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 enough this week.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

So folks have been talking about the new Snow Leopard operating system for Mac. Over the past year, Apple has been positioning this version as more of a “under the hood” upgrade that tightens things up rather than a glitzy overhaul of the user interface. No matter what they said it was, I figured that it was newer, and therefore better, than the current OS—Leopard–and I had to have it.

I ordered my copy last week on Amazon and sat down with a smile as I awaited its arrival. And then I thought about doing a few quick Googles to see how other people have been making out with Snow Leopard. I immediately happened upon a few upgrade guides like this one, providing sage advice about the upgrade process. They recommended the “slash and burn” method, starting from a clean hard drive, and I felt that was a good idea. Nothing better than a wipe and fresh install to make your machine zip along twice as fast. And therein lies a tale.

The first sign of trouble

As I was reading up on the Snow Leopard upgrade process, I happened upon lists of “unsupported software” and casually glanced at the lists, expecting esoteric tools only used by three über geeks in the audio recording industry or perhaps some exotic ray-tracing software. Much to my surprise, I saw two of my favorite applications, in a very very short list of troublesome apps: Parallels and EyeTV.

I immediately checked the versions and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that my EyeTV version was safe. But, Parallels was another story… They have no plans for patching Parallels 3 to work with Snow Leopard, and why should they, when they can sell us Parallels 4!

So, I ordered my fresh copy of Parallels 4, from Amazon with a twenty dollar rebate. When it arrived, I spent an evening upgrading Parallels, and I thought I was all set for Snow Leopard.

Preventative Measures

Following the advice of the upgrade websites, and prior experience, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a full backup of my hard drive on a spare external drive. On a hunch, I turned on the drive that I use for Time Machine and had it do one final “Time Machine” sweep through the system before bidding adiu to Leopard.

I knew that I had all of my installation media for stuff like iLife and Photoshop Elements, and I had all of my license keys in electronic form. It would be a simple matter of mounting the backup drive, copying over my loads of documents, and peering into them to find keys.

The first attempt

I boldly inserted the Snow Leopard disk and booted from the DVD drive, selecting the “Slash and Burn” method of installation. I reformatted the hard drive and went off for dinner while Snow Leopard installed.

Trouble

When I got home that evening, I started the lengthy process of installing stuff. I suddenly realized that it was not as easy as I had hoped: it’s one thing to reinstall something like Microsoft Office, but there seemed to be more loose ends than I had considered:

• How would I migrate my Mail settings from the old image to the new?
• What was the best way to migrate the Address Book contents?
• iTunes is great, but it has tendrils in everything. Can I simply copy my old library to the new without messing up my iPhone, Address Book, or other linked stuff?
• How about those nice password tools such as 1Password and SplashID that keep your passwords safe and sound? I had no clue how to get their contents from the backup. I wasn’t sure if it was even possible to do so—perhaps I was supposed to have exported the data beforehand.

It was becoming clearer to me that I had not done my homework at all.

More trouble

My initial shock at the depth of the upgrade process led me to start making a list of applications and looking at what I needed for each one. I soon found out that Snow Leopard support is somewhat spotty in many applications. In particular, the FineReader for ScanSnap software that I depend on so much for my scanning work flow is not fully supported. Fujitsu says that they will have an update soon and to keep checking their web site.

My password tool, 1Password, is another problem child. It works only on 32-bit Safari, and Snow Leopard now runs Safari in 64-bit mode. Of course, a new version is coming, and I will probably have to pay for it, but it is still in beta.

There was quite a bit of chatter on the Web about whether Adobe Photoshop Elements would work on Snow Leopard, and the responses seem split fifty-fifty for now.

Three very important tools were in danger of running in limited mode or not running at all, so I had to throw in the towel.

Time Machine saves the day!

As I sat, humbled, before my vanilla install of Snow Leopard, I admitted defeat. I slipped the Snow Leopard DVD back in the drive and rebooted from the DVD. This time, I selected the “Restore from Time Machine” option and turned on my Time Machine drive.

Guess what? It worked perfectly! Unlike many software products, Time Machine does exactly what it promises.

Within a few hours, my machine was fully restored to the way it looked seconds before I made my first attempt at Snow Leopard.

A Final Word

Learn from my mistakes, and my salvation by the full backup. As much as you can’t wait to upgrade, please do the following:

• Inventory all of your applications that you really need.
• Obtain the installation media (download or CD) for every single one.
• Obtain the keys for every single one.
• Investigate whether you need to export data from any of them, and make a checklist for these exports prior to upgrade.
• Check the “Unsupported Software” lists that are out there for any red flags.
• Check the web sites of your most important apps for their official word.
• And finally, do a complete backup!

