Daddy Wears Slippers to Work — book blog about working at home

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I just finished this section.  It’s part of the Technologies section and gets into the whole, “what should I buy a Mac or PC?”.  As you will read I am suggesting a PC.  Yes, I know the Intel-based Macs can run Windows and most major applications have Mac versions.  So I’d like some feedback on this section.  What do you think?  Am I on the mark?  Don’t be shy.  Leave a comment, or three.

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When you’re buying that computer the next thing you need to decide is whether to buy a Mac or a PC.  Before I get to my recommendation, I need to tell you about my computing history and I think you’ll understand where I’m coming from.

My first computer was an Apple IIe. My parents bought it my freshman year in high school.  Right after, by the way, I typed my first and last term paper on a typewriter (I got a D because I misspelled “society” wrong every time, see Mrs. Miles I got a lot better).  Since then I’ve had mostly Macs.  I had a Mac all through college, grad school, and my first jobs.  Yes, I knew about PCs and started to work with them in grad school, but I still loved my Mac.  When I got into pharma I was a hard-core Mac person.  I even had a desktop background that read “You can take my Mac when you pry my cold dead hands from my mouse.”.  I started to discover then, though, that going against the flow was not a good thing.  I had to have two computers in my office because Macs were only begrudgingly allowed on the network and the corporate e-mail was MS Exchange.  Sure I did my best to show how much better and cooler I was, but I should have seen it was a losing battle.  I lost the battle when I moved to Canada.  That branch of the company was very anti-Mac.  I still had a Mac and a PC, but I used the Mac less and less.  When I started out on my own, I had to choose, like you, which to buy.  I chose PC.  It was cheaper and I had learned that it was a lot easier to go with the flow.  Work with what everyone else had than try to fight it.

My advice then, PC.  Yikes, I know.  This is assuming you have a choice, most big companies aren’t going to give you one.  You use what they use.  Period.  End of discussion.  However, things have gotten a little more complicated here in the Summer of 2006.  Apple is now using the same kind of chips that PCs use and people are starting (and Apple is encouraging this) to load Windows on their Mac with the Mac operating system.  Hmm, so I can have a Mac and a PC in one computer.  Why not that?  Well right now it’s only been a few months since this sea-change has occurred and the jury is still out on how well this is going to work for people beyond advanced users.

In the end, it is going to come down to what you like to work on and what you do.  If you just e-mail documents to people, use blogs and RSS for information, and your collaboration systems are web-based, this might just be a non-issue.  I do love the way the Mac laptops look (MacBooks).  The features are cool and Mac OS X is stable and powerful.  Macs have a lot going for them, except that most business people don’t use them.  So think about what you do, how you do it, and who you have to work with, then decide.  Don’t be afraid to buy your friendly neighborhood geek a beer (maybe a burger too, because we don’t get out much) and ask what they think.  Remember this is going to be the primary tool in your workday besides the phone, so don’t rush the decision.

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Tags: Daddy Wears Slippers to Work, telework, telecommute, work at home, work from home

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Chris reminded me with his post that I hadn’t put back up solutions into my book (yes, Andy I know you suggested it, and it’s in my notes … Chris just reminded me to actually do it.).  So I wrote a little earlier today about Carbonite, which is still going, btw.  In the meantime, I’ve written the first draft of my section on Back up solutions:

Back up solutions

Okay I’m going to drill this into your head.
You. Must. Backup. Files. Often.
Repeat after me.
You. Must. Backup. Files. Often.
Why? Let me put this bluntly. If you lose the data on your drive, you are toast. How can that happen? Let me count the ways:
Computer failure. It happens, something blows and the computer is unusable
Needs repair. Happened to me with a new computer. Wrecked the keyboard and I needed to send it away … for two weeks. Because I had daily backups, work continued. I also had two extra computers, but I had the files and could have borrowed pretty much any computer with access to the Internet
Viruses and spyware. If you get socked with a virus, rolling back to an old backup can save your tush.
User stupidity. Ever accidentally delete a file? Who hasn’t. That "aiiigghhhh" moment as you empty the trash and go "Noooooo!!!!". If you have regular backups, well you can go whew, I’m covered.
Now, what should you back up? Everything isn’t practical, really. If you have one of those total system failures you’re going to wind up reinstalling Windows or Mac OS X and all the applications. So, really what you need to back up are files, and sometimes settings, for things you can’t re-download or get from somewhere else.
Don’t forget about e-mail … on Windows especially those files aren’t in places that typically get backed up.
Now the big question, how?
There are two kinds of backup local and offisite. Local is, of course, a backup that is somewhere in your home office. This can be a CD or DVD back up, an extra harddrive, and other computer, etc. Off site means that your data is stored away from your home office. This can be done by sending CDs/DVDs off site, or a remote backup service that uses the Internet to store files somewhere else.
Which is best? Do I have to choose? Let’s look at both options first.

