Computer and Internet Tips

Backing Up Data on a Remote ‘Cloud’ Computer

2011-03-03T17:48:00.001-05:00

Storing Your Files Inside the Cloud

WHEN the hard drive on Melissa Grove’s computer failed, she faced the possibility of losing 7,000 Word documents, 600 spreadsheets, hundreds of PowerPoint presentations and 12 years of federal grant applications.
“My PC clicked and I knew, uh-oh, and the computer was dead,” she recalled.
You’ve probably had that feeling. And you undoubtedly have heard the exhortation: “Back up your data or else.” For Ms. Grove, the executive director of the Legacy Counseling Center, a nonprofit support organization in Dallas for people with H.I.V. and AIDS, the story had a happy ending because she had backed up her data on a remote computer — what is commonly called “in the cloud.” With copies of everything, she could restore all her files.
While once a tedious task, backing up computer files is now much easier because the process has become entirely automated with the software that comes with a Windows PC, called Backup and Restore, or a Mac, called Time Machine.

It eases the problem almost everyone has of establishing a new habit. “How many times has the dentist told you to floss and you don’t?” said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega. Mr. Huberman understands the problem firsthand. Even though his company makes external hard drives, his wife, “a very intelligent businesswoman,” wasn’t backing up her files. He learned that only when a fierce brush fire forced them to evacuate their San Diego house.
Backing up to an external hard drive doesn’t help when your house burns or a tornado tears off the roof. If your computer is destroyed, your hard drive, stored 10 feet away in a closet, is probably gone too.
Even though a hard drive with a terabyte (or 1,000 gigabytes) of storage can hold thousands of photographs, songs and movies and costs less than $100, storing your files in a distant commercial data center, encrypted and secure, increasingly makes more sense. Cloud backups are appealing for another reason: as computing becomes more mobile — on laptops, tablets and smartphones — you need to have reliable access to the data anywhere over an Internet connection.
A growing number of companies now offer these cloud-based backup services. Two of the best-known, Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) and Mozy (www.mozy.com), offer similar features with different pricing paths.
Mozy charges $6 a month ($65.89 a year if prepaid) to back up 50 gigabytes of data on one computer, or $10 a month ($109.89 a year if prepaid) for 125 gigabytes on up to three. Carbonite charges $54.95 a year for unlimited storage from one computer. With both services, additional storage is available at discounted rates.
While Carbonite mostly likely will cost less, it comes with one significant drawback: the service does not back up external hard drives, commonly needed by filmmakers and photographers to store files. So the service is of limited use for those people who keep large amounts of data.
Carbonite also throttles back one’s uploading speed when it detects that a large amount of data will be stored, making the initial upload process even longer. But that may be of no consequence to those who store a smaller amount of data.
Carbonite’s advantage is in allowing its users to access their files anywhere. A user can download and view a single file using apps available for the BlackBerry, iPad, and iPhone or Android devices. Files can also be downloaded from any computer, through the company’s Web site.
Mozy users currently can access their files only via computer, but the company announced this week that remote apps for Apple’s iOS and Android devices would be available soon. Mozy does, however, provide next-day delivery of a DVD restore disc for $95 with up to 50 gigabytes of data, or $132.45 for a 125-gigabyte restoration disc.
Backblaze (www.backblaze.com) combines many of the features of Carbonite and Mozy. It offers unlimited backup for $5 a month per computer ($50 a year prepaid), and also backs up attached hard drives. If your computer’s drive crashes, you can either download the data or receive a DVD for $99 or hard drive via overnight mail for $189. Backblaze’s backup application is one of the easiest to use: it just backs up all data files and once completed, backs up new files on a continual basis (backups of deleted files, as with most services, are erased after 30 days).
For those who can’t decide where to back up, CrashPlan (www.crashplan.com) gives the option of storing one’s files on a local connected hard drive, CrashPlan’s remote cloud servers or on unused space on a friend’s PC.
For $50 a year for unlimited backup, you can specify which files should be held in one, or all of those three places. CrashPlan will also back up your external hard drives.
Amazon.com is also in the business of renting out its servers to people seeking backups. Rather than buying it directly, services likes Arq (Mac only) (www.haystacksoftware.com/arq) and Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com) provide access to the Amazon Web Services servers.
Prices include both a standard monthly fee ($2 a month for Jungle Disk, $29 one-time fee for Arq), and varying fees based on how much data, and how many individual files, are uploaded and downloaded. Uploading and maintaining 50 gigabytes of data on Arq will cost about $5 a month, assuming you only alter about 5 percent of the files in any month. Jungle Disk users can store the first five gigabytes of data at no charge, except for the $2-a-month fee. Storing 50 gigabytes would cost a total of $7.40 a month. Setup procedures for both Amazon back-up services may be too complicated for many. It requires users to sign up for an Amazon Services account and then obtain secret access keys from the Amazon site.
Because broadband speeds in the United States are slow, the initial backup-to-the-cloud process can take days or even weeks. In tests, I was usually able to upload two gigabytes of data a day. To back up my 50-gigabyte hard drive, a typical size these days, would take 25 days before the initial backup was complete. But once uploaded to the servers, files are uploaded only when changed, and that process takes just minutes.
The services operate in the background, and are generally unnoticeable. All companies promote their industrial-strength security: files are digitally encoded and often compressed before uploading. Multiple copies are held at one or more data centers.
Mr. Huberman, the Iomega president, has a solution for those who are still wary of putting their data in the cloud: Iomega’s Personal Cloud. It is available on all of the company’s Home Media hard drives and allows users to back up data from one Home Media drive to another stored in a distant location, like a friend’s or relative’s home, via a broadband connection.
At about $300 for two Personal Cloud-capable drives, with no monthly fees, the service costs could equal those of a typical cloud-based service within about five years.
But you still have to worry whether that hard drive in your friend’s house is also in the path of a tornado or wildfire.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 3, 2011, on page B7 of the New York edition.