It’s amazing how many applications and weird little utilities we forget we have. How could I have possibly remembered that I compiled a custom copy of the “rsync” executable for my backup workflow? I would have lost that and had to figure out how to rebuild it on Snow Leopard.

And I haven’t even talked about making sure your documents make it safely onto the new machine. That’s a whole ‘nother story.

In case I forgot to say it, please make a full backup.

[Update: I'm giving Snow Leopard a rest for a few months]

It has been said that Time Machine allows you to do a full restore from bare metal, and I’m living proof: I have done exactly that twice in the past week, with astounding success.

Encouraged by an episode of the Mac Geek Gab where they talked about their experiences upgrading their existing systems to Snow Leopard, I decided I would give the upgrade-in-place option a try. I expected some things to not work well and others to be quirky, but here’s what happened…

The actual install was painless, taking an hour or so to complete. I then began to kick the tires to see what was broken.

It was clear where those 64 bits went: apps like Safari were positively zippy, and I was pleasantly surprised with each new application I launched. All of my special settings seemed to make it through alive, including my password manager, though I did have to re-enter some of my registration keys. All of my mail and contacts made it through well. I was able to sync my iPhone without incident.

I found a few apps that weren’t working correctly and I looked for newer 10.6-compatible versions. I found newer versions of Yep and xGestures.

I did note that there is currently no ad blocker available for Safari that runs in 64-bit mode. This is disappointing because even though I understand that Apple wants us to see their ads, I can’t imagine that they really want us to suffer from the flickering jumping dreck that should have ended with the hated “punch the monkey” banners of years gone by. The fact of the matter is, if I want that 64-bit speed and snap, I guess I have to watch ads.

The Showstopper

I decided to scan a document to see just how difficult it would be to get my workflow going again. Michael F, below, wrote the truth about the situation: the scanner works fine in certain modes, but the OCR software doesn’t.

He pointed out that it was a problem of the FineReader software looking for a specific bit of metadata in the PDF identifying it as a ScanSnap PDF. Sadly, that metadata string changed.

The Finereader software is looking for “Mac OS X 10.5.8 Quartz PDFContext”, but under Snow Leopard, the string is set to “Mac OS X 10.6 Quartz PDFContext” instead.

There are ways to tweak PDF metadata, and one of them is by using pdftk.

I went to the pdftk site, all ready to download it and start OCRing my PDFs. I was greeted with less than optimal news: they have a version compiled for Panther, a version of OS X from several years ago.

I knew it wouldn’t work, but I gave it a try anyway: the app told me it needed Rosetta to run. I could have installed Rosetta at that point, but I figured I wanted a proper compiled version.

From there, I looked into compiling the app on OS X 10.6. I should have remembered my struggles with this several months ago on a Solaris Unix box when I found that pdftk depends on a monster called GCJ that required about forty other software packages to compile—it seemed a gargantuan task that I wasn’t ready to begin.

On a hunch, I inspected the content of a new pdf and an old pdf, the latter still acceptable to FineReader. Though much of the file was raw binary, the metadata was in text at the end. A short sed script was all it took to swap the nice text string for the offending 10.6 one.

In spite of my best efforts, FineReader still rejected my hand-tooled PDF file. It knew that it was a bogus file.

I have looked into Abbyy FineReader several times before, as well as Fujitsu’s ScanSnap support, and was unimpressed. For two vendors that produce products that are at the top of their class—FineReader is arguably the best OCR you can get for Mac, and ScanSnap is the best document scanner for the common man—they sure do have miserable customer support.

It is as if neither company cares a whit about the Macintosh platform or their customers. While most other vendors are busily patching their products and giving hourly updates on their Snow Leopard compatibility progress, Abbyy and Fujitsu just don’t seem to care that their best-of-breed combo suddenly doesn’t work on Mac.

Once they get this sorted out (hopefully in the next few months) I’ll give Snow Leopard another try. In the meantime, I’m sticking with good old Leopard.

My own choice for document format is almost always Portable Document Format (PDF), but rather than just state this, I would like to consider some of the factors involved.

This is the first of a series of articles covering document formats. This article focuses specifically on the distinction between works in progress and finished product.

Two Kinds of Documents

In general, we can consider two broad categories of documents: working documents (works in progress) and archived documents. You can call these by many different names, but the fundamental distinction is still there.