Local

When CD burners first came out we all thought this would make backups easy. Well, we had floppies, Zip drives, SyQuest drives before, and people still didn’t back up. I think CD burners have been better for pictures and music than the back up of data.
Regardless, I have a good story about backups. Actually two. When I was finishing my Senior thesis in college I was backup up my data and writing regularly (good for me!). So when one of those dorm fire alarms went off in the middle of the night … jammies on — check, down coat (it was winter in Maine) — check, box of disks — check. Yep I went outside with my box of backed up data. Goofy as it looked, I wasn’t taking any chances.
Flash forward two years and I’m finishing my Masters thesis. I was taking a short vacation to lead a church group of kids to see Pope John Paul II in Denver. So this is what I did … one backup wrapped in plastic and foil in my freezer in my apartment. One copy in my office, one in the department office, one in my friend’s house. Paranoid? Yeah I bit. Of course I had just read about a grad student who just lost everything to a fire, so I wasn’t taking any chances.
Well local backups. The problem with both of these is that, I’ve found, that it’s hard to get enough on one DVD or CD. And I’m not so keen on re-writable CDs and DVDs. They aren’t supported by all drives and are more expensive.
But … if you need a quick backup of pictures, or few files (especially to mail or share) CDs and DVDs are excellent choices. I always have some in my laptop bag and blanks around the house.
External hard drives have come down in price tremendously. There are even USB- powered external drives that are pretty much designed for backups. This is exactly what I do right now. I have an external drive connected to another machine in the house. Every night I use a free Windows utility called SyncToy to back up my documents to it.
This works well for me. The hard drive is large enough that I don’t have to worry about filling it up quickly and best of all, it just runs. With a CD or DVD solution you have to be there to put the disc, take it out, and put in another, if needed. Not convenient.
The hard drive is removable so that for a restore I can just hook it up to any other computer and get my files. It’s on my network so I can look up and find an old version easily.
Perfect? No. Hard drives can fail. I do have to make sure that my computer is on during the back up time. But, this system has saved my tush more than once since I started it.

Offsite

What if your computer is stolen? What if your house is broken into? What if there is a fire? Scary, scary things to think about. But these are the things big companies consider when they have offsite backup storage. Typically the backups are done locally, then shipped offsite to a secure facility. Now you could do the same, say with a safe deposit box on a bank, but that’s hardly practical is it?
For home office folks, if your work isn’t doing remote back up, and with teleworkers on highspeed Internet, there isn’t any reason why they can’t, you can have your machine backed up to a storage facility over the Internet.
Now, this isn’t new. In fact it was one of the Dot Com Boom companies of the 1990’s. Two problems then. One was that a lot of people were still on dial-up. Granted multi- gigabyte harddrives weren’t very common then, but still, it could be a lot of data to push at 56k dial-up. Next was reliability. Both the company and the ability to get your data out. Several of these companies started, had paying customers, and folded. Where did this data go? Sometimes it was lost, I believe, other times it got back to the customer. Still this has made most of us rather gun shy of remote backup solutions. No matter how easy, seamless, painless, and automatic they are, trusting all your data to a company that you hope is still in business when you need them, that can be a stretch.
I think times are changing. My local telco is offering the service, but at "holy smokes, how much?" prices. There are more services coming up now and I think it is a service sector to watch.
When evaluating a service don’t think of just price, but also access to your data, recovery procedure, encryption, and their own data security.
As I’m sitting here writing this chapter I’m trying a new service that is encrypting and uploading my My Documents folder in the background.
But let’s come back to the question from the beginning of the chapter, what should I do?

Last Word

So, what’s the best for you? Like a lot of computer-related things, something is better than nothing. If you back up your data weekly to a few CDs or a DVD, great. You’re doing more than most people. If you buy an little 80 gig external harddrive and use that to back up files, even just drag, drop, walk away for a while, that’s awesome. So let’s not spend time going, this is better that is better, la, la, la.
First thing is to get in the habit of backing up. Don’t wait until a crisis, like your toddler thinking your laptop is thirsty and giving it a drink, realize that you don’t have any data backed up.
My advice, start easy. Buy a spindle of CDs or DVDs and just drag your files to it, burn, label and set aside. I did this for a while and I do still go back to those backups to look for old installers or files that I didn’t think I’d ever need any more.
Later, work up to the external hard drive. Internet backup? You know I do this for my Outlook contacts (Plaxo) and it’s saved my tush for sure. And e-mail (GMail), ditto. I think during this year we’re going to see good services get established, make money, and maybe start being more popular.
Me? I do all three. I burn some things to disk, I am backing this book up to a flash drive, I have the external hard drive solution, and I’m trying out an Internet back up solution. To me, the Office of Redundancy Department wins the day for backup.

Tags: Daddy Wears Slippers to Work, back up solutions

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