It’s midday in Sydney and this blog has already received 16 spam comments today. Fortunately I don’t have to deal with them as I use a WordPress plugin called Akismet to weed them out for me. They end up in a special folder where I can check them if I have the patience.

In the last 6 months there have been 29,783 spam comments on this blog.

Can you believe it? 29,783!!! I can’t.

This blog is not especially popular. I don’t post as often as I’d like, and some of what I post is not relevant to many people. And yet in the last year there has been 36,359 comments classified as spam.

As you can see, the number of comments rose to a peak in September. I’m not sure what the story was or what causes the rise and fall in spam. Has anyone else seen similar figures?

Here is a sample of the sort of comments we mean by spam:

As you see, they all want to sell me something, or sell you something. Or worse.

Maybe I need to add one of those things where you have to enter the funny characters you see on the screen. I know Akismet is sealing them off for me, but just allowing them to add the comment in the first place offends me.

What do you think?

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iGoogle has a new look, and I like it. I use iGoogle as my home page, as as you can see I have customised it to the way I like it. I also use Google+, and I appreciate the clean design it uses. iGoogle has been brought in line with Google+.

This is how it looked a couple of days ago.

This is how it looks today.

The changes are subtle but make a big difference. The most obvious difference is that side column. It’s not gone, it can be brought back at any time. You can see a little arrow on the top left above Weather. I’ve hidden it because 99.99% of the time I don’t need it.

Clicking on an item in Google reader gives a cleaner look as well.

Well done Google!

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The last of the four Unlock The Past Expos was held this weekend in Geelong, and it was the biggest and best ever. It was held at the Geelong Arena, the home of the Geelong Supercats (a basketball team, I believe). The Exhibition Hall was a transformed basketball court, with carpet laid over the shiny wooden floor, and was swarming with visitors and exhibitors.

There were two streams of talks and my biggest regret was that I didn’t get to see any of them. I was kept very busy, helping out with registrations at the beginning of both days, and helping people with their research the rest of the time. There were lots of interesting questions and even though I couldn’t always find answers immediately for them we always managed to find somewhere else they could look. It’s important to remember that not everything is available online!

For more photos go to my photo album in Facebook, and for a full rundown of all the talks see Shauna’s blog.

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Early last year I bought a Toshiba NB200 notebook. It was just what I wanted. I bumped up the RAM to 2GB and installed Dropbox, and I never looked back. I could take my work with me and have it synchronise with my main laptop at home.

About a month ago it became unreliable as to starting up. Now it won’t start up at all. Not happy.

I’ve checked forums and so on. If I press F2 or F12 while it’s trying to boot up – nothing happens.

If I press 0 (zero) while it’s booting up to restore it to its factory condition – nothing happens.

If I do nothing when it’s trying to boot up, I either get a black screen or the Toshiba splash screen, and there it stays.

The forums also say to use my system restore disk. I have no system restore disk, and I don’t have a portable disk drive to run it on, so to buy these things will cost more money. I thought that’s what the space being taken up on the hard disk by the factory system restore was for.

I know we’re supposed to be replacing our netbooks with iPads or other tablets these days, but I use mine to work. I need a keyboard all the time. I don’t want to have to mess with a virtual keyboard, and I don’t want to have to carry a portable keyboard around and have to connect everything up when I get to the place where I am researching. I just want to open up my netbook and go.

I can’t afford to buy a new netbook every year and then upgrade the memory, and then spend the time loading everything back on it that I need. I would pay more for a netbook with a longer guarantee, but it seems that netbooks are on the way out, in favour of tablets.

OK, I’ve had my rant, thank you for your attention!

By the way, if you are interested in Dropbox, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, you will do me a favour if you sign up using my recommendation. That way I get more space, and when you are as hooked as I am you can recommend it to your friends and get more space above the first free 2GB.

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The 2011 Unlock The Past NSW Expo was held at the Coff-Ex this last Friday and Saturday. I was there helping out in an official capacity and I gave a talk on Social Media for Family Historians. I was sorry to have missed many of the presentations given, but I did manage to catch two.

Carol Liston spoke about researching places in depth for family and local history in a talk called Finding the address isn’t enough – the links between local and family history. I have seen Carol speak on previous occasions and she always gives an overview that helps you draw the details of family history together in a way that you think ‘of course! why didn’t I think of that?’ Go and see her any chance you get!

Melanie Oppenheimer spoke about the Soldier Settlement schemes in NSW and the project she is working on to better understand the experiences of the soldiers involved in these schemes. The stories and photographs contributed by the descendants of the soldiers add a depth not otherwise possible. The website is hosted in conjunction with State Records NSW and is well worth a visit.

