Tech and life

Just a cautionary tale today. Until recently I was only partially backing up this WordPress blog. I didn’t realise this and thankfully I never had to restore the blog from backups otherwise I would have learned my mistake too late – and it’s just not enough to rely on your blog host to come up with the backups when there’s a problem. Some are better than others but they can’t be relied upon.

So where was I going wrong? Well to put it simply, there are two important things you should be considering in a WordPress backup – your blog database AND your files. I had read enough posts about WordPress backup plugins and I installed one (WP-DB-Backup) very early in my blogging history to backup the database of posts. But that’s actually not enough. If you’re not backing up your files then really important stuff like all the image uploads for each post, your plugins, and your themes (including css and php files) aren’t being backed up and you’ll need these to completely restore your blog quickly in the event of a disaster or your blog being hacked.

Backing up your WordPress blog database

There are different ways to do this but I’ve always used WP-DB-Backup and use the option to download the backup to my hard drive although you can also have it emailed to you. On my PC, I’ve created a new folder called My Sites for my blogs as I already have My Documents, My Pictures, etc and this continues a consistent folder naming policy. I then created the folders Techandlife/Database Backups in this folder. I also backup this database backup regularly to an external backup hard drive so I have a second copy.

Backing up your WordPress blog files

Again there are different ways to do this but I use an FTP client to download the WordPress files to my hard drive and again also backing this up to an external hard drive. The important files on your WordPress blog are all in the directory public_html/wp-content. Again this goes into my My Sites/Techandlife folder. I must admit I don’t back up regularly enough but I try and do it once a month, so at worst I’ve lost just the last month of posts. The FTP client I use, Ipswitch WS FTP LE is a classic freeware product and still works fine under Windows 7. You could also use FileZilla for your file backups.

Another way to backup your files is with the WordPress Backup plugin.

Backup everything at once

I haven’t tried this but understand that EZPZ One Click Backup will backup (and restore) both the database and files but I note on the download page that quite a few people have problems getting it to work. Everything mentioned so far are free solutions but there are also paid solutions like WP Dolly Pro and monthly subscription services like blogVault.

I’ve never had to restore my blog from backup yet so I’d love to hear your experiences with backing up and particularly restoring your WordPress blog. Did it work for you? What did you learn? Which backup plugins do you use if any? We all want to be fully prepared for this disaster waiting to happen and know that we’re in good shape to get going again as quickly as possible. Drop a comment below with your experiences, good and bad.

A recent poll on MakeUseOf suggests that most of now have at least one computer in the house, and many of us have three or more! Admittedly, MakeUseOf readers are perhaps a little more tech savvy than others but I’m pretty sure the poll isn’t too wide of the mark for most of us now.

So you’ve bought a shiny new desktop PC, laptop or tablet and your old PC or laptop has been forgotten and consigned to a dusty old corner. Well it might just be worth pulling it out and putting it to use, particularly if it’s still reasonably fast and has a network card installed. David Pierce suggests using one machine for work and one for leisure and that’s pretty good advice. If you’re a freelancer and work from home, you rely on your primary machine to earn money! So it’s a great idea just to keep one machine solely for work, i.e. avoid too much surfing and downloading which may lead to a malware attack. Leave all this to your older secondary ‘leisure’ machine.

But if your old PC is just too old for everyday leisure use, at least make sure it’s ready to go in the event of a major issue on your main machine. So before you consign it to a corner, run some maintenance tools (eg CCleaner and Malwarebytes) and make sure all program updates have been downloaded and installed. There’s great peace of mind for a freelancer knowing that you have a standby machine ready to help out when your main PC or laptop has a problem (failed hard drive, failed power supply, malware attack, etc). You can work away on your standby machine as you run malware scans on your main machine, or indeed if the repair is too much for you, your standby machine should see you through while your primary machine is at the repair shop.

So you’ve backed up your data and photos from your PC to an external drive, NAS, or DVDs. That’s great but problem is the files mightn’t last intact there long term. Five years perhaps… 10 years, perhaps not. Point is you don’t want to go back to a dusty old DVD of cherished photos to find that the files have become corrupt through bit-rot or degradation of the storage media. ‘Bit rot?’ I hear you say. I hadn’t heard of the term either till I read a great post on it by Rich Menga of PCMech yesterday. Rich suggests putting your photos in file archives and testing these regularly for errors. He says that if the archive file is damaged due to age, it can be repaired without the need for any special utilities. Usually, all it takes to test an archive is a right-click/Test Archive.

