Backing up crucial files

I have a few friends that I help out with computer related issues and the most common issue I seem to help them with is recovering lost information.  

Here are a couple of items to consider when choosing a back up plan.

• How much data is absolutely crucial? Megabytes or Gigabytes? 

• Back up to an HD (internal or external) or the Cloud? 

• Is the backed up data encrypted?

• Is the back up scheduled?

• Does the back up work for both Mac and Windows platforms?

• Is there an app for your back up?

I use a product called Mozy. It meets all my needs.

If you only have a few Gig or less of crucial info to back up, there are a couple of free apps that you can download. You can get two Gigabyte free to use for ever.

If you have more than a few gig of data you want to back up, you can then decide if you want to upgrade to one of their paid plans.  Like anything else, the more you want to back up, the more it will cost regardless of vendors.  Mozy also offers business/enterprise solutions if you happen to need that functionality as well.

Here is some info directly from Mozy's site.

If you're looking to keep your online data safe and secure, Mozy is the right choice for you. Not only has the entire Mozy business completed a SOC 1 SSAE 16 Type 2 audit and received ISO 27001 certification, but Mozy's online backup product also uses rock solid file encryption to ensure your information is secure on your computer, during transit and in our data centers.

 As soon as you select a file for backup, Mozy encrypts the file right on your laptop, desktop or server to giving you immediate protection with the same encryption standard used by the military (256-bit AES encryption.) Files are transferred to Mozy data centers through an SSL-encrypted tunnel, ensuring that your files are doubly encrypted during transit. This is the same technology used by banks to ensure safe delivery of information online.

With multiple data centers across the world, you can be sure that your data is stored in a remote location in the right place for you, ready to be restored if and when they're needed. Files at rest in the data center also reside in an encrypted state, meaning that your important information has never been safer. With a secondary copy of your data remotely stored and encrypted, you have complete protection in case anything happens to your computer or laptop.

 Mozy customers also have the choice to let Mozy manage the encryption process for them (activating a 448-bit Blowfish encryption key) or you can manage your own key using military-grade 256-bit AES to secure your data during storage.

Regardless of how you choose to manage your information, Mozy has your back when it comes to encryption and security.

Give it a shot and try MozyHome for free. Once you get to their site you see a log in box, just below the log in box is a link. It will say "Don't have an account? Sign up now."  Click on the "Sign up now" link to register for your free trial.



Speaking of free,  try an Amazon Prime membership for free as well. Free two-day shipping on millions of items, unlimited instant streaming of 41,000+ movies and TV episodes, and over 350,000 Kindle titles to borrow for free.  Not a bad deal!

an entertaining Out of Office reply...

I had sent a friend an email and got his Out of Office reply and it was too funny not to share.

I am currently out of the office due to furlough; A sequestration driven, mandatory, unpaid, non-punative vacation, and will return on July 30th.

Hope you enjoy it as well.

IA quote of the day!

A good friend sent this quote to me today and while humorous, it does sum up the issues faced with Information Security & Information Assurance.

"On one hand, the safety of information and information systems must be protected, while the administration and procedures for doing so must be kept reasonable so that information assurance does not evolve into an unsupportable self-licking ice cream cone of manpower and systems requirements."

I do not know who to attribute this to, but they hit the nail on the head.

GJB!

CrashOnAuditFail – Windows Server 2003

A little background.  My coworker and I maintain a business critical intranet web server for about 220 users in our company, as well as other jobs and responsibilities from time to time.  We are also the help desk for the app and most problems in general.

We had just finished eating our lunch when the phones light up with what at first seemed to be a typical network issue.  We have a few trusted users that seem to have a bit more insight than others so we went down stairs to their locations and checked the normal connectivity issues that are the most likely culprits.  This time was different, we (the admins) could still log in, but users got a 404 Error.  After checking several different work stations, we went back to the server.  We checked the System log and there wasn’t much info to be found.  Just that the server had unexpectedly restarted.



That wasn’t much help so we looked in the Security log and found this error.



The very limited info provided here proved to be just enough.
It seems that when you have auditing turned on and have set the Security Log to ‘Do Not Overwrite events’ and the log fills up, it will cause the sever to restart. 



That in itself isn’t that surprising, it’s the fact that when it restarts because the Security log is full, it only allows administrators to log in.   I understand why this happens, after all if it can’t perform auditing on the users' activities, why should it let them access the server.

We all know that Google knows everything, right?  The secret is asking the right question.  This is where a more verbose log error would have come in handy.   We eventually found the answer here. The answer was provided by Backlund. 

The key to this is that when the server restarted it made a registry change and didn’t let us know via a message of some sort. 
So open up Regedit and navigate to the following key.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
in the CrashOnAuditFail key the value is 2.

Change the value to either 1 or 0 and restart the machine.

