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#Winning on Friday the 13th

f13a_300.jpgToday is Friday the 13th. The only Friday the 13th of 2011 as it works out.

This specific date has special significance for me — and it has nothing to do with movies.

Since Friday the 13ths occur so infrequently, and are  somewhat famous, I use the day as a semi-random chance to get my digital ducks in a row.

Stop everything
My Friday the 13th routine starts with a quick review of all open projects and work. I don’t actually do any work on those projects, rather I look over everything, reviewing all the details and milestones, and just make sure that nothing’s being missed.

Backup everything
Next, I check out my data backup software and processes. In the blogosphere, the 13th of each month  has been promoted as Blog Backup Day, but really, protecting your data is something that everyone should do, be it through a highly-protected storage device like the Drobo-FS, or using a backup drive system like ClickFree’s, or some combination of  the two.

Vaccinate everything
Then, I make sure my anti-virus and firewall technology is current — and run a manual scan over all my drives. Yes, time consuming but it also provides me peace of mind that everything’s clean.

Defrag everything
Finally, I run a drive defragmentation utility over all drives that can benefit from it. Some operating systems automagically handle drive fragmentation and some don’t.

Data ducks in a row
And yes, that can be a lot of work, but at the end of it, I’ve got a good picture of my workload, and the state of my data on my computer systems. I’ve turned a day that’s famous for horror stories into a day of good. #Winning 🙂

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Have you backed up your data today?

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Today is World Backup Day, I’m told, but to be frank, every day you should be thinking about the safety of your data, there’s just too much of it that’s irreplaceable.

So, today, I’m going to take a quick look at some of the backup systems I use and have in place. Yes, I said systems. No one backup system is infallible, so redundancy is important.

And, of course, this is my thinking on the subject. You may have differing opinions, which is great, as long as you are backing up :smileyhappy:
Continue reading “Have you backed up your data today?”

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Fat lady sings. Winners announced soon.

Thus endith my first blog contest. And a very cool ride it was.

My good friends at Clickfree, a Canadian backup technology company, agreed to provide the prizes (Clickfree Transformer SE) for a blog contest challenging folks to provide there best (or worst I guess) backup horror story.

I’ve received some rather good entries. Check out the comments in the original post for the entire list, but here’s a couple of excerpts to give you the idea:

In a multi-developer game development environment:

We updated our local SVN repos and tried to work with the new changes that we were all mak­ing (plus unknow­ingly the changes this other guy made)… only the game ended up crash­ing. It worked fine before this latest update and no one was sup­posed to have made any changes that would cause this prob­lem, and yet, here it was, the game was crash­ing. Franticly we looked at all the changes “we” had made for the prob­lem (remem­ber we did not know this guy had checked any­thing in) and argue­ments rose over who was at fault of this issue (oddly no one fingered the par­tic­u­lar pro­gram­mer in ques­tion since we didn’t know he had com­mit­ted any­thing, plus it was 4am and no one was think­ing straight).

Stolen Grad-student Thesis data:

I got a frantic call from a grad stu­dent once, say­ing that someone had broken in and stolen his com­puter with all his thesis data and his 3/4 fin­ished draft thesis — two years of data col­lec­tion research and writ­ing gone!

Winners?

In the next week or so I’ll be reviewing the entries and notifying the winners. And yes, there will be a blog post about it. Stay tuned!

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How to backup files across a network easily

Before I start, a friendly reminder that you only have a day left to enter the contest for a free Click­free Trans­former backup system. Tell me a backup horror story.

It’s one thing to backup the files on your local computer and another to backup files stored on other computers on your network, or Network Attached Storage drives or servers.

In the first case, odds are you simply drag and drop files and folders that are important to you to a blank CD or DVD and burn your backup.

In the latter, well, usually a much more complex process with dedicated backup software is required.

Recently I grabbed a Clickfree Transformer SE to do some simple backup work on my desktop and laptop computers. Basically, the Clickfree Transformer plugs into a USB port. Then you plug a USB Hard Drive into the Transformer SE.

And the magic begins. The software quickly scans your local system and copies important documents, photos, media and other files to the USB drive attached to the Transformer SE.

But back to the theme of this post, ‘backing up files across a network easily’. Basically there’s two things you need to do.

Mapping your network drives
First, you have to have ‘mapped’ the network drives containing files to be backed up. Mapping the drive is a simple process that tells your local Windows operating system to treat the network drive as if it is a local drive — even assigning a drive letter to the network drive.

Microsoft has a pretty good walkthrough on mapping drives in Windows XP. The process for Vista and Windows 7 is very similar.

Configuring the Clickfree Transformer SE
And this process is pretty simple. First, you have to get to the Clickfree backup configuration screens.

If you’ve seen a backup run, then you know there’s a countdown prior to the process beginning. When you cancel that countdown, you abort the current backup. But you also now have the ability to configure your backup by selecting which drives (local or mapped network) and file types you want to back up.

This is important because it’s possible, when backing up mapped network drives, to try and backup more files than you have drive space available for…should  you try and backup your entire photo, video, and music libraries to one drive, for example. If this happens, then the backup also fails to the configuration screens, allowing you to tweak the config so you can fit the backup on the drive.