In a follow-up post today, he has a further great article looking at how long media – hard drives, optical media and USB drives – will last. He comes to the conclusion that storage on flash drives might well outlast hard drives and optical media.

I think the message from all this is to keep more than one copy of your data and photos in backups locally, backup to the cloud, and refresh the files on new media every 2 or 3 years.

Here’s links to Rich’s two posts:

How to Avoid Bit Rot – PCMech

How Long will that Media Last? – PCMech

Head over there and read the posts. If you value your data and photos, they’re must-read articles.

You wake during the night to the smell of smoke, and jump out of bed to find the living room of the house is ablaze. Your first priority is to get your family to safety of course and phone the emergency services. That taken care of, say you’ve got one chance to take something as you leave your home for possibly the last time. What would it be? Something valuable, something sentimental?

When I considered this scenario, I concluded that if I had a chance, I would take my photos with me if I could. Pretty much everything else could be replaced but, when I thought about it, my photos are priceless memories which I’ll enjoy for years to come… memories of my childhood, holidays, friends, our wedding, my own family growing up. Much of my older photos are still in albums, while some are still in their wallets piled in boxes in the loft. I’ve also got quite a few wooden slide boxes full of 35mm transparencies (yip, no chance in a fire!). More recently, my digital photos are on my PC and backed up to an external hard drive.

It’s very, very  easy to get complacent about this and hope it will never happen to you. So I guess I should make an effort to get all my photo albums and 35mm transparencies digitised and get everything onto my external backup drive. Another possibility would be a fireproof safe but could I trust it to save all my photos and transparencies? I doubt it. Anyway it would have to be pretty large and therefore the cost would be prohibitive. Going the digital route, ideally, I should have two backup drives and do weekly rolling backups, keeping one drive away from the house, say at my parents’ house and swapping these out weekly to update them. That way I’d be covered against fire, flooding, theft, etc. and wouldn’t have to hunt for a laptop or external drive in a burning house. Wouldn’t cost too much either, in fact I reckon buying two external 500GB backup drives would cost around £100 ($160). I don’t have videos so 500GB drives should be fine and I can always upgrade them when I need more storage. Alternatively, I could backup my photos to the cloud but this would take quite some time to upload and with an annual cost of around $50-100 per year, I think I’m better off with offsite storage. I wouldn’t rely on keeping everything just in the cloud anyway – I would have to have a physical backups. But surely two drives doing a rolling backup would be enough wouldn’t it. Any thoughts?

So what would you take with you from your burning home?

Image credit: 111Emergency

If you carry your data on a USB drive, I’m sure you’re always worried about losing it. Of course you should always take the necessary precautions about protecting the data on it like making sure it’s backed up somewhere safe and encrypting the data on it if necessary. But we don’t always do this and so we might end up losing some valuable information.

You could use Flash Drive Reminder which pops up a reminder when you try and log off Windows without removing your USB drive. Putting the drive on a car key ring might also help you to remember it but if you haven’t done this, what about getting the stick back? Doubtless if lost, some finders would just keep it, look at the data, or delete the encrypted data and reuse the stick, but I’m sure many with good intentions would return it if given the chance.

Well you could use LostDrive and edit the contact details. Or just put a text file in the root directory of the stick with your contact details. You could call the file ‘Read-me-if-you-find-this-USB-stick.txt’. But you mightn’t be happy about putting contact details in there in case the drive falls into the wrong hands.

Well I’ve come across a free service called whspr! which allows you to be contacted by email without giving away any personal details in the text file.

If you fill out the form there they give you a URL which you could put in the text file. Anyone who finds your USB stick hopefully will open the text file. You could put a message thanking them for opening the file and that you’d be most grateful if you could get in touch with the owner by clicking the URL. This would send them to a form at whspr where they can send you an email message. whspr forwards the message to your email address and now you can get in touch with the finder whose email is on the form. The URL lasts for up to 365 days so you have to remember to renew it before then. So set up an email or text reminder with your reminder app, for example Task.fm, to remind you say a week before the URL expires and get a new URL from whspr.

