,

Marc

Best Practices – Let’s Review what we have learned!

As a result of writing these posts. I’ve decided that my personal “disaster plan” needs some updating. I’ve decided to share some of my findings with you as a way to review the previous posts.

What do I use my computer(s) for? I primarily use my computer for communication. I use it to write these posts and I also use email as a very important means of communications with my clients and business associates.

I spend a lot of time online doing research and keeping up to date on changing technologies. I subscribe to many ezines and RSS feeds from about a dozen blogs that provide me with good information.

I am a spreadsheet fanatic. The first spreadsheet was Visicalc, introduced in the early eighties I believe to run on the Apple II and the Radio Shack TRS-80. I worked for Radio Shack at the time and immediately got why I would want a computer when I saw the power (limited as it was compared to today’s programs) of Visicalc.

I think that I tend to over analyze things because I have so much fun, yes I said fun, with my spreadsheets. If you only use a spreadsheet to add up a few numbers, drop me a note and I will share some things with you.

I also use my computer for my business and person accounting. I use Quickbooks Pro 2003 for the business and Quicken for the family. I use Tax Cut Deluxe for my personal taxes.

I use Microsoft Office 2003 on top of Windows XP Professional. Internet Explore 6.0 and Outlook Express are my choices for web browser and email clients.

I know where all my disks are. They are in my office – scattered in 4 or 5 different places, but all of them are in my office. I think I can find most everything I would need to recreate my computer system. On the other hand, as I type this I realize that many programs and updates are stored in a “downloaded files” directory and the serial numbers are in emails sent to me when I purchased the software on line. I think that they are backed up…. I’d better check.

How is your “Best Practices” exercise coming along? Post a comment or two if you don’t mind.

Marc