Justnowism

As the days go by

I just went back and checked out the first posts that I ever made on this blog back in July, 2006.

• Cilla and I got our Open Water Diver certification on Great Keppel Island.
• I was giving advice about using Windows instead of advising against using Windows.
• Our video business had just kicked off.
  
• We owned a dog.
• Advertising in the Observer seemed like a good idea.
• James Doohan (Scotty from Star Trek) passed away.
• My computer was new and modern.
• There was a month-long war in Lebanon.
• There was no paving around our house.
• We had a digital still camera that worked.
• I vowed to switch from Flickr! if Google created a photo sharing community - which they did, and I did.

It's been nearly two-and-a-half years since I've started blogging.  The blog has had over three-and-a-half thousand unique visitors from accross the world.  I clearly have nothing better to talk about.

Zoe Thackray

Mick is a dad! Again!

Read about his new daughter Zoe on his blog.

Backup in time.

I worked with this guy in a computer shop a long time ago, we'll call him Dave - an intellectual, a musician, a fellow geek whom I've known for many years as a competent computer technician.  In a comment to one of my previous posts, he directed me to some nice backup software to help cope with the problems we have both experienced with Windows.

I can't see why we need to try and develop or purchase all these work-arounds for the failings of Microsoft's OS. To be fair, WindowsXP has backup software built in but even this guide to using it on Microsoft's own website says most people don't know think about backing up and even if you do, you have to do some digging to find the program to do it.  And then the whole back-up process is totally manual, requiring you to select everything you want to back up, tell it where you want to put the backup - network drive, blank CD - and then you have to set up a schedule and maintain that schedule, which few people are able to do. Also, a complete and regular backup using this method would use an enormous amount of data storage because you back up everything, every time, even the stuff that didn't change since the last backup.

Dave's suggestion was some imaging software - Acronis - which essentially takes a snapshot of the entire system which you'd then burn to a disc or save on an external or network drive. Disk imaging is usually time consuming and best for quickly performing clean installs. I haven't tried Acronis, but their site doesn't give a lot of information about how their software works. It says they have an incremental backup feature suggesting that it can identify your files that have been changed and add them to the backup which saves a lot on data storage.  

Both above methods can be stored on a DVD which makes it hard to accidentally erase the storage which can happen with external hard drives but even DVD are not infallible.

I also had a comment on my last post from an anonymous user - lets call him Mick Frank - who suggested that I back up to the cloud.  While I already keep a lot of information online under my Google account  - Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Video, Picasaweb - I am rather selective about what I upload to these sites.  One should ask: Do I really want to place my information in the hands of another person or business?  I don't think of these Google services as somewhere to store my backups.  They are a place to share ideas with others.  As for anonymous ftp servers, there are serious bandwidth issues for most Australians.  In this country we have limits on how much we can download with nearly every Internet plan, limited either by speed or by the amount of downloaded data.  There are speed issues.  How long does it take to send a modest 35GB backup to an FTP server on the other side of the planet?  There are privacy issues too.  Where is the server located?  Argentina?  Zimbabwe?  China?  USA?  What is to stop someone looking through all my stuff?  More to the point, will that server still be there tomorrow?  No thanks, I prefer to hang on to my data myself.

OS X has a backup feature called Time Machine. First of all, it's included with the OS and not only is it easily found, it's one of the most advertised features. This is what I needed to do to get it going.

1. Plug in a big external hard drive.
   
2. Open Time Machine
3. Turn On Time Machine
4. There is no step 4.

Now our Mac is backed up.  A complete backup.  When I import a new CD, it detects that there are new files and adds them to the backup.  When add a riff to my musical composition it is automatically added to the backup.  If the Mac were to suddenly die in a billowing cloud of smoke - touch wood - the last entry I put into the calendar, the last note I jotted on the desktop and the last web page I bookmarked are safely backed up on my external drive.

So how did I end up in the situation I described in my last post?  

Fact: 

No-one backs up until about 10 minutes after they need to.

I had even done step 1. Plug in a big external hard drive. but I still just couldn't be bothered with clicking the mouse a few more times to back up all my data.  At the time it all just seemed too much hassle...

...and then there's that tendency to erase hard drives without thinking...

Apple seem to have put data protection up front.  We all know that computers crash.  Macs and PCs alike, all are susceptible to a hard drive failure, but Apple are actively doing something about it.  Not only with the most easy-to-use backup software in the world, but even the hardware is being re-designed with data protection in mind.  Apple notebooks have the option of shipping with solid-state hard drives that have no moving parts.  Wherever there are moving parts, there is wear and with wear, failure is inevitable.  So if you have anything on your computer that is irreplaceable - back it up.  

Make up a check list.

1. Documents
2. Pictures
3. Music
4. Videos
5. Address Book
6. Bookmarks
7. Financial Records
8. Downloaded software
9. Game saves
10. Whatever else you can think of... and think hard!

Backup now... before it's too late - although, as I showed in my last post, even when it's too late it may not be too late!

The past eight years.

