Archives for posts tagged ‘Backups’

Another good checklist for going paperless

Jim Robinson over at Money Talks News has put together a nice article giving five basic steps for getting a jump start on your paperless life.
Among other things he discusses options for prioritizing and cutting down on the total volume of stuff you plan on keeping, digital or otherwise.
“Backup, backup, backup” made number four on [...]

When migrating to a new operating system, Look Before You Leap!

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 enough [...]

Keeping Your Documents Readable for Years to Come

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 choice [...]

Life’s too short to fight with a lame shredder

Anyone who is packing serious scanning hardware should also be packing serious shredding hardware. It may not matter if another Capital One offer slips into the trash intact, but there’s no way I’m going to dispose of old tax records or medical records without rendering them completely useless to the enemy.

Here is my own short list of things to look for when you are buying a new shredder.

Why you should digitize ‘everything’

“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 [...]

Face it—Your great CD Collection Ripping Project is never going to end!

This afternoon was kind of lazy and rainy, and I found myself sifting through stacks of CD cases again, full of enthusiasm as I discovered some lost Rolling Stones and David Bowie albums, imagining how few discs remained before I could declare victory. But then I stumbled across a huge cache of classical music discs [...]

Help! My data is being held hostage!

 

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…

Just what exactly is taking up all of that disk space?

Anyone who is serious about committing their piles of paper and other media to digital format asks this question from time to time. And it doesn’t seem to matter how large hard drives have grown over the years—the media files seem to grow to keep pace quite nicely.
I would like to share with you a [...]

What would you do if you lost your cell phone?

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.

If there aren’t two copies in separate places, it isn’t a backup!

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 to juggle [...]