Protecting Your Digital Photos and Documents

 We all have a ton of data on our devices; important documents, photos of friends and family, stuff you just don't want to lose. Anything can happen though, disaster is always lurking right around the corner. Spill your coffee on your laptop, drop your phone into the pool, your devices can even just up and stop working, and poof, everything is gone in a flash. That's why you need to back up those important files, and you need to do it now. Do not wait until it's too late.

There's lots of ways you can do it, and they're all relatively easy. You can back your files up to the cloud, you can use a backup program that will copy your files to an external hard drive and then do incremental updates to the saved data every time you make a change on your device, or you can just copy and paste the files you want to protect to an external drive. You have lots of options, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Let's review a few.

Cloud backups can be seamless and easy, but the cloud can get hacked, so I'm not a big fan. I don't want any more of my data floating around in the ether for some bad guy to poach and resell on the dark web, there's enough of it out there already. I'm always getting a notice from some institution or other saying, "We regret to inform you that all of your personal information has been compromised. Not to worry though, we've signed you up for 3 free months of Experian Credit Monitoring Services and DeathGrip ID Theft Protection coverage. Enjoy it on us! (special terms and conditions apply)."

No thanks, I'm good. The best and most reliable way to safeguard your data is to back it up to an external hard drive. I don't like to use automatic backup software to do it though. It's always running in the background, and it slows the crap out of your devices. Plus, it backs up stuff that you really don't need to back up. The file structure it creates on your external drive isn't very intuitive, either. I 'm going to show you a relatively easy way to back up your files, and I guarantee it will take a little bit of the worry out of your life.

My preferred back up method is to copy and paste my primary file folders over to an external drive and then update it on a regular basis. It's quick, easy and painless, and the file structure is simple, it's just a straight up copy of your hard drive. The folders you want to back up (or copy) on a PC are shown below. Note: If you save a lot of stuff to your desktop, you should copy that folder over as well. 

These 5 (or 6) folders hold all of your personal data, and that's all you want to be backing up and storing, cuz that's what's really important here, protecting your stuff, not Microsoft's.

For a reliable external drive, I like to use a simple USB plug and play drive like the Seagate 2TB Backup Plus Slim Hard Drive. It's small in size but big on storage, and there's no power cords to fuss with. It works off of a built in USB 3.0 cable, drawing its power from whatever device its plugged into. It comes with preloaded backup software, but I don't use it. As I mentioned earlier, backup programs always seem to be running when you don't want them to, dragging your device down. I just plug in the USB drive to my device, open it up, ignore the preloaded software and create a couple of folders.

In this example, I've created a desktop backup folder and a laptop backup folder. Inside of each of those folders I create dated sub folders, e.g. "Laptop Backup 07 01 2025". There's plenty of room on these drives to do multiple backups of each device, and you should. Next, I copy and paste my main folders from the device's hard drive to the external drive's new dated folders. Simple as that. You can copy and paste one folder at a time, or do them all at once, your choice.

Once the external hard drive starts to get full, I delete the oldest dated subfolder before I create another one, this way I always have multiple copies of all my files on the external device, and I never run out of disk space on it.

But what about the pics on my phone, you say? The best option is to sync your phone, tablets and any thumb drives or SD cards you have with your PC or Mac on a regular basis. Then when you back up your PC to your external drive you catch everything in one neat package. It's the same principle as above, you don't need any fancy software or devices, just plug your mobile device into your PC or Mac with a USB cable and copy and paste (or drag and drop) the pictures and files over to the computer. Easy peasy. Synching your mobile devices also allows you to safely remove pics and free up storage space on them, something we all need to do.

Bonus Tip: For added peace of mind, I store my external hard drives in our little grab and go SentrySafe burn box. If disaster strikes, all of our docs and pics go with us, even if our devices don't make the cut.

Bottom line, you don't have to do it my way, but you do have to do it. Choose whatever method you're most comfortable with and do it without delay. Do not be that person that calls me on a Monday night in a panic and says "Help, that new upgrade just bricked my device and now I've lost all of my family pictures." All I'm going to do is give you the number for the Geek Squad, and wish you Godspeed and good luck, because you're gonna need it, all of it. 