November 4th, 2008 was the day Obama was elected President of the United States and America, indeed the world, celebrated change after eight years of an extremely unpopular government.

November 4th, 2008 was the day my wife and I celebrated eight years of marriage.  We've had (nearly) eight years of living together in the bush.  The Australian Bush.

Eighth anniversary.  Cilla pulled her little book of irreverent information out and informed me that the appropriate gift for this anniversary is an electrical appliance.  Although it sounded unlikely to me - eight-year anniversaries have been around for a lot longer than electrical appliances and marriage has existed for even longer - she assured me that her book is correct, albeit a little modernized.  So we thought about what we wanted and decided on expanding our beloved Mac Mini with an external hard drive.  Romantic eh?  We thought so!

We found a good deal on a 1TB USB hard drive called WD Elements.  It was about $185.00 delivered and took nearly a week to arrive, but arrive it did and we set to the task of setting it up on Minnie.  

Yes.   We named our Mac Mini "Minnie".  So what?

First things first, back up docs and videos so I copied them all onto the external hard drive.  Then in a flash of wisdom we thought we'd refresh the OS X install on the Mac.  There was nothing wrong with it.  Everything worked fine, but the install was over a year old and had been upgraded to 10.5 from a pre-installed 10.4 and sort of felt a little sluggish from when we first got it.  It's certainly better than the average on my Windows machine which has had about six reinstalls in the same time period.

So a fresh install of Leopard underway, completely formatting the Mac hard disk in the process.

Wiping out everything I forgot to back up.

The iTunes collection - about 40GB of mp3 music we've collected since before we've been married.

Not a huge loss - music is replaceable and we still have our CD's and you can collect iTunes store purchases without any problems.

The big one was the iPhoto collection.  About ten years worth of photos of everything Cilla and I have done.  Wedding photos.  Pics of our dive holidays.  Photos of Merlin, our late great dane.  And none of it was backed up and all of it just got wiped.

That sucked to say the least.

Anyway, I did manage to recover just about everything.  After a little bit of googling I discovered a program called Data Rescue II and it spent about three hours last night looking at the empty bits of my mostly empty hard drive for any trace of what was there before.  Despite the length of time and the amount of stress, it was very impressive with the amount of information it managed to retrieve.  The drive was re-partitioned, formatted and had OS X installed on it and this software managed to recover all my photos and music - as well as a handful of other stuff that I also forgot to back up.

I suppose it's time to learn from the mistake.  Time Machine would probably be a good start, but backup to DVD disks is probably a safer option.  Time machine doesn't prevent some idiot formatting the hard drive!

Windows 3 put to rest.

When I first started using PC's in the nineties after playing with various other computers like Amiga 500, Macintosh II, Amstrad and Commodore 64, PC's running DOS seemed like an archaic operating system compared to AmigaOS and Apple's Operating System with their icons and pull down menus and mouse pointers.  The only way to make a PC look and behave anything like those computers was to load up Microsoft Windows.  

A friend of mine- back in about ' 88 - once tried to teach me how wonderful  Windows 1 or 2 was and showed me how he could use windows and icons and a mouse!  Wow!  A mouse!  Needless to say, having a colour Macintosh at home, I left unimpressed with his demonstration.

But when I left the Apple camp and discovered PC's for myself, through a new phenomenon called "Deathmatch" in the form of the original Doom game played against up to three other computers on an IPX network over coax cable, Windows was up to version 3.x.  That was some time during 1993-94 - before Windows95 was released.

Well, something that I think most people didn't know was that, although support was discontinued in 2001, you could still buy a license from Microsoft to run Windows 3.x....  until.... now.  Microsoft, after over eighteen years since the release of Windows 3.0, is no longer selling licenses for perhaps their most landmark OS.

Techspot have a story about it.

Obama wins.

I told you he would do it!  heh...

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=tQGsP8mnHsg

Good on him... good on America!

Free Anti-Virus for the Mac

While the Mac has been practically immune to virus and worm attacks, the ever increasing number of Macs continue to make Apple computer users an attractive target to malware writers. Apple themselves have said that Mac users should be aware that although we have enjoyed a peaceful existence we need to maintain safe security practices and be aware and alert to possible dangers. There are Mac viruses out there. I began using a free antivirus package called ClamXav and although it didn't seem like a very polished product, the price was right. It was quite a resource hog though and I found myself shutting it down to prevent the computer from slowing down due to a virus scan which kind of defeats the purpose of having it.

Back in July '08, PC Tools released iAntiVirus, a free version of their commercial antivirus package for home use - just like Avast! or AVG for Windows.  It promises to be discreet and be light on the resources so I'm giving it a go.  If it works well enough, I'll let you all know.  We need to maintain good security regardless of what kind of computer we have.  With all the unprotected Macs out there with no virus protection at all we are in danger of suffering from an epidemic like Windows experiences with the "I Love You" and "Melissa" viruses hit.  Of course Windows users that maintained proper security - antivirus and firewall - were not affected, but it goes to show how few people back then actually took security seriously.  So Mac users shouldn't be caught like that - we are not immune - and it would be really embarrassing.