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Last
month
Backup and Recovery
Alan talked about Backup
and Recovery. He went through the reasons to back up your computer
data, when to back it up, and showed us ways of doing so.
The main reasons to back
up your data are to be able to recover in the event of PC or disk
failure, or to recover from a disaster, such as fire or theft
of the PC. You need to consider whether to back up all the data
on the PC, or only those items which would be difficult to replace.
For example, as long as you have the install disks for Windows
and any programs that you use, you can always re-install from
there, however, your data files, e.g. spreadsheets, documents,
photos etc, would be lost. Some of these may be irreplaceable,
e.g. photos, some may just be very difficult, or inconvenient
to reconstruct. Backups can also be useful when you accidentally
delete an important file.
The simplest way is to
create a complete back up of everything on the PC. The problems
with this are that it takes a while to run, and will quickly become
out of date. It can also take a significant amount of storage.
It should also be noted that much of this backup would be duplicated
on each occasion, things like programs do not change very often.
Alternative strategies
concentrate on backing up the irreplaceable data, broadly the
contents of “My Documents”, and doing this on a frequent
basis. The amount of data involved is much smaller, and thus quicker
to backup and less to store. Don’t forget to ensure that
your Emails and Address books are included in the folders that
you back up.
In terms of frequency of
backup, Alan’s recommendation was that you balance the cost
of doing the backup ( time, media etc) against the cost of replacing
the data (recreating spreadsheets, etc). It may be worth creating
a backup copy of photographs once you have offloaded them from
your camera, and sorted out those you want to keep. For other
things like spreadsheets which may get updated on a regular basis,
you may want to do these on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis.
Windows includes a program
called NTBACKUP. It is not installed by default in XP Home, but
can be found on the Windows CD. That provides full, incremental
or differential backups. Alan then explained the differences between
these:-
Alan then discussed where
to store the backups, both the media to be used, and the physical
location. If you are primarily protecting against disk failure,
the simplest, and probably cheapest in the long term, is a second
hard disk, either internal or external. This will also provide
fast backups and restores. If, however, your primary aim is protection
against fire or theft, the backups must be kept separate from
the PC at least in a different building/house. This normally implies
that you need to use CD/DVD’s, although using two external
hard disks and swapping the offsite one is an option. Tape was
an option in the past, however with today’s large hard disks,
it is rarely used for home machines.
You should also check your
backups occasionally and make sure that you can recover from them.
It is no use doing a daily backup, only to find, when you need
it, that it has not worked, or it is backing up the wrong folders!
He then talked about recovery
of the data after a problem. The exact circumstances may vary,
you may want to recover just one file, or to recover all of your
data. The key thing to remember is that restoring a backup file
will normally overwrite any existing file of the same name. If
it is important to keep both copies, either rename one, or restore
it to a different folder.
If a recovery does not
work at first, try again. Check if you have an alternative backup
copy in case one is corrupt. As a last resort, don’t delete
any if the files, there are tools which can recover some of all
of your data from damaged files and backups.
Next Years Meetings
Below is a list of proposed dates for next years meetings. These
dates are still to be confirmed but we will update you as soon
as possible.
January 14th
February 11th
March 11th
April 8th
May 6th
June 3rd
July 1st
August 26th
September 23rd
October 21st
November 18th
December 16th
Vista Service Pack 2
Microsoft will deliver Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) April
2009, this will be two months after it issues a final test version
to users, according to a Web site that accurately predicted several
Windows ship dates in 2008.
A Malaysian Web site that predicted the release dates for Vista
SP1 and XP SP3 earlier this year, said that Microsoft will post
a release candidate -- the final test version -- of Vista SP2
in February 2009. In April they will offer it to users via download
from the Web at some point afterward. The final availability date
is vague, if only because Microsoft has had trouble this year
synchronizing service pack RTM dates with availability on Windows
Update. It took six weeks last winter to get Vista SP1 in the
hands of most users and a week to issue Windows XP SP3 in the
spring. XP SP3.
Although Microsoft issued the beta of Vista SP2 to a limited number
of testers a month ago, company officials have so far only committed
to shipping the update sometime in the first half of next year.
According to Microsoft, Vista SP2 will include Windows Search
4, Bluetooth 2.1 wireless support, faster resume from sleep when
a wireless connection has been broken and support for Blu-ray.
Some of those features, including Windows Search and the Bluetooth
support, have been available to Vista users for months through
individual updates. Vista SP2 will require SP1 as a prerequisite,
a factor that played to Microsoft's ongoing recommendation that
users deploy the first service pack as soon as possible.
Sync Toy
For those of you who want to follow Alan's advice from last month
this free software may be what you are looking for.
Sync Toy uses a paired-folder architecture, where you specify
a left and a right directory.
Sync Toy 2.0 is a free download. Running on the client side, Sync
Toy is not meant as a full-blown backup solution, but it fills
the niche of automating repetitive file copying tasks you'd normally
do manually.
Sync Toy 2.0 installs quickly on Windows Vista or Windows XP and
is available in 32-bit or 64-bit versions. You can upgrade from
earlier versions of Sync Toy and preserve your existing folder
pairs. However, you must synchronize your folders first with the
earlier version, then do the upgrade to avoid data loss when you
use Sync Toy 2.0. Once you upgrade, you should sync all your folders
again to be sure Sync Toy 2.0 is ready to track changes to your
folders later.
Folder-pair creation in Sync Toy 2.0 is done with a three-step
wizard, where you specify two folders, type of copy or sync action,
and a name for the folder pair. When you're done, you can preview
and run a sync on one or more folder pairs. A useful new twist
is that Sync Toy 2.0 lets you go back and change the name of the
folder pair.
The user interface is intuitive, with comprehensive help if you
need it. In the original Sync Toy, you had the choice of five
different types of sync actions. Sync Toy 2.0 offers three: Synchronize,
Echo, and Contribute. At first, this seems like a step backward,
but on a closer look, the extra two actions previously available
were almost identical to other options. When you select an action
in the folder-pair wizard, you get a short description of each
action in the UI, so it's easy to choose the type you need. Here's
how they work:
Synchronize Copies new and updated files in both directions. If
you rename or delete a file in one folder, that action is replicated
in the other.
Echo Copies new and updated files and performs deletes and renames
only from the left folder to the right.
Contribute Copies new and updated files on the left to the right
while ignoring deletions.
A new feature with Sync Toy 2.0 is the ability to sync multiple
folders to the same destination, which lets you combine or sync
files from multiple folders on one or more computers. This can
come in handy when using multiple laptops synced with a single
network folder. So, no more excuses from the outside sales guys
that they couldn't save their files to the network.
Sync Toy's setup has been improved as well, and there have been
a number of updates to fix or enhance unattended execution. You
now can also sync encrypted files to unencrypted folders.
While Sync Toy is well-designed and -tested, it isn't part of
Windows and is not supported by Microsoft. However, there is a
very active and responsive group of people on the Sync Toy forum
where you can ask questions, get help from others, and give feedback
to the team.
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