Everything should return to normal.  We hope that this can help someone, I wish that I had known about this before this bit of excitement.  While we knew that this wasn’t a résumé updating event, it was still stressful.

Amazon Connected Home Solutions - Streaming Music

Amazon has thought this out for us.  They have made several videos that address some of the more common alternatives to help you achieve whole house music.  On this page you will find several videos just related to streaming music.

In most cases you will need a network of some type, be it hard wired or wireless.  Amazon has thought this out as well with their video series Networking 101.  Once your network is up and running, they have broken whole home music into three options.

Option One - Whole-Home Systems

Whole-home systems transmit audio from a central location (such as your computer) to a plethora of amplified possibilities: a home theater stereo, powered speakers, an HDTV, and more. The audio that is being served up through your home can either be the digital audio files stored on your computer's hard drive or audio streamed from an Internet radio station.
> Shop whole-home systems

Option Two - Wi-Fi Radios

Wi-Fi radios stream content from Internet radio stations, which requires an Internet connection. As the name suggests, a Wi-Fi radio can wirelessly connect to the Internet (the source) over your home's wireless network router (the transmitter), and it acts as the direct receiver. It doesn't require connection to your computer, only to your network router.
While Wi-Fi radios don't require a connection to your computer, some offer the capability of streaming stored digital audio files (such as MP3s) from your computer's hard drive. Also, some Wi-Fi radios offer a wired Ethernet option as a feature.
> Shop Wi-Fi radio's

Option Three - iPod Streaming Solutions

Apple iPod-centric solutions provide an easy way for you to stream music from your iPod or iPhone to wireless speakers or receivers throughout your home. Many iPod streaming products can operate independently of a home network, so if that's an option you're interested in, be sure and read more on product detail pages.
> Shop IPod Streaming solutions

Apple Airport Express

The Apple Airport Express is a compact wireless base station that acts as a receiver to audio transmitted over Wi-Fi from a computer music source running the Apple iTunes software. The Airport Express connects to an amplified speaker via an integrated 3.5mm audio jack output.
Music sharing is just one function of the Airport Express, which can also be used as a standalone Wi-Fi router (great using while traveling), extending the range of your main Wi-Fi router, or providing access to a printer (via its USB port) to a wireless network.

> Learn more about the Apple Airport Express

Android 2.2 - Where is the Alarm Clock?

     Like many happy owners of a phone running Google's Android operating system, I was quite happy to receive the recent upgrade to Android version 2.2 (Froyo).  The new interface is easier to navigate and, once you get used to it, faster, too.

    There are a couple of things about the latest release of Android that are puzzling, or at least were initially.  My next couple of posts will address a few of these items, along with some of the things I like about the upgraded OS running on my Motorola Droid.

    The first thing I noticed (and was puzzled by) was the settings area for the alarm clock seemed to be missing.  Where is my alarm clock?  I was fumbling with my Droid late at night knowing I desperately needed to find the settings area in order to enable an early wake-up for the next morning (which wasn't very far off).  I struggled to wrap my tired brain around why I couldn't see the icon right at the top of the applications area where I had accessed it so many times before.  Finally, after some searching, I found the alarm settings are now part of the Clock settings.  From your applications area click on the "Clock" icon.  You'll see the alarm clock icon located at the bottom left of your screen (it's the same image as before - little clock with bells on top).  The interface remains essentially the same once you're into it, only the way in which you access it has changed.

     So, that's where your alarm clock settings went.  Hope this helps you wake up on time.

Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Unable to open the Outlook window. (A solution to a frustrating problem)

As I'm sure you're all aware, every Microsoft error message is helpful, complete, and crystal clear, right? Well, maybe not. My most recent adventure with an error message told me something I already knew, but nothing more. Here's the deal.

I had a short power outage this evening at my house wherein I learned just how overdue I am to replace the battery in my uninterpretable power supply (UPS). My Dell XPS 410 went "lights-out" right in the middle of installing a new application. Outlook 2007 wasn't even open, although I had only closed it seconds earlier (the process may have still be running). Upon restarting the computer and attempting to open Outlook I was faced with the following error:

This error message displayed each time I attempted to open Outlook 2007 on my Windows Vista machine.

After a couple of restarts and some basic troubleshooting I was beginning to get frustrated.  Google searches didn't seem to help much initially, as most of the results referenced an issue when using Windows XP and attempting to open Outlook in Win95/ME compatibility mode.  I'm running a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate and I most certainly am not running Outlook in in compatibility mode (who would run anything in 95/ME compatibility mode, anyway?).

A bit more searching and pulling together suggestions from a few different forums on the Internet led me to a very simple solution.  Open Outlook from the 'Start' or 'Start>Run' dialog box as follows:

Outlook.exe /resetnavpane

Outlook should start up with no errors.  I hope this helps someone and prevents the dreaded reinstall of Office (which was, in my mind, the next logical solution to this issue).