Hopefully, these tips should help you minimize the loss of a USB stick. Have you any tips? Drop a comment below.

Image credit: jatop

I came across a really useful blog post recently at Online Tech Tips on transferring your TweetDeck settings to another computer. It’s well worth a read if you are using TweetDeck on say a laptop and desktop and basically it involves copying two important files from your TweetDeck folder under Application Data to the same folder on the second PC. On my PC, the files are:

c:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\preferences_techandlife.xml

c:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\td_26_techandlife.db

However, it occurred to me that this method can also be usefully applied to restore your TweetDeck groups should you accidentally delete a group which you have spent a lot of time and effort defining. If for some reason you close a Group column, there is no way back unless you have backed up and can restore these two files. The file td_26_techandlife seems to be the important one containing the Group data.

The scrolling arrow and the remove column button are pretty close together in TweetDeck and not very distinctive so it is possible to select to delete a column when scrolling through your tweets:

Admittedly, if you chose to delete a column you get a warning that this is irreversible, but it’s nice to know that if you do mess up, your hard drive dies, or you decide you want to restore a deleted Group, it can be done.

So I suggest you add these two important files to your regular back-up routines and restore them to the above folder should the need arise.

Edit: Version 0.26 of TweetDeck introduced synchronization of groups to multiple computers so it’s now possible to backup and restore your columns. Click the Settings button in the top right corner of TweetDeck then click the Sync tab. Register for a TweetDeck account to sync and backup your columns.

On Twitter, you can basically tweet personal stuff, or useful content, or you can answer other tweets, promote your blog posts or retweet what you’ve read. Most of you who have seen my Twitter profile will know that I usually tweet or retweet useful web links and I just wanted to take a minute to explain why.

At first sight, this might seem a boring thing to do, endlessly passing on a site here and a site there. I decided from the start to tweet useful content and tweeting web links seemed the best way to do it. Before I started in Twitter, I was, and still am, a big fan of RSS feeds. I currently have 145 RSS subscriptions in Google Reader focusing on Tech and Blogging. I realised that a lot of people were blogging in their spare time, putting in a lot of time and effort to bring me excellent free content. Having started this blog, I now know how much work is involved. I felt that filtering and tweeting the best web links on a daily basis would be a good way to pass on useful content and also give something back to all those bloggers by hopefully directing people to their sites.

I actually enjoy passing on useful information – I did this for years on tech forums before Twitter came along.

I don’t actively go out and look for followers these days and haven’t done so for some time, so I know that it’s the content which is driving people to follow me. Okay, my numbers aren’t huge, but at least I know that my followers aren’t just follow-backs who haven’t looked carefully at my profile. They’ve all seen a useful tweet or retweet, hopefully checked my profile and decided to follow me.

With a bit of luck, they’ll all like my blog posts as well and subscribe to the RSS feed (at the top right of this page!), so in the end, the efforts I put into microblogging will hopefully be rewarded with a group of people who want to read my blog.

On the chance that some of you have not arrived here from Twitter, I try and tweet the best of what I see in my RSS feeds each day – usually 4 or 5 tweets. This can be anything from social networking, blogging tips, SEO, CSS and WordPress plugins through to PC troubleshooting, PC utilities, freeware and on to Ubuntu. Things I’m interested in.

If you’re new to Twitter or may have missed some of my old tweets, please go back and look at my Twitter profile. There’s a complete record of my tweets there. Retweet anything you see there if you like. And follow me on Twitter if you like the content.

Useful links (added 21 February 2009):

Being a Useful Twitter User

This is the first in an ongoing series I’m going to cover on online services which I find really useful.

You may have heard of Delicious already or seen their logo on a web page. It’s really just a way of bookmarking webpages you have found useful so you can find them again easily or share them with a friend, a group of people or everyone. You just tag a webpage with appropriate keyword/s or phrase/s and you can return to that page again later by searching for that tag. The tag can be anything: a person’s name, a location, a recipe, etc. Even Delicious. You can link words into phrases using hyphens, e.g. Google-Chrome, PC-troubleshooting. The possibilities are endless.

People use Delicious in different ways. It’s really very flexible. Here’s a few uses:

View pages that are currently popular

You can view pages that are currently popular and being actively tagged by just going to the Delicious website. Here’s what’s currently popular as I am composing this post.