Working Documents

These are documents that you are still writing. They share some characteristics:

• They must be retained in their original format, such as Microsoft Word.
• The formats are often very specialized. Quite often another tool can import such a document, but you usually lose something in the translation.
• You and your colleagues need to have the same editor software to view and modify the documents.
• They are often short-lived. This phase of a document’s life usually doesn’t more than a few months (though a template document might be kept for many years).
• A good backup strategy will need a short window between backups; these documents change often, so they should be backed up frequently.
• You may want to consider a document versioning strategy, so you can see how the document appeared at different stages during its life.

Here are some examples:

• Microsoft Word documents
• Visio diagrams
• Photos that you are still retouching
• Audio files that you are in the process of curating (e.g. applying ID3 tags)

Archived Documents

These are documents that are read-only, meant to be viewed but never modified.

• They often must be rendered in very precise ways, so each viewer sees the document as intended (consider a 1040 form from the IRS)
• They may be around for a long time.
• These documents should be less tightly bound to a particular software product. PDF vs. MS Word; JPG vs. Adobe Photoshop.
• They typically have a wider audience. You may share a work-in-progress with a co-worker or two, but a finished read-only document might be read by hundreds or thousands.
• Any user should be able to read these documents, with little effort.
• Your backup strategy is probably going to be more focused on longevity and less focused on frequency. These documents are in it for the long haul.

Why not start with a simple example?

Here is a screenshot of an application I use in my day job:

Just in case you did not recognize the unmistakable visage of this small molecule, I have labeled it appropriately.

This is an application called ChemDraw from Cambridgesoft, and unless you are a chemist you have probably never heard of it. My molecule is saved as caffeine.cdx in a format that only ChemDraw knows intimately (though there are other similar chemistry tools that can import this file format).

My point is simple: if your friend sent you a copy of caffeine.cdx, how exactly would you open it?

In contrast, here is a more accessible rendition of the same molecule in PDF format. Try it out; you should be able to view the molecule, and zoom in on details.

What if you had to show someone this document five years down the road? Do you want to have to chase down a possibly obsolete version of a very expensive application that might not even run on your operating system?

Obsolescence

Some time back I was sifting through some files on an old server at work that apparently had been written by me. Fifteen years ago I was attending night classes and writing many of my English assignments on a VAX running VMS at work (over my lunch break!). I was using some anemic version of WordPerfect that had been ported to VMS. This arrangement saw me safely through college, but was not conducive to long term document storage.

Do you have any idea what VMS directory structures look like? Maybe, and maybe not. Are these files compatible with the contemporary DOS versions of WordPerfect? Maybe.

Could I open these files on a Windows Vista machine in 2009 using Microsoft Word? With luck. What about using Pages from Apple iWork on my Mac running OS X? Doubtful.

Not only do we need to be concerned with special applications that only a select few (with expensive licenses) have, but we also need to consider that the file format might be obsolete beyond hope.

For an exaggerated example, consider the image of punched paper tape at the top of this article. I would have no clue what to do if I were given a roll of this tape.

Which do you keep?

Look at the characteristics of the document types listed above and see which one fits your document best. Quite often you will find yourself keeping both the original document and a PDF rendition. Indeed, this is what many professional document databases do.

If you can’t easily choose one, keep both. In most cases, I have found that I only need the PDF rendition for the long term and I couldn’t care less about the source document.

Summary

In the world of the paperless home, much of what we do is store digital copies of old documents for searching and possible reprinting some time in the future. Don’t make the mistake of keeping all of your documents only in their original editable format; you might just find yourself with a digital file that cannot be viewed!

“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 the raging wildfires closing in on his city have made it clear to him that it is critical to protect whatever can be easily preserved in digital form.

Mike gives a sound strategy, starting off with a fast pass at just getting it digitized with little regard for perfection, followed by more focused efforts.

He pointed out how some objects just aren’t as important as the memories that they represent, illustrating this with a photograph of his son’s martial arts trophies that he has since donated to various organizations.

Mike makes it very clear that backups are mandatory. My kind of guy!

Here’s the whole article: Why you should digitize ‘everything’ (Computerworld.com)

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…

My Wife’s Email

Some months back, my wife was moving from a PC to a Mac, and all that remained was to configure her email. She had been using Eudora on the PC for many years and had several thousand emails in her mail folders. It went without saying that there would be dire consequences if I were to lose a single scrap of her electronic correspondence.

My first thought was to simply install Eudora on the Mac and then copy the database from one to the other. But there was bad news waiting for me in Eudoraland… The product is discontinued and no longer supported. They haven’t released a version since 2006, and you can’t even buy a license to turn off the ads anymore.

