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. 

iTunes 8, Another Good Reason To Backup Your Files.

Along with the new Nano and Touch, Apple rolled out iTunes 8 this week. Although it has some cool features like Genius and grid view, I saw an interesting bit of information on iLounge that should be noted before you upgrade.

During the install, iTunes 8 will do some massaging and tagging of your library that previous versions of iTunes won’t like, so if you have problems and want to revert back to the previous version, you’re going to need to reload your library.

So there you have it, yet another perfectly good reason why you should backup your files. Please...

For more details and a complete test drive, check out iLounge’s “Instant Expert” article on iTunes 8.

My PC is Gone, Baby, Gone.

I’m a pretty careful guy when it comes to caring for my systems and preserving my data. I’ve seen enough “data disasters” to last a lifetime.

You know the drill. You get the call from a relative or friend who has been dumping digital pictures onto their PC for the last 2 years and has never backed it up. Their hard drive is clanking, the PC won’t boot, and they’re frantic. “Oh my God, little Nell’s first communion pictures are on there!” they wail.

Usually you can recover some or all of their stuff but it’s always a pain in the butt and your friend or relative always stands behind you the whole time, wringing their hands and asking “How’s it lookin’?” every 5 minutes. Such a fun time! Once I even had to resort to a trick I learned from one of my coworkers to rescue data, freezing the hard drive. If you pop a bad drive in the freezer overnight sometimes it will work for about an hour after you take it out. It worked, but just barely. The drive started clanking again about halfway through the copy and died for good right after I finished.

I actually think there was divine intervention on that one. The drive belonged to a loved one who was particularly distraught and close to tears as I left for the evening with the dead drive in hand. I was flying home the next morning and although her computer was working, she had no hope of ever seeing her pictures again. Man, would I have loved to have seen her face when the FedEx guy delivered the DVD’s I created a few days later. That would have been priceless.

Anyway, we all say “I’ll never be that guy!” but it’s almost impossible not to be that guy.

I have a laptop, an iMac and a honkin’ Media Center PC at home. Any digital pictures and videos we take get loaded onto both the PC and the iMac, and they all get copied to a portable hard drive also. In addition, once every couple of weeks I burn a copy of the My Pictures folder onto a DVD. Same with the My Videos and the My Music folders and just because I’m totally anal, I also run the iTunes backup routine once a month and rip all purchased tracks to CD.

So, you would think that with all this preparation a machine meltdown wouldn’t be such a big deal for me. Well guess what? Even when you’re prepared it still sucks.

The other night, right after I finished the previous post, my PC went into a coma from which it still hasn’t recovered. It froze and that was it. I couldn’t even get it to POST, let alone reboot. Fried motherboard. Gone, Baby, Gone.

Luckily it’s still under warranty so we made a copy of the hard drive (told you I was anal) and off I went to Buy More. The store was great. They popped the hood, confirmed my original diagnosis, then packed it up and shipped it off on its long trip home to the manufacturer.

Beautiful, right?

Not exactly.

Now I’ve got to wait for its return, which could take up to a month, and when I do get it back there’s a good chance I’ll have to reload everything. A small price to pay, especially if I end up with a brand new system, but a time consuming hassle nonetheless.

In the meantime although I’ve still got my laptop and iMac, I’m out of business on a lot of fronts. My laptop isn’t powerful enough to process video and doesn’t have a video capture card and PVR software like my desktop. The iMac can process the video, but the video projects that I had already started on the PC will need to be restarted from the raw video files on the Mac, or they’ll just have to wait. Also a lot of the software I use regularly on the PC isn’t on the laptop or iMac, which means I’ve been busy loading software.

The coup de grace is that my iTunes library is on the PC and my wife’s is on the iMac. Both are radically different and if you’re familiar with iTunes you know the hassle of transferring to another computer.

On the plus side, this will force me to do some things I’ve been putting off. I’ll probably run all my music through a leveling program and then re-import it into iTunes with sound check off. As you may know, the iTunes sound check software really sucks. My levels are all over the place.

And then there’s…

and…

Ah nuts, there is no plus side. A PC meltdown is just no fun at all.