Welcome to Eric's Computers newsletter #2. First I'd like to thank one of my customers, Jim M, for asking me about the program Malwarebytes and why it was not listed with my favorite free virus and spyware removal programs. Well, it should have been. You can download it here http://www.malwarebytes.org/

           This month I'd like to cover backups. I will focus on home and home office solutions only. How many of you back up your data daily or weekly? I get at least one failed hard drive a week in my shop. Sometimes I'm able to recover the data, but when I'm not, the only option I have is to send it out to a data recovery center. The price for this can run into thousands of dollars. Your data might be worth that to you, but will you be willing to spend that kind of money to get it back? No, probably not, you'll suffer the loss and move on. There  are some great data backup solutions and some are free. If you got last month's newsletter you know I like free. If you didn't get it you can read it here.  

            There are only two places you can backup to, local and remote. You can backup locally to many different types of media. A few are, floppy, thumb drive, CD, tape, network, internal hard drive, or external hard drive. First I'm going to discuss my favorite way, external USB hard drive. You can find inexpensive USB hard drives at Fry's or online. I like SeaGate brand the best. I also have these drives in stock. There are two basic types, one that is small, a little larger then a pack of cigarettes, that doesn't need an external power source and one that is a little larger than a paperback book, that needs to be plugged into a power outlet. Typically the smaller size holds less data and is more expensive, but very portable, and is small enough to fit in a purse or coat pocket.  

          So you have purchased your external USB hard drive, now what? Plug it into your computer and power source ( if necessary) and turn it on (if it has a switch). Your computer should automatically see the drive. This should work both in XP and Vista. Right click on the start menu and select Explore. Find the My Computer Icon (XP) or Computer Icon (Vista), right click on the icon and  select Manage. This will bring up the Computer Management Console. In the left window under Storage click on Disk Management. Normally these disks are already formatted for you so all we are going to do here is change the drive letter. Locate your external drive in the right window (identified by size and name), right click on it, select Change Drive Letter or Paths, and select Change. Set the drive letter to one high in the alphabet I like "Q", this way no other devises you may plug in at a later date will "steal" the drive letter from your External USB drive. Now that's done close the Computer Management Console.

            Ok, now for the software. Most of these drives come with their own flavor of proprietary software, I don't recommend using  any of them. My favorite backup utility is called Cobian Backup and guess what, it's  FREE. You can download it and find all the install and setup help you need here http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

          Now for remote backup I recommend an online service called Mozy. You can sign up here http://mozy.com/home. They offer up to 2 Gigs of data backup for FREE. Also, if you need to backup more, they have reasonable pricing.

That's all for this month. Thanks for making my business a success!

Eric