Eventually, after quite some time in Google, I found that one could simply point Eudora to a Gmail IMAP account, then drag all of the messages from the local folders to the IMAP folders.

Unbelievably, it worked exactly as advertised. I dragged thousands of messages to her Gmail folders and the machine bogged down for a whole day as it uploaded everything to Gmail.

Garbled Messages

Once I finished the job, I inspected the moved messages. Much to my horror, many of them were displayed in XML format, with embedded HTML tags all over the place. A few experiments verified that this was not an error on my part. The same message would show up garbled in the Gmail web interface, the Apple Mail client, but would still appear cleanly in Eudora, served from Gmail.

The message above, shown in Apple Mail as XML, was rendered properly in a fresh install of Eudora on a clean PC:

Clearly, Eudora had mixed in some special sauce of its own when it stored all of those files on Gmail’s IMAP server!

In the end, we accepted the situation: from that point forward she was golden, using Apple Mail and Gmail. If she ever needs an old message, we can fire up Eudora on an old machine and view the message.

What’s the point?

Many applications that we use in our paperless workflows and lives have sinister tendrils working their way throughout your data, slowly adding value to your life by their secret internal data that they will never relinquish. You may never notice just how dependent you are on their “secret sauce” until you are forced to change applications.

Tagging

One of the most harmless appearing kinds of secret data comes in the form of tagging. Just exactly where do you think those tags in your iPhoto or Picasa library are going? If you wanted to switch from one of those fine products to the other, how would you get thousands and thousands of tags saying “Rome, 1998″ and “Joey’s Graduation” moved over?

The problem is that these applications keep their tag information in a separate database from the actual images. Many similar applications suffer from the same problem: if you tag documents in a product such as DEVONthink, your tags are stored separately from your files.

There are standardized ways of embedding certain kinds of tags in many multimedia files, such as the ID3 tags for MP3 files and metadata tags in PDF documents, but often applications do not modify these in an effort to avoid touching your original.

And the day you want to leave them, they will hold your tags hostage!

Mysterious Black Boxes

I blame iTunes for the plethora of black box applications that encourage you to feed them multimedia files, which they promise they will squirrel away in a perfectly sensible and secure location.

When you drop a bunch of MP3 files on iTunes, they get shuttled into the relatively orderly iTunes library. When you drop a set of photos on iPhoto, they go into a pretty odd arrangement of folders that are created based on dates and source folder names. Sometimes iPhoto pays attention to the file timestamp; other times it uses the EXIF data within the picture.

DEVONthink does similar magic with PDF documents; they tell you to dump stuff in there and let DEVONthink’s smarts sort it all out for you.

This file organization is a different kind of “secret sauce” that you would lose if you were to switch horses.

An Unhappy iTunes Story

I smiled when I read this silly little anecdote:

“Eddie finally came in with his portable disk and uploaded his 85GB collection of MP3 files into her computer. Okay, it might be illegal, but who cares – everybody’s doing it. Eddie looked at her importing the MP3 files into iTunes, Angie’s favourite player, and suggested that she switch to Winamp, which is just a way cooler piece of software. Angie wasn’t sure. Eddie explained that he had all those carefully crafted playlists for Winamp, mixing the files he just gave to Angie into really spacey all-night sessions, and Angie should really try it out.

Angie did install Winamp with Eddie and has opened it a few times since then. She still doesn’t know … well, in fact she does. That software just doesn’t feel right to her. What’s worse, Angie has spent years in rating her song files with iTunes, and quite rarely hears any bad pieces anymore. But if she goes for Winamp, all those ratings seem to be lost.

Wouldn’t you know it, just after installing Winamp it started – most embarrassingly – playing her forgotten Backstreet Boys disks. Eddie said nothing but did raise his eyebrows disapprovingly. Well, now those files are gone, but shouldn’t there be a way to export ratings from iTunes to Winamp?

After a few days of fiddling with Winamp, Angie gives up. She will stick with iTunes. She’s got so much content already in that library that she could not be bothered to switch. Maybe Eddie could get an iTunes converter for his precious playlists?” 

— Lehikoinen, Juha, Antti Aaltonen, Pertti Huuskonen, and Ilkka Salminen. “Chapter 4 – Metadata Magic”. Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age. John Wiley & Sons. © 2007.

What can you do about it?

Not much. Software companies have a financial incentive to make it easy to import data, but there is not much incentive to make it easy to export data. If your chosen product was very popular, as Eudora was, then there is a pretty good chance that a future product will be able to import your metadata.

Keep this in mind as you handle your files.

