John The Geek Tech Tips E-Letter #003

This week’s word is: backup! Okay, show of hands…who knows what
a backup is? Good, almost everybody. Next, who backs up their
computers regularly? Ooh, bummer, almost nobody! And I’ll bet
those few who do have had at least one instance in their past where
they lost a ton of time and/or money because their system crashed
and they didn’t have copies of their data files.

Maybe you’ve never had a power outage in the middle of a document
you’d spent several hours on and hadn’t actually saved to disk yet.
Maybe you haven’t had a hard drive crash and lost hundreds of music
downloads, or pictures, or business documents or data that you’ve
accumulated. If that’s you, then congratulations, you’ve beaten
the odds. The bad news is: you’re way overdue!

Seriously, hard drives are extremely reliable these days, but they
all fail eventually. You know that MTBF number that was so proudly
displayed on the spec sheet? That means Mean Time Between Failures
and it’s usually a very large number of hours. The implication is
that it will be so long before that sucker croaks that you’ll have
sold or given away that PC and be well into your second or third
replacement by the time the hard drive decides to bite the big one.

The significant word in that acronym is “mean”. What’s a mean?
It’s what most people call an average. If you take two hard drives
and one dies at 100 hours and the other at 10,000 hours, the MTBF is
5,050 hours. Sounds like major security going on, right? Not if
you’re the one who bought the 100-hour drive!

External hard drives are so cheap these days there’s really no
excuse for not having your PC backed up at least once a day. I
have a Maxtor 500GB One-Touch external hard drive sitting by my
main PC. The One-Touch comes with backup software that runs in the
background and at the specified time every day backs up the
contents of my PC’s hard drives onto the One-Touch. Actually, it
backs up just new files and the changes made to any existing files,
which takes a lot less time. I have a 160GB and 250GB hard drives
in my machine, so copying everything off them both every night
would take a good long time. As it is, a typical backup on this
machine takes about 15-20 minutes. It kicks off at 12:30AM when
I’m not usually at the machine. Yes, that means I leave my machine
on 24/7, which is a topic for another time.

My Maxtor 500GB One-Touch drive cost me just over $200 at Staples a
year or so ago. They’re less expensive now. I think you can buy a
1TB (that’s terabyte, as in trillion) One-Touch for about what I
paid for mine. The point is, a couple hundred bucks now will save
you way more than that amount in time and aggravation if your
system does decide to go south one day.

To continue our discussion of great freebies on the Net, this week
we’ll look at Google’s Calendar application. It’s part of the
suite of Google online applications that are available free to
everyone. To check out the Calendar, go to
http://www.google.com/calendar. If you have a GMail account, you
can use those credentials to sign into Google Calendar. If you
don’t, refer to the previous two e-letters to learn why you should
have your very own GMail account.

The Google Calendar does pretty much what you’d expect a calendar
application to do, but with some interesting bells and whistles:

Create multiple calendars, some private, some public, and some to
share with others. For example, you could have a personal calendar
that you share only with family members, another one for work, and
another one for that killer band you’re in. Events on the
calendars can be private or searchable publicly, so the band
calendar would list your gigs so that people could search to see
where you’re playing next. You can give others read-only access to
your calendars, or let them add, edit, or remove events.

Set notifications so that your calendar alerts you to upcoming
events. You can have alerts sent to your email, your phone, or
popup on your screen if you have Google Calendar open in a browser
at the time. The default when creating an event is to alert 10
minutes prior to the event time, but you can set it for hours or
days ahead of time.

Create events via a browser or by sending a text message from your
cell phone if you don’t have immediate access to a computer.
Google Calendar will text you back letting you know the event was
added to your calendar.

There’s more, so I recommend you check out Google Calendar. It’s
an indispensable part of my life now.