I can’t help it. As soon as I hear of a new version of anything, whether it’s an application or the entire operating system, I have to install it. Now prudence would lead one to take careful steps and wait until all of the wrinkles are ironed out before starting. I was almost not prudent [...]

Whether you are a cube dweller sharing an electronic document with your next door neighbor or a homeowner attempting to catalogue your digital life, you will soon encounter resistance in the form of document incompatibility. What good is a byte-for-byte perfect duplicate of the original if you cannot open it in an application? My own [...]

“How a lifestyle experiment and a disaster made me realize the value of turning atoms into bits” — Mike Elgin A couple of months back, Mike Elgin of Computerworld posted an article on his foray into the paperless world: Paperless office? Ha! How about a paperless life? In this followup article, he considers how lifestyle changes and [...]

  How can you keep your data from being held hostage? Have you ever stopped to consider exactly how much information is permanently stored within your favorite applications, locked down to all but the most determined command-line commando? Perhaps the easiest way to explain what I’m getting at is by way of an example…

Many of us have smartphones these days that hold substantial quantities and varieties of data. What happens to that data and how you replace it are two key questions to consider in the event that a mobile telephone is lost.
If you haven’t thought about it much before, why not take a few moments to consider the factors involved and any changes you might want to make to help minimize the stress from such an event.

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 [...]

  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 [...]

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 [...]