Well, I ought to give you a few better tips than that I suppose.

Why You Need To Back Up

Your hard drive is going to fail. It’s not a question of if it will fail, but when it will fail. Hard drives today are pretty reliable, but still they are intricate, delicate machines. They also spin and anywhere between 5400 and 10,000 RPM depending on the model you have, and with all that spinning, something is going to break eventually.

Redundancy is key. No storage media is infallible, and if you think of it that way, all your data should be stored in more than one spot. Always. Think about everything you have on your computer. Documents, email, pictures from your Aunt Virginia’s 90th birthday party, and that cool video of the water skiing squirrel. You don’t want to lose that stuff, do you?

Backing Up Is Easy. Here’s How.

This won’t cost you a lot of money, and it won’t take a lot of time. Here’s how to back up.

Step 1. Buy something to back up on.

You can back up on anything really, CD’s, zip drives (remember those?), or even floppy disks if you had a lot of time and still had a floppy drive (remember THOSE?). But the two best choices you have are an external hard drive or a USB flash drive. If you only have a small amount of information, you can get by with the usb drive, but for most people who use their computer for a bit, I’d recommend the hard drive. It holds a lot more than the flash drive. Not sure which to get? Look at how much space you are using on your computer and use that as a guide. To do that, in windows, open My Computer, right click your C: drive and hit properties. You should see how many Gigabytes (GB) are in use. You’ll want at least this much space (extra is good). On mac, open Finder, find your Macintosh HD and hit File, Get Info. Again, see how much is in use.

Special note: If you use Mac OSX, you’ll want to get a drive larger than the data in use on your computer. Time machine will allow you to roll back to a moment in time anywhere in your backup, so it saves versions of files. It’s a great feature but it needs a little more space to get the most out of it. Go for a little bigger hard drive here. It’s worth it.

Step 2. Set up Backups.

OK so you’re got your shiny new hard drive ready to go. Let’s copy some data!

Windows: 

If you got an external hard drive, it most likely came with a backup utility that you can install and use to automatically back up your information.

Mac: 

Apple’s OS X provides a very handy backup program called Time Machine. To set this up, just plug in your new hard drive and open Time Machine. It’s under Applications if you don’t see it in the dock. Turn it on and tell it to use the new drive for backups. It will take a while the first time, but it will back up everything. Then you can go back to time machine anytime you lose something, and if your computer crashes or hard drive fails, the drive has all your stuff stored there.

Manual Backups:

If you got a USB drive or if you just prefer to do it this way, you can back up your information manually. Just pop the flash drive in and you should see a new drive appear in My Computer (PC) or Finder (Mac). You can copy files and folders over to that drive. Once on the drive, they’re backed up. If you don’t do much on your computer, just do this once in a while and you’re all set! Just remember that anything stored in just one place is at risk for being lost.

Step 3. Go nuts.

If you’re like me, you’ve had a hard drive crash once a long time ago and you lost some data and you swore you’d never make that mistake again! My first line of defense is Time Machine. I use a mac and time machine handles my regular backups on a day to day basis. But I also write software, namely Waypoint which is the flagship software package for my company, Twin Harbor Web Solutions. I write code for Waypoint regularly, and it’s critical to the success of our business. Our customers use Waypoint every day and it’s important for them that Waypoint always be there. That being said, losing the source code to Waypoint would be an absolute disaster, so we go a few steps beyond just Time Machine. We make regular backups of all our software and store them off-site, on DVD in a fireproof safe. This way even if our offices burn down, we still have that software…at least the version since the last backup! That reminds me, it’s time to make another DVD backup and get it over there.

Hopefully this post helps save someone’s data!

SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer. The SSL Certificate is a little piece of code that is used to make a website more secure. When you visit a website, the URL (web address) usually starts with http://. Once configured with an SSL Certificate, the website will support requests using https://. When this happens, the connection between the user and the server is encrypted. So when you enter information on that website, such as your credit card number, before it gets sent over the internet to the server, all the bits are jumbled up using an encryption algorithm. This prevents anyone who may be listening in along the way from discerning what is in that transmission. The SSL Certificate provides the means of securing that transmission.

It is important to have an SSL Certificate on your website if you are collecting any sensitive information. Credit card information certainly merits an SSL Cert, but other things do as well. Prices for these certificates range widely based on the strength of the protection (how strong of encryption is used) and they will often carry warranties with them as well. SSL Certificates are sold through a series of trusted authorities who validate the certificate’s authenticity. When you visit a site with a valid SSL Certificate, you will see a lock icon in your web browser. Click on this lock to see the details of the certificate.

If you visit a website that has an invalid certificate, you will usually see a warning message appear. Be wary of websites with invalid certificates. These messages can appear for a number of reasons. The certificate may be expired (they renew each year, just like a domain name) or they may not be properly configured. Speak with your web host for more information on SSL Certificates and how to purchase, install and configure them.

