How to backup your data

This document is based on backup in Windows XP, Vista or 98. The main principles will still apply to Macs and Linux, however your data will be in a different location to what is suggested here.

Most people with computers would be aware that you need to backup. Only trouble is most people are not sure what and how and how often they should be backing up.

So how often should you backup.

My golden rule is, if you have done enough work or taken enough photos or downloaded enough music that you would not want to have to redo the work, then it is time to backup.

So if you take photos everyday or work on documents everyday, then you should be backing up at the end of every day.

So what do you need to backup.

Basically you only really need to backup your work, your photos, music. You do not need to backup windows or your programs as you will have the windows disk and software disks with your programs.

In later posts I will provide instructions on how to backup emails and address books for Outlook and Thunderbird as well as your favourites.

So what method should I use to backup.

There are a couple of methods that I would recommend for the average PC user.

1. Rewritable DVDs (DVD RW) or Rewritable CDs (CD RW) or though the CDs are starting to get out of date they are still useful if you are only backing up less than 700 MB per Disk.

The advantages of backing up to media such as DVDs are:

The disks are relatively inexpensive.

You can make multiple copies and put some copies away or take to a friends house in case of fire or theft.

2. Portable hard disk drive or Flash Drives.

Portable hard drives are more expensive than Disks, however you can store much more data without the need to use multiple disks as you would have to with DVDs if you had a large amount of data.

So how do I backup.

First thing you need to do is determine what you need to backup and how many megabytes your data is.

So how much data can I store

CD-Rs hold 700 MB of data

DVDR or DVDRW hold 4.37GB (4700MB) note the slight difference here, please only try to put a maximum of 4.37GB onto a DVD.

Portable hard drives or flash drives: It will depend on how big the drives are and how much space you are already taking up on the drive.

Finding your data and its size.

Your My Documents

This includes Documents, Music and Pictures. (unless you have stored Music or Pictures outside the default location)

So your main location for data is your My Documents folder. For windows xp users this folder can be found by opening windows explorer (start, all programs, accessories, windows explorer).

Once you have windows explorer open you will see a folder in the left hand window called My Documents. You need right click on this folder and choose properties and then the general tab and see how many MB it says for size.

For Windows Vista users you will need to open windows explorer and in the left hand column you will see a Vista OS(C:), if you expand this you will see a folder called users, expand this folder and find your logon name, right click on this name and select properties and confirm the size in MBs or GBs.

So the main thing here is make sure that the available space on your backup media is more than the amount of data you intend to backup.

Backup procedure to portable hard drives or flash drives

So first we need to plug in the portable hard drive or flash drive to an available USB slot in your computer.

Next we need to create a backup folder on the portable drive. Open Windows explorer and in the left hand window navigate and find the removable drive, it will most likely be listed as one of the drives below your cd or dvd drive.

Highlight the drive in the left hand window of explorer and then select the menu options file / new / folder. Now you can type the name backup or whatever you want to call the folder.

Now all you need to do is navigate back to your My Documents folder (XP) or your Folder with your user name (Vista) as decsribed above.

Right click on top of your folder and select copy. Then navigate to the backup folder you created on the portable drive and right click on top of this folder and select paste.

A copy of your data will now be sent to your removal drive.

When you go to perform the copy and paste the next time, you will be asked to overwrite your existing files. At this point you can select yes to all and your data will be updated with the new files.

Backup procedure to CDRW or DVDRW

Before backing up your data to a rewritable DVD or CD the disk will need to be formatted (or prepared) using your burning program.

With Nero you will need to select prepare rewritable disk. Depending on which other program you have for burning you will need to choose to prepare rewritable disk. Once this is done your disk becomes equivalent to another drive.

You can copy files to the DVDRW or CDRW as is described above for the backup to portable hard drive.

So thats it for backing up your My Documents, Photos Music etc, next few posts will describe backing up emails to Outlook and Thunderbird as well as backing up your favourites.

