My second pocket hard drive finally arrived from Amazon, and I have reached a milestone in my digital life: I now have two complete backups on portable media that will never be in the same place at the same time. Are those little drives different? I’m fairly certain that those pocket drives are all the [...]

Last week I received my shiny new copy of iLife ’09 in the mail, and I found that the new Faces feature of iPhoto has turned out to be far more interesting than I had imagined based on the reviews. Once the application had finished searching through my library of thousands of family snapshots, I [...]

  A list of several useful hardware and software tools with which to arm yourself before you attack the file cabinet. When I first became interested in woodworking, I checked out several books on the subject from the library. Invariably, within the first two or three chapters, there was an illustrated list of desirable hand [...]

From time to time I catch myself focusing on dealing with paper after it is in my home, rather than finding ways to slow the flow. Here’s an interesting list of general greenness, reducing the total amount of paper in the home: 19 Tips to go Paperless at Home I like the ideas in Julie’s [...]

A short while ago I was reading some poor guy’s blistering rant of how his Drobo died, taking about a terabyte of data with it. It’s a tragic situation,  and your heart goes out to the fellow.  Don’t be that guy! The Drobo is one of the most talked about external storage devices, boasting an amazing ability [...]

Those tiny USB drives we so casually toss about are convenient and easy to lose. Here’s some thoughts on making sure you don’t lose your secrets to strangers. While my family was on vacation over the holidays, I managed to calmly back our rental car into a concrete column in a parking garage, denting the [...]

Do you have an aging machine gathering dust in the corner of your closet? Why not give that machine new life as a Network Attached Storage device, providing a central disk drive that everyone in your house can access. What does this have to do with going paperless? Sooner or later as you go down [...]

How does one go about making nice pretty scans of sheets of paper that happen to be so inconveniently bound in a book? I’m not kidding about the saw. Last Sunday I decided to scan in some aging technical manuals, but they were at least an inch thick each, and there was absolutely no way [...]

Brad Templeton recently posted his idea of how all of our manuals and documentation should be easily downloadable from a reliable site based on the UPC of the product. Since not all companies last forever, a sort of online escrow repository would make things even better. See: Going paperless by making manuals easier to find I [...]

I was just reading an article entitled Backup Basics — Or, How to Avoid Using Data Recovery Services! from Dr. Greg Mulhauser’s site. He followed this up with a second article: One Example of a (Hopefully!) Sound Backup Strategy. From the original article: What would you do if all your practice data suddenly disappeared? Data recovery services exist to [...]