Archive: Business & Technology

Dr. Digit 'Splains It AllDr. Digit 'Splains It All

I am a good backup do-bee.  I have strategies to make sure that everything I can think of that is important to me will be backed up, if not every week then every couple of weeks.  But no matter how clever you are about backing up your important data, it isn't really put to the test until something fails.  That is what happened to me two weeks ago when I got home from a vacation.

There are two computers in my office, a MacBook and a Hewlett Packard PC desktop.  The PC is around five years old.  The night I got home I turned it on and had no problem.  The next morning the hard drive was completely dead.  When I say 'dead' I mean that most of the drive was unreadable.  It didn't recognize the 'D:\' partition that HP puts on its drives to hold a recovery system.  It still knew about the folders on the 'C:\' partition, but it thought that all but c:\windows were empty.  And much of Windows itself was gone.

Don't even ask me how I know that -- suffice it to say that I could run the computer but the drive was toast.

With all the negatives Vista offers I have been unwilling to consider moving to it.  I got the MacBook to try out a Mac to see if I could live with it, and found much to my shock, that I really liked it.  Even though I am a dyed in the wool PC user.  But certain things we need for our business will only run on PCs, so I had to do something.

I got an old ten year old Dell out and reinstalled Windows 2000 onto it.  Yeah, pre-XP, believe it or not.  And then I installed what I absolutely needed to get my work done while I tried to figure out what to do about the HP.  I like the HP.  It is a very capable machine, fast, and has a lot of things I like built into it.  If I could get it back simply by replacing the dead hard drive it would clearly be worth it.

So I called HP tech support for the first time ever.  Christopher lived up to the great things I had heard about HP support.  First of all he listened to me and asked questions so he would understand the problem.  He wasn't on script -- he actually talked with me, not just to me.  When he didn't know an answer he simply said so and offered to find out if I didn't mind being put on hold (I didn't mind).  When he came back he told me that if I found a new drive about the same capacity as the old my recovery disks might work.  He wasn't positive, but he was pretty sure.

How refreshing! 

I had read that HP tags their drives so that the recovery disks for my model wouldn't work unless they found the original drive.  But whether it worked or not I was very happy with that call.  And I was even happier when I Googled the model number and found that I could still get the same drive new for only about $70.  If the recovery disks worked I would get a great computer for only 70 bucks.  If they didn't I could get a copy of Windows Media Center from a company on the Web for about $110.  Either way much cheaper than buying a new computer, especially since new computers come with Vista.

A week ago my new drive came.  HP has detailed instructions on their Web site on how to disassemble my computer and replace the drive.  It was actually quite easy.  That night came the moment of truth.  I put the recovery disk in the CD drive.  It worked!  Yay!

Now came the test of my backup strategy.  We had a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive where we keep business files so that we can all use them.  It is basically a hard drive connected to the network without a computer.  It is on all the time, so anyone can access it at any time.  One of the great things about our NAS is that it can back itself up to USB drives that you plug right into it.  You schedule a backup and it does it.  Ours backs itself up every Friday night, then sends me an e-mail to tell me how it went.

Also I discovered that you can tell Windows to put 'My Documents' wherever you want.  Even not on your computer.  So I had pointed 'My Documents' to a folder on the NAS.  My idea was that I could access the data from any computer and it would be automatically backed up once a week.

After reinstalling Windows on my HP I repointed 'My Documents' to the NAS and instantly almost everything I needed was back.

The next part of my strategy was to keep the installation files in a special folder on the NAS, arranged in folders that mimic the way I arrange my Start menu.  One folder for art programs, one for video and sound, one for business programs, and so on.  That made it very easy to get all my programs installed, especially since I had plenty of backups of the activation numbers required to install them.

Next, when the NAS sends the email saying it has backed itself up, that reminds me to run backup software on the PC and the Mac to back up the odds and ends that are not on the NAS.  I am good about doing that, so everything was there with only a few days worth of data missing, no big deal.

Except for our Quickbooks data.  The backup program on the PC could only handle file names of a certain length.  Our Web stats program was saving files with humongously long file names, and choking at that point before it got around to backing up Quickbooks.  Oh oh.  I did have a backup from February, but that would mean reconstructing five months of invoives, checks in, checks out... a nightmare!

After struggling with this for over a week I found a much more recent backup.  It turns out I was a genius and a dolt.  The genius piece was backing up our important business data in two different ways.  The dolt part was forgetting about the second way when I panicked because the first way failed.  But all I could say after finding a late June backup was, "Yay!!!"

Quickbooks (and Quicken) themselves were another story.  Intuit is singularly unhelpful unless your backup solution is to pay them full price again for a newer version of their software.  Quickbooks has a back-end way to register the product, or at least to get it to work.  Quicken changes the serial number each time you install it, and that is tied to the enabling number.  So your valid number to get it to run doesn't work when your hard drive dies. 

And a nightmarish phone call to Intuit resulted in my finding a replacement for Quicken -- a nice program called Checkbook Pro -- that works on the Mac.  Unfortunately I couldn't do the same with Quickbooks, because that's what our accountant needs us to use.  My feeling is that if I pay for the software I should be able to use it.  And if it needs to be reinstalled I should be able to do it no matter how old it is.  Intuit charges full price even if you have an earlier version of Quickbooks, one of the few companies in the world that doesn't give you a break on updates.  And they try to bully you into spending it by building obstacles into the programs and not helping you.

To make a long story short, my backup strategy was:

1- Keep as much important stuff on the NAS as possible, because it automatically backs up
2- Back up the rest at least every other week
3- Keep copies of the installation programs for every application that matters to me in a place where I can find it (on the NAS which will back them up) as well as the numbers I need to make them work

My backup Report Card:

The only two companies I needed to consult get an A and an F.  Hewlett Packard gets an A for being honest and talking to me at all even though my warranty was long past expired.  Intuit gets an F for being entirely unhelpful and greedy.  If I ever buy a Windows machine again you can bet it is going to be an HP.

My backup strategy gets an A+.  The last time I had to restore a computer it took me a week to get everything the way I like it.  This time it took a bit over a day.

I get a C- for being a dummy.  If I had realized I was backing up Quickbooks that second way I would have found my recent backup much sooner, and slept a lot better over the past few weeks!

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