Merry Christmas to all

To those of you who read the Wizard’s Blog, I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Please be safe if you are driving over the break as there are a lot of people on the road.

Oh and please remember the number one rule of computing.

ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA.

Don’t know how to back up your data?, well come back the day after Christmas and I will have a short post on basic backup procedures.

Thanks again for all of those who take the time to read my blog.

The Bubble Video

Video: YouTube

This post is a break from the normal. The video is a light hearted look at the technology industry today. Quite funny.

The basics of using the ping program

So some of you may have heard your local technician or your IT administrator at work use the term ‘Ping’. So whats it mean and how can you use it.

Firstly ping is a small program that runs in DOS or a command prompt from Windows or from a command line interface in Linux or Unix.

Ping when used allows you to send a small message to another device on your network or on a remote network such as the internet. You are sending this message to the devices IP Address. (each network device has an address called its IP address) See my previous post on IP Addresses

If your network is working properly you should be able to receive a reply from the machine that you sent the message to, this will then tell you that your connection to that remote device is intact.

So when will the ping program be useful, well lets say for instance you go to access your broadband internet and it doesn’t appear to work, you open your browser and your internet site does not display. The ping program can tell you if you have access to your broadband modem and also tell you if you can ping the outside world (internet).

OK so how do we use the ping program. In Windows we need to open a command prompt. To do this for Windows XP and Vista you will need to go to the start button and choose run and then type cmd and then press OK or enter. For windows 98 or millenium you will need to go to start and run and type command and then press OK or enter. (See picture below)

Run Command

So once you hit OK you will see a command prompt box appear as in the picture below

Command Prompt

So now we need to ping one or two things to see if we have access or not. So what ip address or addresses do we ping.

In the command prompt above I have typed ipconfig, this command will give you your ip address, default gateway and subnet mask as shown in the image below.

Ipconfig

So it is the default gateway on your PC that I would like you to ping first. So I’m going to type ping 192.168.1.1 and you will need to replace the 192.168.1.1 with whatever your IP address is, so the command is;

ping 192.168.1.1

You should see 4 replies if you are connected to your broadband modem as in the image below. If you receive the replies from your default gateway the next step is to ping an Ip address from the internet and then finally a domain name on the internet. In the sample below I have pinged yahoo.com’s ip address and then their domain name.

So it’s ping 216.109.112.135 and then ping yahoo.com.

Pinging IP address

So to wrap up, we have learnt

1. How to find find our own ip address and default gateway.

2. The usefulness of the ping command to see if we are connected to our broadband modem and or the internet.

3. How to ping our default gateway and a device on the internet such as yahoo.com’s servers.

Basic Networking: The IP Address

So what’s this IP address thing that you sometimes here the techy’s talking about.

For the purpose of this tutorial we will look at IP Addresses using IP Version 4 as this is currently the most widely used and IP Version 6 is still not widely used.

An IP address is basically a set of unique numbers that electronic devices use to identify and communicate with each other on a network such as the internet or a local network like you would see in an office environment.

The concept is very similar to the house where you live having an address, ie your name might be Mr Jones and your address 99 Main Street, Denver, Colorado USA. Therefore if I was to send a letter by post to you I would need to fill out the full details as below.

Mr Jones
99 Main Street
Denver, Colorado
USA

In Networking the IP addresses look like this sample below,

192.168.1.1 or 203.12.160.35

Some IP addresses are meant to be unique on the Global Internet, while others only need to be unique within your local Network.

So for every device that is directly connected to the internet it will need a unique address that sets it apart from every other device on the internet.

Examples of these devices are your broadband router or modem that connects you to the internet, Internet web servers such as www.google.com etc.

So what about if you have a broadband modem at home and you have one or two or more computers connected to this modem and they all access the Internet.