• If you can put keywords in the files themselves via EXIF or ID3 or similar tags, do so. Once they are there, they won’t be lost.
• Make the file names meaningful. It’s the lowest common denominator, and may be all you have at times.
• Make sure your files are searchable where possible.
• Try not to relinquish control over the folder structure. If possible, use a good folder structure that captures events and related documents.

This is a very deep topic, which is treated with respect in business and industry—many people specialize in managing data migrations from the old to the new. In addition, the diversity of metadata out there is startling; there are loads of products and standards for every industry out there.

At the end of the day, we face the very same problem that they do, with our humble email application.

I never thought that Eudora would go out of business, did you?

But what would you do?

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.

What’s the problem?

There are really three basic areas of concern when you lose a portable phone:

• Someone else can make calls on your phone and bill them to you.
• You just lost all of your pictures, contacts, and text messages.
• Some bad dude has access to all of your pictures, contacts, and text messages.

Problem 1: Some Bad Dude has your Telephone
Most people take care of the first problem right away, and you should do so as well.

Take Immediate Action
You must contact your provider ASAP and let them know your phone was lost before some ne’er-do-well starts dialing up 900 numbers or making overseas calls to some see-no-evil third-world country that gladly charges you thousands of dollars per minute.

Even if you don’t have the provider’s number with you, it’s important enough to make a dash for the nearest computer to do a quick Google search. Call them up; it should be sufficient to give your name and mobile number.

Once you have reported the phone as lost or stolen, make sure you change the passwords for any email accounts you had configured on your phone. This will shut off any routes open to bad guys to send messages in your name.

Take Preventative Measures
There are a few measures that you can take up front while you still have your phone. Note that these all fall under the category of “closing the barn door after the animals have left,” so you want to do them before you lose your phone.

You can minimize the risk of costly bills ahead of time by asking your provider to block 900 number service and block overseas calls. Of course, when you are packing for your trip to Paris, you might want to call your cellular provider to let them know so that you don’t block yourself. 

In addition, many phones come with a “lock” option, where a PIN is required to unlock the device. I wouldn’t trust my Swiss bank account number to such a PIN, as there have been known bugs in these, but it’s better than nothing.

There exists a class of utilities for smartphones that allow you to remotely lock and erase your device. I used one of these utilities for a while when I was a Treo user, but it always seemed a little too quirky to depend on as my only defense.

You might consider handset insurance from your provider—for a few bucks a month, you can have your handset replaced if it is lost, stolen, or destroyed. Make sure you read the restrictions first!

Problem 2: You lost your Data
Have you ever considered what kind of data you would lose if the phone were lost?

Here’s a short list of possibilities:

• All of your contacts
• Pictures you took with the camera
• Calendar events
• Text messages
• Email messages
• Music
• Software
• Special notes (A shopping list? A list of passwords?)

Synchronize with your Desktop
Many phones come with desktop synchronization software that can be used to protect you to some extent. For example, the iPhone synchronizes with iTunes whenever you plug it in, and in the process the contacts and photos are copied between desktop and phone (only if you have this enabled, of course).

This kind of synchronization is pretty good, but it is implemented imperfectly for many devices, and it does you no good if the only time you synchronized was when you bought the phone.

Worse still, many phones don’t provide software data utilities out of the box. When my wife purchased a Motorola Razr 2, I was disappointed to find out that Motorola phones require a software package called Motorola Phone Tools which costs $35.

Take some moments and consider how many contacts you carry with you on your telephone. If it is a couple dozen, you can probably just keep a list on your desktop machine and keep them both up to date.
But once you get into the realm of hundreds of contacts, you have no choice: to avoid a catastrophic loss of your social sphere, you had better back up that list somewhere.

Consider the impact of losing Text messages and Email
Think about the text messages and email on your phone: would you shed a tear if you lost these? I couldn’t care a lick about losing old text messages, since I use SMS strictly for need-to-know-now information that loses relevance quickly. I imagine that folks who buy the “unlimited text message” option may have some special ones that they don’t want to lose.

With a bit of luck, and planning, you might be able to keep from losing important emails. One option is to use the mobile web versions of various online email services to handle your mail. This way, you never have any messages on your device.

I like Gmail because they offer a free service called IMAP email, where your emails are retained on their servers and your device simply shows what is available on the servers, kind of like webmail, but nicer.

Get to know what your device supports and what services are out there.

Google Sync to the Rescue!
For the smartphone set, Google recently introduced a great calendar/contact syncing service, where you can set your phone to connect to your Google Calendars via a new tool called Google Sync for your Mobile Phone.