Windows Blue is Coming

Good news for those of you who hate Windows 8 with a passion, the Windows 8.1 update, code named Windows Blue, has been released to manufacturers, and a beta version is available for download now (Windows 8.1 Release Preview). The official release date isn’t until October 17th though, so I’d hold off until then, no matter how anxious you are for change, as I’m sure there’ll be some tweaks in the meantime.

Initial reviews are encouraging, looks like they’ll be addressing some of the biggest concerns users have had with the new OS. Here’s a sampling;

The start button returns, although not quite the way you remember it. Clicking on it will just dump you into the Metro/Start Menu that you now see at boot up.

Shutdown options are no longer buried under the Settings Charm and will appear with a right click to the refurbished Start Button, so it is good for something.

You can choose to boot up directly to the desktop once again instead of the Windows 8 Start Screen, and you can also change the Start Screen so it shows the Apps List (your old Programs List that used to appear when you clicked the Start Button) instead of the tiles it defaults to now.

Your Start Screen modifications can be synced across all of your PC’s.

There’s a Control Panel/PC Settings consolidation that will make it a little easier to find all the things you need.

You can turn off the annoying “Charms Bar” that keeps popping up every time you move your cursor too far to the top right of the screen.

You’ll be able to open up to 3 apps at a time and size the windows yourself. Any size you like, thank you very much. If you have multiple monitors, you can even have the desktop on one and the Metro/Start Screen on the other.

There will be a search bar overlay on the desktop and it will open in a window superimposed on your current screen rather than dumping you back to the Metro/Start Screen.

Improvements for easier navigation using a mouse and keyboard, for those who don’t have a touch screen device.

Faster performance, and a new version of Internet Explorer, IE11.

There are many other changes, some you’ll like, some not so much, so take a few minutes to check out the product guide on the preview page. It’s probably a good idea to download it for future reference as well.

As frustrating as Windows 8 can be, it has some very good features that will undoubtedly be made better with this upgrade. The biggest thing for me is that it won’t constantly be dumping me back to the Metro/Start Screen with all those useless tiles when I really want to be on the desktop, also the “optimization” of those old timey key boards and mice will be a good thing. The goal, according to Ballmer, is “refining the blend” between the desktop and the Metro interface.

As for those who think the only problem with Windows 8 is that the user community is afraid of change, I call BS. I’ve been rolling with the changes since the mainframe and teletype days, quite nicely, thank you, and I understand Microsoft creating an OS suited to mobile devices. What I don’t understand is their one size fits all OS dream. Forcing it onto desktop users just didn’t make sense, and it looks like they’re finally admitting it, to a degree, anyway. Optimizing 8.1 for keyboard and mouse, what a novel idea…

doh!

In comparison, Apple’s iOS and OSX look and smell enough alike so that you know they’re part of the same family, but they’re different depending on the platform, as it should be with Windows. Different keystrokes for different folks, I say.

OK, enough sermonizing. Version 8.1 will be pushed down for free to Windows 8 machines via Windows Update on or after the October 17th official release date. Read up in the meantime, it will help you through the transition.

That is all.

Problems Creating Clips In Google Reader

Clips are little “boxes of info” you can create in Google Reader that neatly display your most recent news feeds on your website, blog or Facebook page. You select the feed folder you want to display the content of, click “create clip”, and then customize it to your liking. When you’re satisfied with the look and content, you simply copy the HTML code Reader has created for you and embed it on your web page. The result is a neat little box containing the “x” most recent posts from any given feed. You can see the results over in my right hand border (Tech News, Patriots News, etc.).

Recently I started having problems creating clips. I’d click on create a clip, and nothing would happen except for an “errors on page” message at the bottom of my Explorer window. What’s supposed to happen is that Reader pops a small window that allows you to configure your clip. This was extremely frustrating for me, as I had a clip that had stopped updating. It either contained some bad code, or the source of the feed had stopped sending updates, and I wanted to replace it. There’s not much entertainment value for my readers when the same 5 headlines have been in my Celtics News clip for close to a month.