Well what happens in this situation is, the modem gets a unique IP address for the internet and any of the computers that connect to that modem and then access the internet will get there own address that is only unique for your local little network at home. Any of the computers that use the internet will use the address of the modem to access the internet.

Please see how this works in the picture below.

Picture: The Wizard

Please note this is a part of the basic networking series, we will soon be beginning a more advanced networking series for those of you interested. Stay tuned!

New theme for The Wizard’s Blog

About a week ago I purchased 4 of the great new Revolution Wordpress Themes from Brian Gardner at BrianGardner.com.

Just tonight I have installed the Tech Theme for The Wizard’s Blog. I do however have a few modifications to do, so please bare with me, I should have the major mods done over the next few days in my spare time.

Below I have some snapshots of the revolution themes. If you are interested Brian Gardner has some free themes as well as the four or five he sells shown here. Brian also does custom themes and websites as well. Brian’s themes can be seen here Brian Gardner Themes and he can be contacted here Brian Gardner Contact Form

Well this is the Revolution Tech theme and the one I am using here on the Wizard’s Blog.

This is the Revolution Magazine theme, a really flashy theme that looks great and I wil definitely use it for some of my other sites.

This is one of my favorites as it is so clean and well laid out. I am using a modified version of this theme on both www.getalookatthis.com and www.palebludot.com

Finally the sports theme. I don’t have a specific use for this one yet, but I will definitely use it in the future.

Website: BrianGardner.com

Adjust Visual Setting for more speed from your PC or Laptop

Most people these days are in a hurry. Lots of things to do, and the last thing you need is for your computer to be running slowly. Here is a quick and simple way to get your XP or Vista PC or Laptop to run a bit better. The best thing is it should only take about a minute or so to do.

Adjusting Visual Settings in Windows XP

You will need to get to your system properties dialog box, and there are 2 ways you can do this.

If you have a My Computer icon on your desktop you will need to right click on it and choose properties.

If you don’t have the My Computer icon you will need to go to start and then Control Panel and choose the system icon.

Once you have the system properties dialog box open you will need to choose the tab which says Advanced.

Next to the option for Performance you need to choose Settings.

Then finally under the Visual tab you will have a number of boxes which are ticked.

Now remove all of the ticks except for the bottom two.

The two ticks to keep are, 1. Use drop shadows and 2. Use visual Styles.



Adjusting Visual Settings in Windows Vista

Ok for the Vista users we will need to get to the system properties dialog box and this can be done 2 ways.

If you have a My Computer icon on your desktop right click on it and choose properties.

If you don’t have the My Computer icon on your desktop you will need to go to the start button, Control Panel then choose Classic View from the left hand panel and find and open the System Icon.

So now we both should be able to see the option for Advanced System Settings in the left hand window, go ahead and choose that option.

Choose the Advanced tab and next to the performance section choose settings.

Under the visual tab you will need to clear all of the ticks except for,

1. Show Thumbnails instead of icons
2. Use Drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop
3. Use Visual Styles on windows and buttons

Select OK then OK again and your done.

Now the performance difference you get will vary depending on the how your machine was running originally. I do however almost always see a marked difference in the speed when opening programs and moving from one open program to another.

Please leave me a comment if you are unclear and need some help with implementing this procedure on you system.

Scientist connects moth’s brain to a robot

Robots controlled by living brains, Seems like the plot of a of science fiction movie, well not anymore.

“A scientist who successfully connected a moth’s brain to a robot predicts that in 10 to 15 years we’ll be using “hybrid” computers running a combination of technology and living organic tissue.”

“Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, has built a robot that is guided by the brain and eyes of a moth. Higgins told Computerworld that he basically straps a hawk moth to the robot and then puts electrodes in neurons that deal with sight in the moth’s brain. Then the robot responds to what the moth is seeing — when something approaches the moth, the robot moves out of the way.”

Picture: Disney-Pixar

Click the link below to see the full story at Computer World

Website: Robots with brains at Computer World