Popacular is another site which lists currently popular sites. It lists the 25 most tagged sites in the last hour, 8 hours, day, week, month and overall.
Index pages of interest

I subscribe to quite a few tech blogs. I’m particularly interested in PC troubleshooting, new applications and online services. Once you have registered with Delicious, when you come across a webpage of interest, you can tag it. I use the Firefox Delicious Bookmarks plugin which has a button to  bookmark a page.  You can assign a number of tags to the page if you wish and you can choose to make the tags public or not by checking the box at the top right. You can later bundle related tags into groups in Delicious for better organization of your tags.

Share a website with a group of people

Some tech podcasts, for example the Aussie Geek Podcast, ask their listeners to tag sites of interest for the benefit of other listeners and to bring websites to the attention of the show hosts.

Subscribe to a tag

You can subscribe to a tag in Delicious to see what sites other people are tagging with the same tag. You can even send that subscription as a feed to your RSS reader so you are constantly updated on new pages with that tag.

Viewing your tagged pages

You can view thumbnails of your tagged pages using Favthumbs either in grid or carousel layout.

Viewing and searching your tags

You can search your tags at your Delicious home page. There are also a few Firefox plugins which allow you to tag pages and view and search your tags in a Firefox sidebar. I’ve already mentioned Delicious Bookmarks.

Search the contents of all pages you’ve tagged

If you’re a registered Delicious user, you can search all of the contents of your  bookmarked pages using Delizzy once you’ve entered your Delicious username and password.

Manage your delicious bookmarks locally

You can also manage your bookmarks locally using Netlicious, but this is beta software so it’s not release quality yet. There’s a good description of it here. I find it crashes regularly, perhaps because it can’t cope with my 1649 tags and 3836 bookmarks.

Delicious blog and forum

There’s also a Delicious blog here where you can get the latest info on developments and a forum here where you can ask any questions you have on Delicious.

Hope this has convinced you that Delicious is a worthwhile online app. I recommend you sign up for it now and get to know it. It’s a great service and it’s free.

Further reading (added 15th February 2009)

Absolutely Delicious Tools Collection

Hard drive. Image via Wikipedia

If you’ve ever had a hard drive failure and lost irreplaceable photos and other data, you’ve already learned the hard way. Make no mistake, a hard drive definitely won’t last for ever so if you don’t backup your data, you need to start now to prevent a disaster.

Problem is, backing up your hard drive isn’t an easy process for the beginner or average user. Terms like cloning, imaging, incremental and differential backup are more familiar to geeks and advanced users than beginners, so many just wing it until disaster strikes.

Warning signs of hard drive failure

In some cases, you will start to see signs of a problem before the hard drive fails. Early warning signs include:

1. Computer freezes often. When it happens, the mouse cursor is unmovable and keyboard input is ignored. Nothing works and a restart is required to recover the computer./li>
2. Files mysteriously disappearing.
3. Frequent lock-up during booting. I say “frequent” because all computers will freeze every now and then and it doesn’t necessarily mean the drive is failing. You’re looking for a pattern here.
4. File access mysteriously slows to a turtle’s pace. Saving files or open files simply takes forever.

(from Hard Drive Failure: Warnings and Solutions; PC Mech)

In addition, you may get error messages during booting or the dreaded clicking sound or strange metallic noises indicating imminent drive failure.

I’m going to try and outline a reasonably straightforward backup strategy where you will always have a bootable backup hard drive with all your data should, or rather when, disaster strikes. We’ll divide it into four parts: (1) purchase a backup hard drive and external enclosure; (2) clone your hard drive; (3) backup your data and (4) recovery after a hard drive failure.

Purchase a backup hard drive and enclosure

I know this seems like overkill but it’s a great help if you get a backup USB external hard drive when you purchase your desktop PC or laptop. We’ll see why shortly. Get a disk that matches the one already in your PC or laptop or one with larger capacity. If you’re not sure of the make and model, in Windows XP, you can find out what hard drive you have by double clicking on the My Computer icon on your desktop, highlight Local Disk C , then select File, choose Properties, then the Hardware tab. That should give the drive make and model. Or use a free system information program like SIW or PC Wizard to get the drive information. The enclosure will have a data cable and power connector to connect one end to the backup hard drive and the other end to a USB port on your PC or laptop.

