Well, for some unknown reason, all of my network devices went into a cascading failure. Actually, I think it was some network packet monitoring software I was running for work. Anyway, it caused my wireless to fail, then my wired networking.
Fortunately, my HDD was still good. I used a large USB2 HDD to copy off [...]

Is it turned on ? - that may sound like a stupid question for a 20+ year computer geek but one of the issues was the fact my new X60 has an “off switch” for the wireless. It got bumped somewhere along the way.
Verify you backups. - I would have been up and running a [...]

If you work from a home office - i.e. single employee, family business, independent consultant, small Internet business, farmer, new entrepreneur, etc. - you don’t have a big corporate IT department to support you. You *are* the IT department !
With today’s business, “data” has a value that belies it’s invisibility and the tiny physical space it occupies. [...]

The last piece of the Home Office IT upgrade arrived today and it’s been installed. Last week ended with the arrived of 2 750GB SATA drives. I started this week by replacing my very modern but overly faulty Linksys router with a middle of the road and very stable Netgear router. I paired it with [...]

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p for work. I have an IBM Thinkpad X60 (refurb) for my personal computer. Given the corporate policies enforced in today’s business world, there I keep my personal content (blogs, personal email, photographic work, money manager, etc.) off my work computer. However, when I travel, I don’t want to carry [...]

I have been evaluating a lot of Linux versions, each with a specific market. In the past, I’d use VMWare images for this type of work but I am encountering a lot of hardware specific requirements with these tests. So, I set aside a single laptop to use for testing no less than 5 operating [...]

I previously posted about building out a test PC that has no less than 5 different operating systems. In that post I created a very small 256MB partition. Here’s why …
I use PartImage to make image backups. This is an open source application which is very close to products like Symantec Ghost or Acronis [...]

How *do* you make a complete backup image of an SD card or a USB memory stick ? And some of you may be asking *why* would you need to do such a thing ? Let me answer the second question first. A group of people have been chatting back and forth over on the [...]

At MacWorld 2007, Steve Jobs announced “Time Machine” which heralding in an easy to use, consumer focused solution for backing up your computer Mac with Leopard. However, it was not for everyone. It assumed the backup device - a USB connected hard drive was always plugged in which is fine for a desktop computer but [...]

I am trying to create an backup solution for a Windows machine. I have grown to really like the SimpleLinuxBackup solution I have on the rest of my machines. It is simple (obviously) and performs both full backups and incremental backups.
There are five characteristics I need …

“what to include” - directories and files [...]

Doing sufficient backups, building virtual machines, and storing my transient video collection “on-line” requires storage, storage, and more storage. With three computers now getting sufficient backups to give me moderate peace of mind, I needed more storage than my RAID1 NAS (network addressable storage) was ready to serve. I had 2 750GB drives but [...]

I recently built a working Windows XP machine because Ubuntu was just not supported well enough for work. I used my old T40 so I could preserve my T60p until I was sure I had everything right.
Today I went to move the system over. I’ve done this many times over the years both as my [...]