I did some searching through the Google Reader help files and came up empty, although I did find that people were having a similar issue with the “email a link” function, which is part of the same tool set as “create a clip”. The answer there was to create an exception for Google in your pop up blocker settings, and after reading it, the light went on inside my head.

I remembered that there had been quite a few security fixes pushed down for Explorer recently, and I also remembered that links in my received Gmail documents had started requiring me to “temporarily allow pop ups” too work. Hmmm, a pattern perhaps?

Yes!

I went into pop up blocker settings, added Google to my allowed sites, and Viola… create a clip was working again!

The screen shot above shows my blocker settings now. To access the settings window, go to “Tools”, “Pop up blocker”, “Pop up blocker settings”, then add the address www.google.com

As you can see in the screen shot (click to enlarge) this isn’t the first time I’ve had to do this. You can also add wildcards as I did with Verizon. Some of their pages use www22 instead of plain old www, tricky devils, so I entered *.verizon.net.

So, my Celtics news clip is working again, I’m happy, and maybe I’ve just made you happy too!

Windows Autorun/Autoplay Problems

I recently did some major scrubbing and upgrading of my system, and as is often the case, broke something in the process.

My PC had gotten sluggish; it needed a good cleaning and more memory. Norton had flagged a couple of downloaders and a Trojan Webkit that it couldn’t remove, or quarantine, so I decided just to nuke it and start over.

Confident that I had a good backup, I popped the hood and added another 2 gig of RAM, then reloaded Windows. Next I spent about 2 hours researching and removing all of the useless crap that comes bundled on the reload disks. Once I was happy with it, I plugged in the network cable and began downloading and applying all of the security patches and updates that had come out for service pack 2, culminating in the application of service pack 3. Done, or so I thought…

The computer was running great. It was clean as a whistle and fast as lightning, and I was a happy man. That is, until the first time I popped a CD into one of the drives.., and nothing happened.

Normally the Autoplay wizard fires up when you insert or connect any media or media devices into your PC. It’s the little wizard that pops up and asks you what you’d like to do with said media. Insert a CD, DVD, USB drive or connect a camera or MP3 player, and it asks you to choose a program to open, play or import data with. It’s not a necessity to have, but it sure makes life easy.

If I opened up My Computer, I could see the media mounted in the drive, so I could use it, but something was blocking Autoplay from starting. I checked all of my settings, and found the process was enabled on all of the drives, so I began searching the Interwebs for an answer.

First I found this document on the Microsoft Help and Support site. It described the problem to a T, and came to the conclusion that the problem was caused by having certain versions of Easy CD Creator loaded on the machine. The fix was to remove the software, and then make some registry changes to re-enable Autoplay. Not having this program, I continued to search for an answer more appropriate for my situation.

Then I found this link to an Autoplay Repair Wizard available from the Microsoft Download Center. After verifying the authenticity of my copy of Windows, Microsoft allowed me to download and run the wizard, which indeed found a problem, fixed it, and wrote the changes and results to a log file. The wizard requires you to log out and then log back in to complete the fix, and once I did, the system immediately recognized the CD I had in one of the drives and fired up the Autoplay feature. Sweet.

Just to be certain I had the problem licked, I switched the CD to the secondary drive. I’m glad I did, because I found that I wasn’t done. I ended up having to run the wizard on all of my drives and ports, one at a time, with a logout in between each. For the USB drives, I had to insert a thumb drive to get them to show up in the wizard’s device repair list, but once I fixed the first one, they all began to work again. It was a bit tedious, but it looks like my system is finally back to normal.

This must be a fairly common problem, as Microsoft has come up with a repair wizard for it. The last puzzler I had like this was the Media Center black screen problem, which they also had a wizard to fix. My post on that problem, and repair, has been the top visited post via keyword search on my blog for over 6 months now, so I hope this one proves to be just as helpful.