Backing Up Data on a Remote ‘Cloud’ Computer

By ERIC A. TAUB

Published: March 2, 2011

Mac OS - empty trash securely

2011-02-25T16:45:00.000-05:00

I had almost 1,000 files and folders in my Trash folder and could not empty it.

The solution was very simple: hold the Option key while emptying the trash. It worked perfectly!

Make Firefox Remember Passwords without a Bookmarklet

2010-12-09T18:20:00.001-05:00

Make Firefox Remember Passwords without a Bookmarklet
A few years ago we wrote about a handy bookmarklet that would make Firefox remember passwords on some sites that ordinarily wouldn’t, like Yahoo! or Paypal. Some people on the article were reporting that this no longer works in Firefox 3, but one anonymous commenter referenced a rather clever workaround.
The trick requires the modification of a JavaScript file that Firefox uses for managing login-related tasks. Once the workaround is applied Firefox will start ignoring any attributes in the login forms that try to tell the browser not to remember a password. You’ll still be able to choose whether or not you want a password remembered for a particular site, but at least now the choice will be left up to you.
First things first. We need to open the nsLoginManager.js file in a text editor. The location of the file is a bit different depending on what OS you’re using:

Windows:
You’ll find the file in the components folder where Firefox was installed:
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\nsLoginManager.js
Mac:
Find Firefox in your Applications folder, right-click on it, and choose the option to Show Package Contents. Then within the Firefox.app navigate to the file:
Firefox.app\Contents\MacOS\components\nsLoginManager.js

Alright. This is where my instructions get a little different than what’s provided by the person who found this workaround. They want you to remove a few lines of code from this file, but all you really need to do is flip a value from true to false. That way it’s a lot easier to revert back to the file’s original state should you ever need to.
Now you need to perform a search on the file for:
_isAutocompleteDisabled
You should be taken to a section of the file that looks something like this:

You’ll notice that I’ve highlighted line number 770 (your line number may be different), and it says:
return true;
You need to change that to say:
return false;
It should now look like this:

Save the changes to this file, and then restart Firefox.

The only downside to this trick is that you may need to re-apply it after updating or reinstalling Firefox. Other than that it works great, and is a little nicer than the bookmarklet since it doesn’t require any additional interaction after being set up.