Ready to roll?
And that’s all there is to it. The next time your backup runs, either manually or automatically, files on those mapped network drives will be backed up along with the ones on your local computer drives. Of course, depending on how much you’re backing up, you may need to split the backup across a couple of drives 🙂

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Monthly Backups: Have you started yours?

Before I start, a friendly reminder that you only have 2.5 days left to enter the contest for a free Clickfree Transformer backup system. Tell me a backup horror story.

One thing I like to do is, at the end of every month, verify that I’ve got a full backup of what I like to call my ‘forgotten data’, the data on my desktop or laptop —  data stored on the machines I work on day-to-day.

Once you set up a process to back up your servers or NAS devices, it’s easy to get complacent and forget that some of the things that could be important to you are actually stored on your local computer not on the network; things like game progress saves, edits to photos, videos or podcasts you’ve downloaded..etc.

So near the end of each month, I look at that stuff, determine if it’s really important to me or not, then copy it to a place on my network that will be backed up (using one of my other backup systems).

How ’bout you? Are you regularly backing up this ‘forgotten data’?

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Spring’s on its way. Backup now — before you’re too busy.

I’ve written a lot about backing up your data over the years. But even though backups are important, somehow they’re always 2nd or 3rd on the priority list. ‘Something to do when I get time’. And as Spring approaches, time is one thing that there’s going to be less of as priorities shift from inside activities to outside – yard cleanup, rediscovering local parks with the dogs, etc.

But back to backups. The key to keeping your data safely backed up is to make your data backup process so simple you can forget about it, until you need it, of course.

In the past I’ve written about online backup as a solution, but recently I’ve started to use that as a secondary backup system. My primary backup system is currently local hardware based, works flawlessly so far, and is simple.

The Hardware
In my case, it starts with the hardware. These days, USB drives are quite inexpensive for their size, so I have three (500GB) units that I cycle through my backup routine. Each drive is naked — no fancy case — I use a Thermaltake BlacX docking station to handle the SATA to USB connection, which then lets me connect it to my computer. The drive simply rest in the unit and is then recognized by your computer as a USB storage device.

Which would be enough if I was to manually drag and drop my files to the drive each time I wanted to back up, but remember, I wanted it to be uber easy. Which brings me to the next piece of hardware; the Clickfree Transformer SE USB interface.

This little hardware device sits between your USB drive (or dock, in my case) and one of  your computer’s USB ports. Once it’s plugged in and mounted by your system, it asks to install the Clickfree backup software, and then launches a backup session (which you can abort and configure) automagically. Remember I said I like simple and reliable.

The Process
So, now that I’m set up hardware wise, how does my backup routine work, you may ask. It works like this:

  1. Configure, or reconfigure the Clickfree backup software to include new drives or folders (both on system and mapped to my system but mounted on my network)
  2. Verify or reset the backup time and frequency if needed
  3. Ensure one of my 3 SATA drives are mounted in the drive dock
  4. Carry on about my regular work – the backup will launch at the predetermined time and execute in background
  5. Now it gets a bit tricky with 3 backup drives, but here’s how I do it:
  • When complete, remove the SATA drive ( I’ll call it Drive A) and take it to a safe offsite storage location.
  • Pickup the drive (Drive B) currently at the offsite storage and bring it back to be used later.
  • Insert the third drive (Drive C) that I had on site, but not in use into the SATA drive dock. It’s now ready to be the backup drive at the next backup session.

That’s probably the most complex part of this process. I like to keep two drives on site and one drive offsite. The most recent backup is always offsite and safe. The next-to-most-recent backup is onsite and available if I need to recover a file or two I know have not changed since my last backup. And the oldest backup drive is ready to be used for the next backup session.

And that’s all there is to it. The Clickfree backup process doesn’t encrypt or compress the data, so should you need to recover a file or drive, it’s a very simple matter to get at the files.

Want one?
Now here’s the cool part – your backup process can get back on track thanks to the fine folks at Clickfree; they’ve given me a few of the Clickfree Transformer SE units to use as prizes in a contest.

If you want to get your backup process setup before Spring has sprung (and soaked up all your free time), either enter the contest (tell me your data backup horror story), or you can simply order a Transformer SE direct from Clickfree — and yes, I have a discount code so you can even get a deal on part of your backup hardware. Use Grier10 when checking out to get a 15% discount on your order.

So what are you waiting for…Spring is on its way and you know it will eat up all your free time. Save your data now, whatever backup system you use.

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Write a comment, win a prize!

I’ve been a fan of Clickfree backup systems for a while now. Dropdead simple and effective for most home usage. Well now the kind folks at Clickfree have given me the opportunity to share the love, so to speak, in the form of a contest, my first, in fact.

All the gory details are here, but the contest is really simple:

To enter:
Take your worst / best backup hor­ror story and write-up a com­ment on the contest page that describes a data loss hor­ror story that was aver­ted or would have been pre­ven­ted if you had a trusty recent backup. That simple.

But wait, there’s more!

Of course there is. If you’re not the writin’ type, you can still win — Clickfree has created a special code to get a 15% discount off your order through them. Simply enter Grier10 at the checkout and you’ll have 15% removed from the total.

Remember, don’t comment below if you want the comment to be considered an Entry — leave your comment HERE.

Again, full details on the contest here, but I’m looking forward to this. It’s my first contest, so be gentle with me please 😉