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Backup, backup, and backup again
There are two types of computer users, those that have lost data and those that will. Yes, I know this is a profound statement, but computers are prone to fail (they are made by humans, who do, of course, make mistakes). I'm very religious about my backups as I have lost data in the past, not much data, but some. For years, I did weekly archives to CDs and then DVDs. These were good as I could go back in time and get old data, but it turns out I never did that. Last year I shredded years of old CDs and DVDs. My current strategy is to protect against hardware failure and software corrupting data. The first part is easy, just backup to an external drive every day. I do this and rotate between 3 drives; one is always offsite in my safe deposit box. I goto my safe deposit every Friday (the tellers know me I'm there so often). This is a great strategy and has served me well. I did have a hard drive failure several years back, but recovered quite easily (not quickly because my most recent backup that was a few hours old was sitting in the safe deposit box that I couldn't get to for 2 days as I dropped it off on a Saturday). Every day I use SuperDuper! to backup and I'm very pleased with this. I've added Time Machine to my mix and that has also saved me. I believe you can never have too many backups. Oh and I forgot, my virtual private server gets an archive created daily and then once a day, it is synced down to my machine and then weekly copied to a drive going to my safe deposit box. So, I'm pretty well covered.
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Discounts for Apple Employees
Periodically I get inquiries from Apple employees about discounts. Sometimes I respond, "what kind of discount can you give me?", but usually I give them the line that ReceiptWallet is priced low enough that it is affordable and if it saves time, isn't it worth the cost?
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Crappy Support Policy
Yesterday, I went to see about contacting support for VMWare Fusion to see why my el cheapo negative and slide scanner wouldn't work as no one responded to my forum post (on their forums). After poking around the site, I discovered that they only offer 30 days of complimentary email support. After that I have to pay per incident. Wow, that sure doesn't make me want to use their product. I can understand complimentary phone support for a period of time, but limiting email support, that seems ridiculous. Yes, I realize that some people abuse it, but what about the average Joe who only contacts support with an issue, more over, a bug in the software?
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Broken iCal - Application Needed to fix it
After my calendar didn't sync today using BusySync, I started poking around. The BusySync log gave a Google error saying that I had exceeded my quota. I'm not sure what it was pushing or pulling, but I took the opportunity to clean up my calendars. I had events back to 2002 in it that I didn't need. In iCal, I selected the option to delete events older than 60 days. I quit iCal and restarted it a few times. That didn't help. Next a tip said to search for 'a' or 'e' and then delete items in the results. Well, that was tedious as iCal kept crashing and freezing when I did that, but I managed to delete a lot of events. Then I went back through my calendars and looked to see that old events were still there (most had an 'a' or 'e' in it). I deleted those. Before all this I exported my calendar and then re-imported it. That didn't help. My calendar was so screwed up after years of using iSync, trying to sync to Google and lots of testing, that some events were duplicated 50+ times.