User name and password not remembered - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

2009-12-05T14:36:00.000-05:00

User name and password not remembered - MozillaZine Knowledge Base:
Sites prohibit password saving

Some websites, for example Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and some banks, specify that your username and password should not be saved. You can override this behavior.
[edit]
Using a bookmarklet

1. Bookmark the 'remember passwords' link on this page.
2. Go to the log in page of the site you want to save your details.
3. Enter your login and password, but do not submit.
4. Open the bookmark you just made. (Nothing will appear to happen).
5. Submit.

On subsequent visits, your user name and password should be filled in.

Note: The 'remember passwords' bookmarklet linked above may not work on all sites. Here are some alternate versions you can try. Create a new bookmark and paste the code given below in the location field of that bookmark. [3]

* Try this version that works with frames (doesn't give feedback):

javascript:(function(){function R(w){try{var a,df,dfe,i,j,x,y,r=1;df=w.document.forms;for(i=0;x=df[i];++i){dfe=x.elements;if(a=x.onsubmit){a=''}if(a=x.attributes['autocomplete']){a.value='on'}for(j=0;y=dfe[j];++j){if(a=y.attributes['autocomplete']){a.value='on'}}}}catch(E){r=0}return r}R(self);var i,x;for(i=0;x=frames[i];++i)R(x)})()

* Here is a version that gives feedback if you run it a second time:

javascript:(function(){var c=0;function R(w){try{var a,df,dfe,i,j,x,y,r=1;df=w.document.forms;for(i=0;x=df[i];++i){dfe=x.elements;if(a=x.onsubmit){a=''}if(a=x.attributes['autocomplete']){if(a.value=='on'){c++}a.value='on'}for(j=0;y=dfe[j];++j){if(a=y.attributes['autocomplete']){if(a.value=='on'){c++}a.value='on'}}}}catch(E){r=0}return r}R(self);var i,x;for(i=0;x=frames[i];++i)R(x);if(c){alert('Found: '+c)}})()
[edit]
Using an extension

* Always remember password 0.6 extension.
* Greasemonkey extension with related scripts:
o Allow password remembering
o Auto-login

[edit]
See also

* Password Manager
* Master password

[edit]
External links

* Remembering passwords (Firefox Support)
* Username and password not remembered (Firefox Support)
* Make Firefox Remember Passwords without a Bookmarklet"

Excel Dates Incompatible from PC to Mac?

2009-08-18T23:03:00.000-04:00

I discovered an amazing “bug” in excel tonight. I needed to create a copy of part of a spreadsheet into a new sheet. See if you can spot the difference between the original on the left and the new spreadsheet on the right:

You’ll notice that the dates are off by exactly 4 years and 1 day after a simple cut-and-paste into a fresh spreadsheet. It took a little while to figure out why this was happening.

First, a little background. When you write a date in excel, it stores the date as the number of days that have passed since either Jan 1, 1900 (on the PC) or since Jan 1, 1904 (on the Mac). Not surprisingly, this can cause problems between the two systems.

So, if you open a PC originated spreadsheet on a mac, it automatically uses the PC starting date (1900). If, however, you happen to make a new spreadsheet on that mac and cut-and-paste the dates to that new sheet, you’ll notice that the dates are off by 4 years and 1 day. Why the one day? Apparently that came down to a leap-year related difference between the two systems.

Fortunately, it’s easy to fix. If you’d like to conform your Mac spreadsheet to the PC system, simply open up Preferences->Calculation->Workbook Options an uncheck “1904 Date System”:

Your PC originated spreadsheet and your Mac originated spreadsheet will now match.

If you care, you can read a few more gory details on this Microsoft article on the date system.

Word 2007 "Compatibility Pack"

2007-11-15T21:59:00.000-05:00

Q: I have Word 2003 and have just started to receive Word 2007 documents, which I cannot open. What is the best solution?

A: Word 2007 has a new default file format, called DOCX, that is incompatible with older versions, which rely on the long-standing DOC format. The new version can be set to always save files in the old format, but not everyone knows that or chooses to do so.

However, folks such as you with the 2003 version of Word can install a free "Compatibility Pack" from Microsoft that will allow your copy of Word to read the new format.
It can be obtained from the company's Download Center, at www.microsoft.com/downloads.
You'll find it listed there under "Popular Downloads."