Both talks deserved a much higher attendance.

There are some excellent posts on the Expo by Shauna Hicks and Helen Smith and so I will not repeat what they said here.

I will just share some photos I took through the weekend:

I think everyone had a great time, I know I did!

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A few months ago my laptop spent days going through all my photos and tagging the faces, and then I spent a few more days (on and off) giving them names. It was a lot of fun, and I wrote about it here.

When my laptop ran out of space I had to move all my photos onto an external hard drive. I was nervous about losing all of that work so I wasn’t brave enough to open Picasa.

Now I have a new laptop, with plenty of space for all my photos, and so I have moved them back. The question was, did I have to do all that face recognition all over again?

The answer, I’m happy to say, is no.

Picasa keeps all of that information in a separate database. As long as you can access those files from your old computer you can use them to replace the new ones when you install Picasa on it.

Basically you need to back up:

"C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2"

and

"C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2Albums"

The first one holds face recognition data and probably much more, and the second holds your albums. I didn’t have these files backed up, but they were still on the hard drive of my old computer, and today, with the help of my new hard drive enclosure that arrived in the mail, I was able to copy them over.

I have also added everything under AppData to my Mozy backups so I don’t have this problem in the future if my hard drive fails.

Do you have your AppData backed up?

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My old laptop died a sudden death on Good Friday, 22nd April 2011.

My new laptop arrived on Black Friday, 13th May 2011.

Are you detecting a pattern here?

The death of my old laptop was not the catastrophe it could have been, thanks to my many backups. I only lost a morning’s worth of emails since my last backup had run overnight. I had backups of all documents, photos, music and databases in various places, including online.

I had a few issues with the software I had to use until my new one arrived, but these are mostly resolved. The main issues I still have are lessons you can learn from:

• Is your Application Data (in Windows XP) or Appdata (Vista) folder backed up?
• Some programs keep their data in the same folder as the program files, under Programs rather than Documents. You may have to consciously export a backup regularly rather than relying on it to be backed up with other documents. If you didn’t, it will be lost when you computer dies.
• All my browser extensions and bookmarks have gone missing. I need to find out how to back these up too.
• My download limit is being pushed by having to download a lot of software at once, and re-establishing with Mozy, my online backup service. I’m getting better at organising these things for offpeak times.

I have ordered an adapter for my old laptop’s hard drive. Since it was the motherboard that died I am hoping that the hard drive can still give me the data that wasn’t backed up. It will look like a portable hard drive, only I can open it and put the hard drive into it. Stay tuned!

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My new laptop arrived last week and the power adaptor is even bigger than the last one. Here’s a photo of the adaptors for the last three laptops I’ve had over the 6 years:

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This post was originally published in Genealogy in NSW.

Early last month I wrote about my backup strategy here and here, little realising that I would soon be put to the test.

On Good Friday, less than 3 weeks after writing about my backups, my laptop would not start. At all. It being a public holiday I couldn’t get any technical support on the phone until the Wednesday, as Tuesday was the Anzac Day holiday. I was told it was the motherboard. I could pay $700 to extend my warranty so that someone would come and fix it in my house for “free”, or I could buy a new one. As the laptop is just on 3 years old, I didn’t see the point in throwing good money at it. It’s my third laptop and they just don’t last longer than 3 years.

And, of course, I had my backups.

I am currently using my netbook (or mini laptop/notebook) while waiting for my new laptop to arrive. I shopped around and eventually ordered a custom-built Dell which has a higher resolution screen than the standard off-the-shelf laptops. I usually only use my netbook for research trips and I regularly synchronise all the documents between it and my laptop, so recent versions of all my documents were already on it.

Backups

I use an online backup service called Mozy that backs up everything I use often without me having to remember to do it, including my Outlook mail file and my family tree databases. My mail file has 10 years of emails from family, friends and clients, and I would hate to lose them. Because my mail file is backed up to Mozy every night, I only lost a few hours worth of emails that had arrived on Good Friday after my backup ran the night before.

Mozy also backs up my family history databases, documents and photos every night, as insurance. I can easily download one or all of the files if I need to. I would hate to have to download 20GB of files at once, but it is very comforting to know they’re there, and to be able to download a single file that you deleted or corrupted by mistake.

I store absolutely critical files that I am constantly working on in Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service that allows you to store up to 2GB of data on the internet and automatically synchronise it with your other computers, or those of friends. I keep PowerPoint presentations and handouts for talks in Dropbox, as well as my thesis, so that there is a backup created automatically as soon as I finish editing and close the file.