The screenshot on the right shows the phones that they support as of the time of this writing.

By using Google Sync, you can manage your contacts online or on your phone, and the changes are immediately mirrored.

Problem 3: Bad Dudes have your Data
I don’t even want to consider the possibility of some creepy dude sifting through my contacts, looking at the pictures that I have carefully added, choosing people to stalk, and then going to their homes to slit their throats in their sleep.

Wow, what a horrible thought!

The reality is, that’s probably not going to happen. The odds of your lost or stolen phone ending up in the hands of a serial killer are in your favor.

But a thief sure can have fun with your data!

• Do you keep any of your sensitive personal data in notes?
• Perhaps you have one note where you keep passwords for your online banking site?
• Can a villain gain anything by sending text messages in your name?
• Are your email messages all locally stored on the phone?

Protect your Secrets
If you are like me, you have tons of passwords and secret things that you can’t possibly remember. In my opinion, one of the essential applications for a portable device is a Password Manager application.

These applications provide a simple list of sites and passwords, protected by strong encryption. You provide a single main password to access the data within.

I have used two, and they are both excellent applications: SplashID and 1Password. There are others out there.

Recognize the Danger of Email in Enemy Hands
If you used the same email account for registering for any online services, then it is paramount that you prevent the bad guys from accessing your email. All a thief has to do is go to your online shopping sites and say “I forgot my password” and they will kindly send the password to the phone, in the hands of the enemy.

You would think that as soon as your provider blacklists the phone, nobody should be able to use its email; however, if your phone is Wi-Fi enabled, or if someone slips in a different SIM card, it is conceivable that the email client of the phone can still access your email service. 

Use IMAP Email or Webmail
If you use IMAP access to your email and contacts, such as with the Gmail IMAP and Google Sync options discussed earlier, you can very easily limit the access anyone has to existing data by changing your email password. Once your Gmail password has been changed, your purloined device will no longer be able to access your email.

It goes without saying that if you are using webmail alone, as soon as you change the email password, the bad guys have zero access to your existing email, but you most likely still have contacts on your phone.

It’s worth experimenting a little to see exactly what the “user experience” would be for a thief if you were to change your password.

Summary
Losing a cellular phone can possibly be an expensive proposition, especially if you are not aware of the factors involved.

Ask yourself “What could I lose without being sad about it?”

Ask yourself “What is the worst thing somebody could accomplish with my data?”

Weigh the risks carefully and take any action that you feel is sufficient, and sustainable, on your part.

Are those little drives different?

I’m fairly certain that those pocket drives are all the same inside, with minimal cosmetic differences between Western Digital, Seagate, iOmega, et al.

I liked the appearance of the WD My Passport line, so I bought a matching pair of them in 320MB.

Of course, they come in bright colors, so I bought a black one and an orange one.

Setup

After formatting them with NTFS , I named the volumes WD_BLACK and WD_ORANGE. This way, when I plug one in, I am extremely clear on which volume is being manipulated. Nobody wants to accidentally wipe out the wrong portable hard drive, or worse, overwrite the source drive.

I then set up rsync on my Mac to mirror all of the changes on my network drives onto whichever of the two WD units I have plugged in.

Note that rsync is an extremely geeky way to go about this; there are good tools that allow you to point and click your way to a trouble-free backup.

Macintosh users note: Macs normally can’t write to NTFS volumes. I wanted NTFS for flexibility, so I use NTFS for Mac OS X from Paragon. There’s also a freeware driver out there called NTFS-3G that many swear by.

The initial backup took almost an entire day. Synchronizing takes only a few minutes.

Day to day

I bought two Case-Logic cases for the drives, so they can travel safely. I now keep one of the drives in a desk drawer in my office at work, and once per week I do the following:

• Perform a sync of the drive I have at home
• Take that drive to work with me
• Bring home its brother

I am now fairly confident that even in the worst possible scenario (e.g. house sucked up by a tornado) I would lose one week of data at most.

We keep all of our important stuff at home on a mirrored NAS device, so I probably will not lose anything at all in the event of a single hard drive failure.

Online storage?

I’m still on the fence about Mozy and Carbonite and their bretheren—I want to keep a full backup of all of my files, MP3s, Photos, and PDFs. These services seem to get pricy once the data goes beyond a few gigs. I’m watching them, however, and I might just be convinced one day.

Until then, there’s something quite satisfying about hand-carrying a backup drive to a safe offsite location. Now I just need the briefcase with the attached handcuff!

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 tools for a woodworker’s workbench.

