John The Geek Tech Tips E-Letter #004

Last week we talked about backing up your PC and why that’s so
important. One way to make sure your backups are extra-secure is
to store copies of the backups off-site. Most businesses do this
in case a disaster strikes the main building, there will still be a
copy of the backup available to restore once the hardware is back
online.

Picture it this way: we talked about using an external hard drive
for backups, an external drive that sits next to your PC. This is
all well and good as long as nothing happens to the room in which
the PC is located. In other words, what happens if the building in
which your PC is located burns to the ground? Having a backup hard
drive sitting next to it on the same desk is kinda useless in that
scenario.

This is why off-site backups are so important for critical data.
If you’re a home user, you probably don’t have that much critical
data that you need to be concerned with. You could burn the data
to a CD periodically and store the CD in your safe deposit box, for
example. You could even drop it off at your brother’s house. The
idea is to get it off-site to protect it in case of a real disaster.

While this is overkill for most home users, it’s worth thinking
about because you just might have data that you could not afford to
lose, or that would be extremely difficult to replace. Or, you
might have so much data to protect, that writing it to CDs or even
DVDs is impractical.

Here’s an example from my own experience: I have 43.3 GB (yes,
that’s gigabytes, with a G) of music in a partition on one of my
hard drives. Fully 95% of it is MP3s that were ripped from CDs I
own. Yep, I own a LOT of CDs! Those of you who have gone through
the exercise of ripping your CD collection to disk know the time it
takes to get through a large collection. Obviously, I don’t want
to lose that effort if my hard drive coughs up a hairball.

So, in addition to the external hard drive that is my daily backup,
I have a membership in a service called MP3Tunes which provides as
much space as I need to upload my entire music collection to their
servers. This serves several purposes, not the least of which is
to get my collection off my hard drive and out of my house so that
if a meteor hits my home office and takes out my computer and
backup hard drive, I can download my collection again from MP3Tunes
from wherever I can get a broadband Internet connection. You can
check out MP3Tunes here:

http://www.mp3tunes.com

MP3Tunes is specific to music, but there are others that deal with
all types of data files. Some are free and others have a charge
based on the amount of space you use. I am in the process of
evaluating the latest crop of these and will have a report on them
soon.

If you’re in business, you can be pretty sure that your business
data is worth protecting in this way. Think about it: what would
happen if you lost your customer list? Your bookkeeping data?
Your inventory data? All of the above? The statistics on
businesses that have folded because of a disaster that destroyed
their data are scary. Again, offsite backup storage is the answer
to keep your data safe and your business protected. Watch for my
report on the current online backup solutions for info on
set-it-and-forget-it backups that don’t require schlepping CDs or
tapes all over town.

Technical question of the week:
I had an email from Karen who was having some problems with her
blog. The comments had stopped working. When I tried the site, I
found that the comments link was throwing an error. Specifically,
a syntax error was occurring in one of the WordPress PHP modules
(comments.php), preventing the comments page from loading properly.

Now, a syntax error usually means somebody modified the code and
mis-typed something so that the compiler can’t understand what
it’s supposed to do. One thing about computers is that they’re
very picky about how you type commands. Computers do exactly what
you tell them to do, not necessarily what you want them to do, and
if you don’t type the command correctly, the computer will simply
refuse to have anything to do with it. That’s when you start
seeing error messages and things quit working. The computer
doesn’t know that you meant “print” when you typed “pirnt” and if
“pirnt” isn’t a recognized command…voila! A syntax error!

As it turned out, someone had “fixed” something in Karen’s blog
recently and things had not been quite right since. I suggested
she contact the person who did the fixes and have them check
whatever they changed in comments.php to find the syntax error and
correct it.

One of the first rules of troubleshooting something that used to
work and now doesn’t, is to determine what changed between then and
now. If someone modified something, chances are pretty good that
they broke it. That’s certainly one of the first things to check.
One of the benefits of the rigid consistency of computers is that
if something used to work and suddenly stops working, something
changed. Computers don’t stop working for no reason and once you
determine what changed, it’s usually pretty easy to figure out what
broke and fix it.

Freebie of the week:
This week, we’ll finish up our discussion of Google’s free online
productivity tools with a bit about Google Docs. A Google Doc can
be either a word processing document or a spreadsheet. I use both
frequently as it’s very handy to jump online and create a quick
spreadsheet to analyze some data, or turn out a document without
having to fire up Microsoft Word.

The spreadsheet application resembles Microsoft Excel to some
degree and performs many of the same basic functions. Being an
online application it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that
come with Excel, and its capacity is limited to 100 rows per
worksheet, but most of us don’t make spreadsheets that big anyway.
If you need more than 100 rows of data, you can always add another
worksheet, as long as the data doesn’t need to all be on one page.

The document application is a fairly robust word processor. Again,
it doesn’t have all the whiz-bang of Word, but it does the jobs
most of us ask of Word every day. I know very few people that use
more than 10-15% of the features available in Word. The Google
Docs application is for the rest of us.

One of the coolest things you can do with Google Docs is share them
among others who have GMail accounts. You can make your documents
and spreadsheets public and allow others to collaborate with you,
or simply give them the ability to view them online. This can save
a lot of headaches by making it unnecessary to pass around Word or
Excel files.

You can import files into Google Docs from these formats: HTML,
plain text, Word, Rich Text Format (RTF), OpenOffice format, and
StarOffice formats for documents and Comma Separated Values (CSV),
OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) or Excel formats for spreadsheets.
You can export them in a large number of formats, as well: HTML,
RTF, Word, OpenOffice, PDF and plain text.

Another great feature is a special email address that is provided
with your Google Docs account which allows you to email documents
directly into Google Docs. For example, if you have a hot idea and
you don’t have your browser open, but you have your email client
handy, you can write a quick email to the supplied address with the
subject of the email being the desired title of the document and
Google Docs will create a document with that title and the contents
of the email. Alternatively, you can email attachments to the
special email address and they will be converted to Google
documents in HTML format.

Give Google Docs a try. I think you’ll find them very useful.