I also use two separate external hard drives to back up absolutely everything – my family history research, my client files, my photos, music, and everything else.  I use synchronisation software called GoodSync to keep all these files up to date. I also use GoodSyncto keep my netbook synchronised with my laptop.

So all my data is backed up.

What is missing from my netbook, though, is software.

Software

The version of Microsoft Office I use on my netbook does not include Outlook, so I can’t receive or send emails that way. I can receive all new emails by setting Gmail to pick them up for me, but I don’t have access to any of the previous ones. And I have to remember to copy any replies to my own email address, so that they will all be in Outlook when I eventually get it going. Emails are much easier to deal with if they are all in the one place so I can see the history of a conversation.

I have a backup of my accounting database but no software to run it on. I have the software on a CD somewhere but my laptop doesn’t have a CD drive, and even if I were to install it I can’t activate it without my registration key, which is in an old email in Outlook.

You see my problem? I am in limbo until I can run the software.

To make matters worse, I started using my husband’s laptop, which is only a few months old. I copied my email file to it from my backup and set up a new account in Outlook to pick up my emails. I was using Office 2007 and he is using Office 2010, so I had to be sure that I wasn’t going to be able to save my laptop before doing this, as once I was in Office 2010 there was no going back to 2007.

Unfortunately, after a day or two of using his laptop, it starting giving messages about the “imminent failure of the hard drive”. I copied my Outlook mail file back off it, now updated with recent emails, and we backed up everything else just in case. It has now gone off to have a new hard drive installed. It’s still under warranty, which is comforting, but we now have no full size laptop in the house.

So I’ve started playing with trial versions of software. Trial versions give you access to all of the features of the software for a limited time, such as a month or two. A month is long enough for my current crisis! I have downloaded a trial version of Office 2010 to my second netbook, which did not already have any version of Office on it, nearly 700MB. I didn’t want to overwrite the version of Office 2007 that was already on my “first” netbook.

A second netbook, you ask? It’s the original one, that I bought too early, before netbooks had evolved sufficiently to be really useful. It’s got a great high resolution screen and a metal case, but it’s slow because it runs Vista, it gets very hot and the battery only lasts an hour or so. I bought a new onelast early year when the prices had come down and the batteries lasted longer. The old one has been sitting in the cupboard waiting for me to decide what to do with it.

So now I have all my old emails accessible again. I’ve also downloaded a trial version of the latest Quickbooks, my accounting software. I can now see what clients have paid and create new invoices. This will mean that I will have to upgrade my software when I get my new laptop, as I will not be able to go back to the old version. More money!

I’m still struggling a bit with the smaller screen and keyboards on the netbooks but at least I am able to keep working.

Lessons learned

I can’t begin to imagine what a disaster the sudden death of my laptop would have been if I hadn’t had backups of all my data. In the past I had always replaced the old one before it was too late, enabling a controlled transition from the old one to the new one. Not this time!

Here are some lessons I have learned during this ordeal:

1. If you buy Microsoft Office off the shelf instead of pre-loaded on your computer you can install it on a second, portable device such as a netbook. It’s more expensive but you get two for the price of one. I found this out the day AFTER I ordered my new laptop with Office pre-installed. You may not need Outlook on your netbook, and you will have a problem keeping them in sync if you use it on both computers at once, but it will be there as a backup if you need it.
2. If you download and install a trial version of Office 2010 on a computer that already has Office 2007 that includes Outlook, it will NOT install Outlook 2010 and it won’t warn you. I learned this from experience on an old laptop that was too unstable to give away when I replaced it and has been sitting in the cupboard. That’s when I went to the old netbook.
3. Don’t assume that all software you use keeps its files in a place that will be backed up. Some programs keep the data in the same folder as the program, under Program Files, which is not usually backed up automatically. The current version of The Master Genealogist, which I use for my family tree and those of clients, stores its files under My Documents by default, but older versions did not. I have lost my timesheet data because I didn’t check to see where the data was stored.
4. Make sure you know how to set up your email accounts in a new program in case you can’t go back and look at the old version.
5. Make sure you know your IDs and passwords to all the websites you use. Most web browsers will remember these for you on that computer, so if you need to start using a different computer you at least need to know your ID so you can ask for your password to be sent to you by email if you can’t remember it.

This blog is usually about research, but I think that backups are so very important that I wanted everyone to learn from my experience.

Backup your data, and have a plan for when you need to use the backups. Sooner or later, your hard drive or something else on your computer will fail.