Spaces No More

If you are a first time Mac user, Mission Control is a nice feature. I think it’s more approachable for first timers than Spaces was. I’m sure that was Apple’s motivation in this new workflow. My issue with it is twofold:

1. Spaces are in one row. Personally, in spaces I used a 2 by 2 grid. I could go up down, left right. It was fast and efficient. Loved it. But it’s gone now, and I can’t have it that way anymore.

2. Applications don’t remember where they were after reboot. In Spaces, you could assign applications to particular Spaces. You can’t do this anymore. After you reboot, all your applications will open mashed into the first desktop space. Now when I decide to reboot, we have to waste time putting things back in their place. This is a real loss of functionality I am hoping Apple will remedy soon.

Launchpad is Useless

This one isn’t really a loss of functionality since it didn’t exist in Snow Leopard, but it’s something Apple is touting as useful and I don’t buy it. They are trying to make OSX more like iOS, but in this case I don’t see that a large grid of icons is so great. We have the dock for that. And if you want to have more, I like to use a folder of aliases in the dock that quickly fans out with one click and I can get to more apps that way.

Network Utility Lookup Dropdown Removed

A big part of my job is handling domain names, email and website hosting for my clients. The lookup feature in Network Utility was great. You could select what type of DNS records you wanted to see and it would fetch them. The option is now removed; you can still get the records but you can only do the full lookup and get all the records. This is a small thing, but still it’s something useful that has been taken away.

iCal’s Sidebar is Gone

iCal used to have a nice sidebar where you could check off which calendars were shown and which were hidden. Now in order to see this, you need to click a button which opens a panel with these details. This panel obscures the view of part of the calendar. This is a poor design choice. Additionally, Apple has re-skinned the calendar and although it’s just a design preference, I find it quite cheesy. The previous iCal had the look of a standard OSX window. It was clean and professional. I do think iCal definitely took a step back.

I’m sure there are other things I haven’t found yet. Feel free to post yours in the comments. I will update this post with whatever else comes up.

One big gripe: I can no longer assign applications to specific “spaces”. The settings panel that used to let me do this is gone! Now when I reboot, all my apps get mashed onto the first screen.

** EDIT: Previously I thought I found a workaround, but it seems after reboot, everything goes back to the first space. I hope apple comes out with a fix for this.

Here’s How to set spaces (although they will reset after a reboot):

• Right click (or ctrl click if you don’t use the secondary mouse click) on an app in the dock.
• Under the “Assign To” category, select the desktop you want to keep it on, or use “This Desktop” for the current one.
• OSX will remember this setting the next time you fire up that app.

The virtual machine cannot be used because its files are corrupted.

A bad file copy on the network? It turns out no. This message could certainly mean  you have bad files, but consider one option. It asks you to remove it. Say yes. It won’t delete the PVM file. Instead it sort of de-registers it from Parallels on the machine. Then just open the PVM file again (double click in finder) and it’ll re-add it and you MAY find that your machine is OK. I did. What a relief! Hopefully yours will too.

Open terminal and enter: (Max OSX 10.5 Leopord and up)

dscacheutil -flushcache

You can find these bags:

• When you buy computer parts
• Your E-Z Pass probably came with one. You can put the e-z pass in it if you don’t want it scanned when you’re in your car.
• You can order them online. Search for anti-static bags.

The Parallels Mouse Scroll Fix

Inside Windows, there’s an option that helps smooth the scrolling. This will work for all mice I imagine.

Start >> Control Panel >> Mouse (This path varies depending on your windows install)

Click over to the Wheel tab and there is an option to select the number of lines to jump on each scroll interval. Set it to 1, the lowest allowed. Mine was set to 3 by default (windows server 2003). Setting it down to 1 helped a LOT!

So today I ran into a weird problem. Suddenly the caps-lock key became reversed! The caps light light was off on the keyboard. Lowercase letters in Mac apps, but all caps coming up in Windows. Hit the Caps Lock key, get caps in Mac, but lowercase in Windows.

So off to Google I go. Only fix I found after a quick search was to reboot the Windows OS. Come on! I mean sure, one time, but I saw lots of reports of this happening from time to time for many users. Rebooting every time it happens doesn’t sound like fun or a good use of our precious time.

Fortunately, we found a better fix.

From the Start Menu, select Start>>Programs>>Accessories>>Accessibility>>On-Screen Keyboard (This is for Windows Server 2003, location may vary if you use Vista). Click on the Caps Lock button and close the keyboard app. It should be back to normal!

Hope this helps someone else out there!

UPDATE: We found an even easier way to do this! We’re using Parallels 5 now so I’m unsure if this will work for older versions or not. In our case though, if you press your caps lock key when in a mac application, then go back to parallels, the caps lock state will be out of sync. To set it back, just go back to any mac application, hit caps lock, then go back to parallels. Perhaps there is something in Parallels that will sync the state that isn’t working here but this is a pretty quick fix so we’re not too concerned.