No one ever actually goes out and buys everything shown on those pages; they start with the essentials and build up a collection over time. And so it is with this list I give you of useful tools of the trade.

Staple Remover

Such a simple little device, but so important. My wife staples everything together, then she hands me a stack of old bills to be scanned in, complete with staples.

Don’t bother with those ones that have jaws. Get one of the stick kind, like this one.

Paper Cutter

I wouldn’t buy one unless I had lots of manuals and such to scan, but this is a device that can really speed things up. Just remove the staples from the spine and then start chopping through the centers of the pages, in small stacks.

If you have too much work for a paper cutter, you can always take the manuals/magazines to a professional office center and have them do the job.

Paper shredder

It’s a sad commentary on modern times that most people these days have a paper shredder in the house. Yours should be strong enough to do the job without overheating and should chop the paper into proper tiny bits.

Flatbed Scanner

This is where everyone starts. Nobody goes out and buys a sheet-fed scanner as their first scanner; the price is often prohibitive, and the devices are very task-specific.

Even if you have invested in a sheet-fed scanner, it is good to keep a flatbed scanner around to scan in things such as hard book covers or pages that you don’t want to remove from a book.

Sheet-fed Scanner

The most important part of a serious document scanning exercise.

The ability to scan in twenty or thirty pages in a minute, both sides, makes this expensive device stand head and shoulders above all flatbed scanners.

I use the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M.

You might want to check out Terry White’s Tech Blog’s comparison of the NeatReceipts, ScanSnap S300, and ScanSnap S510M. He did a great video showing the three in operation.

OCR software

Without OCR software, your documents are not searchable. Fortunately, most scanners come bundled with some kind of OCR software. Mine came with both Abbyy FineReader as well as Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.

External backup drive

So important. Your data has to be in two places.

Backup software

Sure, you can manually copy files from your desktop to the backup drive, and I did this for a long time. It’s better to automate this process.

Backup software helps prevent accidental erasure of either the source or the target data, and it helps you perform the backups regularly and painlessly.

I personally use rsync scripts to do the job, though this may be a bit too geeky for some. Many external hard drives come bundled with quality utilities. You can even consider using online backups such as Mozy or Carbonite.

PDF editing software

A definite plus once you begin scanning larger documents. You want to be able to merge documents, rotate pages, and move pages around with ease.

For example, I just finished scanning in a tri-fold owner’s manual that I cut on the folds. The first sheet had page 1 and 6 on it, the middle sheet had page 2 and 5 on it, and the last sheet had page 3 and 4 on it.

When the document went through the scanner, I had a PDF with 1,6,2,5,3,4 page order. It was a breeze to drag the pages into the correct order.

I use the Preview app from Mac OS X for this. Adobe Acrobat does the job quite nicely as well.

Document Management software

This is the repository where you keep your documents. I have mixed feelings about document management software.

On the one hand, these products are very good at what they do and they certainly make it easier to organize documents.

On the other hand, as soon as you commit yourself to one document management tool, it is difficult to migrate your collection to a new tool, should you need to switch in the future.

That said, I use a tool called Yep for this purpose. One of the other major players out there is DEVONthink.

Keyboard macro software

I find myself doing certain repetitive tasks from time to time that require multiple clicks or keystrokes. For example, when I am reviewing a scanned document, I scroll through the document looking for pages that were accidentally rotated 90 or 180 degrees by the scanning software.

The tool I use for previewing and editing (the Preview app from Mac OS X) supports rotating single pages, but it asks you each time “Do you want to rotate the current page only or the entire document?”

After tiring of clicking through that question every time, I used my macro software to write three keyboard macros, and I assigned them to ⌘-Left, ⌘-Right, and ⌘-Up, for Rotate Left, Rotate Right, and Rotate 180. Now I can quickly browse through a document, flipping and rotating any pages that need it.

I use Keyboard Maestro for this job.

File management utilities

As soon as you start juggling hundreds of files around and renaming them and moving them into different folders, you find yourself performing certain repetitive tasks, that can often be made easier by software.

I use a tool called A Better File Renamer for the Mac that allows me to rename large numbers of files, following dozens of customizable rules. This tool allows you to package renaming scripts into a “droplet” on the desktop, where you can drop files.

One of my droplets adds the file creation date to the filename as a prefix. Another droplet converts filenames with embedded dashes and underscores into “title case” names with spaces.

I recently bought a folder management utility called The Big Mean Folder Machine that allows easy creation of folder hierarchies, such as by automatically splitting files into groups of 100. I haven’t used it much yet, but I sure love the icon!

