Tag: BACKUP

Whether you're a recent convert, ambivalent veteran or one of those hardened Apple fanboys, let us remind you: a Mac, like any other computer, needs to be maintained. No, you probably don't need anti-virus software (yet), you may never have to fiddle with registry editing, and you'll likely never need to reinstall the operating system. But you may face a kernel panic, a raft of mysterious app ...

Today is World Backup Day, another awareness-raising holiday that urges you to do something you should already be doing. Tonight, backup your data before something terrible happens (e.g., flood, fire, Rapture) and it's lost forever. Use Dropbox, Time Machine, or an external hard drive -- doesn't matter. Just do it now. After all, tomorrow is April Fool's Day and someone might think it's ...

It's a fact of life that too many of us learn the excruciatingly painful way: hard drives, like humans, have an unpredictable lifespan. Sometimes they last a long time, but sometimes, well, they die suddenly. Now think of all the physical goods we used to store in shoeboxes and drawers that in today's world exist only in digital form on our PCs: photos, music, home movies, Hollywood movies and TV ...

This is John Boldt, a graduate student at the University of Calgary. This past Wednesday, he was out for a run in Edworthy Park when some heartless thief (or thieves) broke into his car, and stole his laptop, which contained his research, notes and partially complete thesis. Now, Boldt was smarter than many users, and backed up all of his work to an external hard drive. But it too was swiped. ...

Chances are you've given up traditional e-mail clients in favor of something like Gmail or Hotmail by now, but did you ever think about what happens when those services go away? Sure, Google's great, but there's no guarantee that it's going to keep Gmail (and all your messages) online forever. If it up and disappears one day, you're done for -- unless you use Backupify (or other backup services). ...

At some time or another, we've all scratched the life out of a DVD or CD. If the old standby repairs don't work (gently rubbing them with a soft cloth and mild abrasive like toothpaste or Brasso), it's worth trying a rubdown with Rain-X. Instead of buffing out those fine pits and scratches, the Rain-X apparently fills them, making discs readable again. If you do find success, be sure to make a ...

As a motley group of music snobs, avid gamers, and movie buffs, we hate to admit this. Really, we do. But the vast majority of our listening, playing, and viewing takes place not in an acoustically treated home-entertainment fortress, but on a couch in front of a laptop. Seeing as that's the case, we really don't need all those fragile, easily smudged discs lying around as we once did. And even ...

A Flickr user recently woke up to his worst nightmare. His account, to which he had uploaded more than 3,000 photos over five years, was hacked and terminated by someone using a Hotmail account. But that's not all. According to Gawker, Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and student living in Taiwan, spent days sending e-mails and making phone calls to both Flickr HQ and Yahoo! (owner of the site), ...

If there's one important task computer users regularly ignore, it's backing up their data, including important items like their office documents, music, videos, and photos. Things go wrong sometimes: Computers get viruses, hard drives fail, and ex-girlfriends launch belongings out of windows, leaving you in a bind. One of the biggest reasons people forget backing up is that they don't know ...

You deserve no pity when your hard drive dies if you don't bother to regularly back-up your music, photos and important documents. The average drive dies after 3.1 years, so plenty die before then. A CD or DVD sells for pennies, and easy-to-use external hard drives abound for under $100, allowing you to quickly (and cheaply) set up automatic backups of all your prized files, so you don't have to ...

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/MobileMe_now_live_ready_for_you'; Hello MobileMe, goodbye .Mac (and good riddance). Apple's synchronization and Web application solution for your Macs, PCs, iPod touch or iPhone is now live. Push e-mail, push contacts, and push calendar and a new suite of Web applications are now yours for the taking. You know, after you hand over $99 for the first year ...

People can get awfully paranoid when it comes to their jobs. Some people can't help but think that everyone is out to get them, which seems to be the case for Marie Cooley of Jacksonville, Florida. Cooley is currently in jail after confessing to deleting files worth an estimated $2.5 million at her former employer, all because she thought she was about to get fired. As it turns out, she wasn't ...

With flavors like marshmallow, kiwi, bubblegum, black cherry and espresso the new line of Fabrik SimpleTech's Signature Mini Drives are ready to be filled up even as they make you salivate. The fashion-forward drives were designed by powerhouse Italian designer Pininfarina (of Ferrari fame) and sport 120, 160, 250 and 320 gigabytes of storage space in a small and stylish form factor. But the ...

Three years ago Jay LeBoff got snowed in and lost power for four days. During that time, LeBoff was forced to rely on a cell phone as his only way of contacting the outside world for emergency purposes. But without power to recharge the phone, he would have been up a certain creek without a paddle if the battery gave out. The experience, and a little bit of environmentally-friendly ...

Losing data without a backup is a painful scenario, but some people have seriously difficult backup scenarios. Case in point: Students in Iraq are using the Internet to back up even more documents: their passports. It seems that there is a disturbing trend where insurgents kidnap students and take -- or destroy -- their passports along with other official Iraqi documentation. With the number of ...