Clone your hard drive

Assuming you have bought your external drive with your new PC, once you have installed Windows on your new system and your essential application software (applications) like word processor, email client, etc., remove any junk or unnecessary programs using PC Decrapifier. Once everything is set up just the way you want it and the PC is running fine, now is the time to clone or image the drive. You’ve probably heard the terms cloning and imaging and very often they are used interchangeably. I’m going to make a slight distinction which some people make.

• Cloning is making an exact, uncompressed copy of your hard drive; just a mirror image.
• Imaging is making a compressed copy of your drive as a file which can be restored or uncompressed back to your hard drive.

I thing cloning is more straightforward for the beginner/intermediate user, at least until you become familiar with the process.

At this point, I’m going to refer you to two excellent articles which will guide you through the cloning process:

• Cloning a hard drive with Acronis True Image 11 Home
• How to Upgrade a Hard Disk Drive — Without Crashing the System

Acronis True Image is an excellent package and well worth investing in for both cloning and imaging.

So now we have a bootable backup hard drive in the external enclosure, with our Windows operating system, and our essential apps. We’re now going to regularly backup our data to this drive so that if disaster strikes we can be up and running again in less that half an hour.

Backup your data

There are different ways to do this from running a batch file which automatically copies your data across to the backup drive to using a backup or syncing program like the free Microsoft SyncToy, Allway Sync or SyncBack. These are probably the best options for the beginner. The important thing is to make sure you have backed up your Documents and Settings folder, including your browser bookmarks. Assuming you’re not using internet email like Gmail, find out where your email boxes are and be sure to back them up too and also any other important data not stored in the Documents and Settings folder. Use Explore to check down through all your folders and ensure that you are backing up all the data that’s important to you including your photos.

Make sure to backup regularly. Twice a week is sufficient for me. I use a batch file and just copy over files that have changed in my important data directories. Probably not a great solution for a beginner but here’s some info anyway.

Here’s a copy of a few lines from my batch file:

@echo off

echo pause

xcopy c:\”documents and settings”\user name”My Documents”\*.* F:\”documents and settings”\user name\”My Documents” /s /e /h /i /r /y /d

xcopy c:\”documents and settings”\user name\”Favorites”\*.* F:\”documents and settings”\user name\”Favorites” /s /e /h /i /r /y /d

:end
echo backup complete
pause

You can add extra lines for each main data directory you want to copy. Just change ‘user name’ to whatever your user name is, and you may have to change the drive letter for your external hard drive letter. You’ll be able to see that in Windows Explore. The xcopy command and the switches at the end of each line are explained here.

Another important point. Disconnect the backup drive when not in use to minimize the chance of any malware getting on it.

It’s even worth disconnecting your PC’s hard drive and plugging in the back up drive before disaster strikes to make sure it’s bootable and you’re backing up all your important data. Follow the procedure in the next section.

Recovery after a hard drive failure

If your hard drive fails, no need to rush out and buy a new drive and restore an image to it. No time lost there so this is a great solution if you don’t have a secondary backup PC and you rely on your PC for work. The beauty of this procedure is that all you have to do to get your PC running again is: unplug and open your PC, disconnect the data cable and power cable from the original dead hard drive and remove it, remove the backup hard drive from your external enclosure and connect up this bootable backup. Your operating system, essential applications, settings and data (up to your last backup) will all be there but you’ll probably have to install some programs which you put on between buying your PC and the disk failure. But this is a good chance to assess just what you were and were not using and be more selective in what apps you reinstall. The other big plus is that your registry is now virtually back to as it was when you first bought your PC and the machine will probably boot noticeably faster.

If you’re not happy about changing over the hard drives or if it’s a laptop and difficult to do, bring it to a reputable repair shop. It shouldn’t cost much to do. Get an estimate first from several shops if you like. Ask your friends if they have used a repair shop and can recommend one in your area. Or perhaps ask a geek friend to do it for you.

One last thing. Don’t forget to purchase a new (bigger) backup drive to go into your now empty external drive housing, and then repeat the cloning process before disaster strikes again. And keep backing up your data regularly.

Hope this has been of some help. Any suggestions to make it all easier? Anything I’ve missed? Drop a comment please and I’ll try and update it.