• What wasn’t backed up after all
  My old laptop died a sudden death on Good Friday, 22nd April 2011. My new laptop arrived on Black Friday, 13th May 2011. Are you detecting a pattern here? The death of my old laptop was not t...
• Backupify your social media
  Some time ago I had a look at Backupify, an online service for backing up your social media accounts. Obviously I set up an account and then forgot about it. I've had another look at Backupify and ...
• My Evolving Backup Strategy needs some work
  I wrote about my backup strategy a couple of days ago, describing the tools I am currently using to back everything up on my laptop. Once I'd written it down it initially appeared quite comprehensi...
• I don’t love my new Toshiba netbook any more
  Early last year I bought a Toshiba NB200 notebook. It was just what I wanted. I bumped up the RAM to 2GB and installed Dropbox, and I never looked back. I could take my work with me and have it synchr...
• Picasa Face Recognition can be moved to a new computer
  A few months ago my laptop spent days going through all my photos and tagging the faces, and then I spent a few more days (on and off) giving them names. It was a lot of fun, and I wrote about it here...

Some time ago I had a look at Backupify, an online service for backing up your social media accounts. Obviously I set up an account and then forgot about it.

I’ve had another look at Backupify and it seems that it has been happily backing up some of my accounts after all. I’ve just never been back to see them.

Apparently I have a Premium Account, which gives me 10GB, monthly ZIP archives, and 5 accounts per service. That may be why I forgot about it. 5 accounts isn’t much. I run a Facebook account, 5 Facebook pages, 5or 6 Twitter accounts, numerous blogs, a Flickr account, and much more besides.

For $59.95 per year I can have 25GB, weekly ZIP archives, and unlimited accounts. Backups are run daily (or I can choose weekly) and are supposedly emailed in a ZIP file.

The screen does say that there’s a new version I should move to. Let’s try that!

New version of Backupify

OK, there’s an immediate improvement, in that it tells me how much space I’ve used:

It now supports Facebook Pages, which it didn’t do before. I like it better already.

For Facebook accounts it backs up a long list of things, including:

• Photo albums
• Photo album comments
• Events
• Groups
• Links
• Notes
• Profile
• Feeds
• Posts
• Friends
• Comments
• Likes
• Statuses
• Status comments
• Videos
• Video comments

Now that I can back up Facebook pages I am using up my 5 accounts very quickly! I use most of these services (except Zoho). What to choose?

Still, I’m not sure what I would do with the backup. If something happens to Facebook there’s nowhere else I can load the data. What have I got to lose?

I’ve added my Twitter account and it seems to be starting again from scratch, ignoring the backups already made in the previous incarnation of Backupify. OK.

I’ve also added my Facebook profile, three Facebook pages, my Flickr account and my Google address book. That’s seven, including Twitter. There’s now no mention of the number of accounts, so I guess it’s just based on storage space. 10GB sounds like a lot but let’s see what happens with the photos in Facebook and Flickr.

I’d also like to add other Twitter accounts but I can’t seem to do that. Perhaps I need separate Backupify accounts for that.

There is also something about Google Apps on the main page:

To be perfectly honest I don’t know what it means, so I’m not putting anything in there for the moment. When I go to the Upgrade screen to find out about accounts, it is only talking about Google Apps, and sharing for teams. So perhaps this is a business thing and I can ignore it.

It says it’s going to take 2-3 days to back everything up, so I’ll wait to see what happens. I hope it sends me an email, or I may just forget I’ve done it!

• What wasn’t backed up after all
  My old laptop died a sudden death on Good Friday, 22nd April 2011. My new laptop arrived on Black Friday, 13th May 2011. Are you detecting a pattern here? The death of my old laptop was not t...
• When disaster strikes do you have a backup?
  This post was originally published in Genealogy in NSW. Early last month I wrote about my backup strategy here and here, little realising that I would soon be put to the test. On Good Friday, le...
• My Evolving Backup Strategy needs some work
  I wrote about my backup strategy a couple of days ago, describing the tools I am currently using to back everything up on my laptop. Once I'd written it down it initially appeared quite comprehensi...
• I don’t love my new Toshiba netbook any more
  Early last year I bought a Toshiba NB200 notebook. It was just what I wanted. I bumped up the RAM to 2GB and installed Dropbox, and I never looked back. I could take my work with me and have it synchr...
• Picasa Face Recognition can be moved to a new computer
  A few months ago my laptop spent days going through all my photos and tagging the faces, and then I spent a few more days (on and off) giving them names. It was a lot of fun, and I wrote about it here...