TechnologyCrowd

One of the great things about an Android based phone is that it imports your contact information directly from Gmail if you already have the information in Gmail.  Since I started using my BlackBerry device about a year ago, I have been synching my contact information so all of my emails and phone numbers were already there.  When I purchased the Motorola Droid, I entered my Gmail sign-in information and almost instantly I had all of my contact information available.

For people that are not already synching their contacts with Gmail, especially if you are not using another smart phone, that might not sound like a great thing.  I will soon be adding a Droid Eris on my family plan for my daughter who currently has an LG EnV.  If you purchase the new phone from a retailer they can port the contacts, but for some reason the stores make you wait for a rebate that you can get as an online discount by purchasing online through Verizon Wireless. Read the rest of this entry »

I often see PC articles talking about the importance of backing up your information and hard drive.  I have accumulated quite a bit of information and made sure to store important information in more than once location with the addition of an external hard drive.  About a year ago, I began using the Windows backup system on my Vista PC, but I didn’t know how I would remember all of the programs that I have added over the years if I lost my hard drive.

I have seen articles about creating a backup image of the hard drive to accomplish this, but many of the programs were expensive and not worth it considering that most of my software is freeware, the only cost if I had to reinstall would be the time and effort in locating all of the programs.

Recently I cam across an article in PC World that included reference to Macrium Reflect Free editon.  They offer a paid version, but the only features missing from the free version are file backup and password protection.  I will continue using the Windows file backup on a regular basis and I am not concerned with the password protection on my home network.

Now that I have my network set up with Ubuntu Server, it is easy create the backup and save it directly to the server for storage outside my PC without having to burn DVD’s.

The entire process was easy and only took the PC about an hour and a half to save the image.  I was able to download the sofware easily by going to the page on PC World. Once installed, you will see a list of the available partitions.

1. Click Backup –> Create Image from the menu and a wizard will open to help with the setup.
2. Select the Partition that you wish to backup.
3. Choose a location, I located the folder on my network but you can also choose a folder on the hard drive or a DVD.
4. There are additional options for adjusting the compression and other properties, I left the default options.
5. Click finish and let the program do its job.

You can continue to work on the PC, but it may cause your other programs to run a little slow, I left it alone for most of the time but did check some e-mails during the process.  After the process was complete, I chose to schedule monthly backups.  You can choose more frequent options but I felt that one month intervals would be frequent enough for my needs.

One other thing that you will want to do is create a rescue CD in the event that your PC will not boot at all.  There was a pop up informing me of this, but you can also choose Other Tasks on the left side of the page and follow the wizard to create the rescue CD.

I am fortunate to have never experienced an total loss of a hard drive, but I am much more comfortable now knowing that if I do I can get all of my programs and information back.  Overall the process was quite painless and I would have done it sooner if I knew how easy it was.