Encryption utility

Gotta have it if you are putting your intimate personal information into digital form. Anything with your SSN or your credit card numbers should be protected. Remember, even if it’s on your home desktop machine, a burglar would take the whole machine, and happily sift through your personal data looking for info that could be stolen.

For some things I use encrypted volumes on Mac OS X; for others, I use TrueCrypt.

Assortment of Thumb Drives

What better way to move your digital documents around? They don’t even need to be that large. Cheap throwaway thumb drives these days have the capacity to hold a lifetime of digital documents. But make sure you protect sensitive data!

[Update: Added a link to Terry White's scanner review]

Don’t be that guy!

The Drobo is one of the most talked about external storage devices, boasting an amazing ability to juggle the bytes among multiple hard drives and seamlessly recover from a total disk failure of any one of those drives. You can even yank a drive out while it is running and the machine will still recover.

But it isn’t a backup solution if the data is nowhere else.

What if you have a virus that erases the device? What if someone steals your Drobo?

Hardware devices such as this are part of a backup strategy but they are not a backup strategy by themselves. The same goes for using different folders or even different partitions on a large hard drive to serve as a pseudo backup. At least, make sure the data is on two different physical hard drives inside your machine before you consider the job done.

In my mind, your backups should be physically and electronically separated from the source data. Physical separation keeps a single head crash from taking out all of your copies. Electronic separation helps prevent accidental deletion of both at once. Don’t lose your life’s memories!

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 rear bumper. Today, I finally got around to sifting through the documents I will need to provide for the insurance claim.

They need printouts, so I put copies of the nine different PDF documents onto a spare thumb drive I found kicking around somewhere in the desk drawer, ready to take to work tomorrow to print out on a nice printer.

I then realized that these PDF documents contain personal information that I did not want made public, for example, a copy of the credit card billing statement for the rental. No problem—I had the right tool ready for the job.

Many people store large quantities of confidential information on thumb drives—this article is not for them. In all likelihood, those folks are already using some encryption software that came with the thumb drive.

This article is aimed at the average person who just needs to cart around a couple of sensitive documents once in a while or perhaps wants to send a little bundle of secrecy to a friend via e-mail.

TrueCrypt

Of many options available, one of my favorites is TrueCrypt. This free open-source application allows you to create secure encrypted “disk image” files that you can then open up just like any other external drive.

TrueCrypt supports Windows Vista/XP/2000, Mac OS X, and Linux.

As a quick demonstration of flexibility, I made a small encrypted disk image called Mustang on my Mac. After creating the disk image, I mounted it and dropped in a couple of super-secret files.

You can see the Mustang file in the top right, with the mounted SUPERSECRET drive directly below it. And below that is the contents of SUPERSECRET—a couple of Word documents.

Then I unmounted the drive and took the super-duper encrypted Mustang file over to a Windows XP machine.

There, I used an XP version of TrueCrypt to mount the encrypted volume.

You can see here that I was able to successfully mount Mustang as Local Disk (E:), and my two word documents are found within, along with a little bit of Macintosh cruft.

For the whole story on how to create encrypted disk image files using TrueCrypt, check out this article:

Create Secure Storage Space on a USB Flash Drive with TrueCrypt

Final Thoughts

Take advantage of a powerful encryption tool such as TrueCrypt to create small totally portable files that can be used as containers for protected documents. Keep in mind that this is one of several free or low-cost options available for encryption. Pick one and use it.

The TrueCrypt utility is able to do far greater things than I even hinted about here; this is just the tip of the iceberg. But it sure is easy to get started by making these small encrypted disk images.

I have the confident assurance that if I copy the Mustang file onto a thumb drive and then toss it on the floor in the local mall, I have nothing to fear—my personal information is safe.

What does this have to do with going paperless?

Sooner or later as you go down the path of committing everything to digital media, you will probably want to share some of your content with other members in your house. Maybe you want to put MP3 files on a central place where everyone can get to them. Maybe you just want a convenient way for family members to swap homework assignments.

Sure, you can go out and drop a few Franklins on a shiny new NAS device, but why not tap into your geeky side and make use of that aging Pentium III that is in the closet.

Here is an explicit set of step-by-step instructions on how to convert an old junker PC into an Ubuntu Linux file server with your bare hands in about a half hour.

Creating a Basic NAS with Ubuntu Linux (Rev 2) (PDF)

Leave a comment here if clarification is needed or if you find any inaccuracies in the document.

[UPDATE: Modified the section on setting a static IP address to explain how to disable DHCP]