Making backups of all your files should be a matter of due course for anyone and everyone, and with recent events in my own cyber life, the concept of the backup has taken on new meaning, turning this geek into a backup freak. But let’s talk about my freaky geeky workspace for a moment and you’ll see that not only am I a freak for anal pleasure, I’m pretty anally retentive when it comes to backing up my life. The closet space that’s in my office has more or less been converted into a supply depot, with everything from filing cabinets, to organizers, to office supplies, to books and manuals, to spindles of blank CDs and DVDs – yes, it’s all my stuff, but as I was cleaning the other day as part of my organizing kick, I came across a CD organizer that had a bunch of old backups; mostly software, but quite a bit of business and tax stuff that I really need to hang onto for a while, but I thought I’d share some backup tips for those who may be so inclined to pay attention or care.

Under Fair Use Laws you are entitled to make backup copies of your commercial software for your own use and for safety and/or archiving purposes. I mean, if you have to spend a few hundred to a few thousand dollars on software, it might be a good idea to make a backup of the disc in the event of damage or destruction. Fair Use laws also apply to commercial music and DVDs that you own, but because of DRM (Digital Rights Management), copying a commercial DVD can be a bit of a hassle and chore, unless you have the right software. A few years ago there was a great program out called DVDXCopy which allowed you to strip the copy protection from commercial DVDs and make backups. Of course the movie studios went nuts and sued 321 Studios and they were successful in getting this version of the software pulled and in putting 321 Studios out of business. (Yes, I happen to have a copy of the original DVDXCopy and it works great, but there are other solutions and tools which you can check out here if you want to make backups of your commercial DVD movies.)

Software backups are pretty easy and fairly common, unless you’re trying to copy a protected disc. Most software companies aren’t using copy protection as much as they’re using sophisticated registration and activation routines in order to use their software; Adobe for example has a very intricate registration and activation process which requires you to enter a serial number, and then generate an activation code which you then use to get the product key to turn on the program. Considering how much Adobe has invested in developing their products you can understand why they go to such lengths to prevent pirated copies from getting out there, but crackers always seem to find workarounds.

I read an article recently that suggested that a KeyGen for Windows Vista has already been circulating around some cracking circles, and it will only be a matter of time before Vista falls, even tho the Northern Entity is completely militant when it comes to this shit. Ooo, speaking of the Northern Entity… do you just hate Windows Update and how it installs that crazy Genuine Advantage Tool that basically tweaks out your OS so you can’t get updates unless they say so? Mmmm, me too. Try this website. It allows you to download Windows Updates in Firefox and bypasses the Windows Genuine Advantage Tool. A very cool site.

For basic workhorse backups I use Nero for data, and I use Sonic DLA for DVD backups. The beautiful thing about doing data backups on DVD is that you can cram over 4gb onto a blank DVD which saves space but also allows you to keep more of your data in one place. These are commercial programs, but there’s a really cool free utility called ImgBurn which can handle all your backup chores. This is an essential utility for everyone’s toolkit.

For music backups I use iTunes, and the nice thing about the new version of iTunes is that it keeps track of your backups, so you can do your entire library and then when you add songs and want to back those up, iTunes remembers the placeholder and it gives you the option of creating a backup starting from the endpoint of your last one. I absolutely love iTunes. Not just because I love my iPods, but because it’s a great player and library tool for music, and of course the iTunes store, but also because it’s a great file format converter too. And speaking of file formats, Microsoft recently lost a lawsuit brought by Alcatel-Lucent over patent infringements in the licensing of the MP3 music codec (which was just over turned by a U.S. District Court Judge). The whole issue over MP3 patents could be partly why Apple chose to go with open source AAC as the audio codec for music purchased thru the iTunes store, but also too, I think AAC is a better format in general, and it’s open source code which I absolutely love. The nice thing about iTunes as I said is that it’s a great file format converter which allows you to convert Windows WMA files to whatever format iTunes supports, including MP3, AAC, WAV, or Apple Lossless. We’ve got close to 80gb of digital music spread across all our computers and five iPods in our home, and if we lost a hard disc we’d be screwed without our backups. This is also why we’ve been considering buying either an external USB 2.0 drive or a Firewire drive. The prices on these external peripherals have really come down, and my husband has an external Firewire drive on his system that he uses for video editing, but I’m thinking I may go with a USB 2.0 drive for music. Something that’s really scary on the geek-meter is that we’ve been talking about getting a server for our home network and using that as a hub for all our media files as well as being able to handle printer and file sharing in our home. Another cool thing about iTunes is that it now lets you browse and play music files within your home network, so I can look at my husband’s library from my computer and have access to his music and vice versa. We’ve considered this as an option, and I could probably write it off as a business expense, but we’ll see. It might be kind of cool to have our own server running Apache and MySQL to handle all of our needs, and also too, I’d be able to host geishaland from my home! Yay!

But this might be off in the distant future, who knows? Maybe when I get my new Mac I’ll buy an XServe as well!

Self Hosted Wordpress Users might also want to check out a plugin from skippy.net that allows you to create a backup of your Wordpress database. It’s a great plugin but it has a couple of issues. The first is that you need to CHMOD certain folder permissions to a higher than safe level in order for the plugin to create the backup, and what’s a bit perplexing is that it seems to want to store the backup on your server, which in my opinion is the wrong place to put your backup. It does have the option to download the backup to your system locally as it should, or to email you the backup, but unless you’ve got your folder permissions configured to allow the plugin to write to the server, it won’t work, even if you just want to download your backup file to your local system – but it’s still a good option and plugin to consider. The other option is to create your database backups thru myPhPAdmin, which is the MySQL database utility included in most Linux hosting plans. This is very easy to do, and I have a quick tutorial posted here if you need a refresher on how to do this.

After I was forced to switch hosts over a content dispute with absolutely zero notice at the beginning of February this year, and after losing my database going all the way back to December of 2005, I’ve become the Queen of Fanatic Backups. I now do daily backups of my Wordpress database and store them on a multi-session CD for safekeeping. I also use the Wordpress Export tool to create a WXR file of my database as an additional precaution, also done daily. Sure it’s a little (okay a lot) anal, but it’s my site, and my content, and I’m not about to lose it ever again. I also do a server dump to disc everytime I upgrade my software or make any changes to any of the .php files used in Wordpress, just in case. My husband thinks I’m nuts, but that’s not really anything new. I suppose that’s why he married me, again! :heart:

:heart: :kissing: :heart:

So those are my geek girl tips and tricks for how to cover your ass and protect your data.

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