backups

It has become conventional wisdom in the PC industry that periodically reinstalling Windows can restore an old PC's youthful vigor. Unfortunately, the process has become a challenge—and a real time-sink, to boot. Better to create a disc image of your hard drive when everything's working well and restore that image when things turn sour.

Recently, my nearly new laptop PC froze in the middle of Windows loading. After a forced shutdown, Vista repaired itself and reverted to a saved restore point. Things were back to normal in no time, but the event reminded me that I hadn'… Read more

McAfee, one of the world's largest Internet security providers, wants to go one step further in keeping your data safe. It now offers to store your backup data for you.

The company announced Thursday the availability of its McAfee Online Backup, an online backup service that automatically uploads data from your computer's hard drive to a remote server via the Internet.

While online backup services are nothing new and have been available for a long time from many providers, such as Carbonite, Memeo, or Cuku, the main difference with the new McAfee Online Backup service is that it'… Read more

The iPhone Camera Roll can cause increased backup and restore times in iTunes if not properly managed. It's easy to mismanage the Camera Roll if you--like me--use it store media for showing later to friends or family. Apple did not intend the Roll to be used this way, however, and recommends that users use the Photo app, instead, for storing media you plan on showing off later.

Per this support document, whenever you sync or perform a restore in iTunes, the app creates a backup of the contents of your iPhone. The more pictures, screen snapshots, or video you … Read more

I'm always intrigued by backup tools for Web services that don't really need backup. TweetSaver is no exception. This paid service backs up (almost) everything you've ever posted to Twitter, along with private messages and replies from other users. It then adds an extra layer of utility on top of it, like a search tool that's limited to just your messages, simple sharing options for each message, as well as a way to assign a tag to each tweet for categorization.

Of course the usefulness of all of this hinges on Twitter being down and/or … Read more

Windows 7 isn't officially out until October, but if you want to start an online backup service and make sure you can still use it once upgraded to the new operating system, Proxure has something to offer.

The company announced Tuesday the availability of version 3.15 of its KeepVault backup solution. The new version provides support for Windows 7 (both 64-bit and 32-bit) as well as Windows Vista and Windows XP.

The company also announced a special version of KeepVault that works with Windows Home Server, a special OS from Microsoft designed specifically for network storage devices such … Read more

If you're using a notebook and there's a sudden power outage, no problem: The battery will let you keep on workin'.

Desktop users aren't so lucky, which is why it's essential to plug everything into a battery backup (aka uninterruptible power supply). If the lights go out, you'll still have a few minutes in which to save your work and safely power down the machine.

Best Buy has an APC 550VA Battery Backup System for $39.99 shipped. It includes a total of eight outlets, all of them surge-protected and four powered by the 330-watt … Read more

Migrating applications from one computer or operating system to another can be a hassle. Doing so for e-mail clients can be particularly frustrating. However, this dandy little utility lets you breathe easy by making the Outlook move a simple process.

BackRex Outlook Backup loads an easy-to-access icon onto your desktop. Launching the utility opens a small dialog box from which you can choose the Outlook components to back up and the destination location for the resulting package. This handy utility performed well in our tests, and selecting options was simply a matter of a few clicks. Navigating its processes was … Read more

Owners of Time Machine-enabled Macs need not apply. But for the rest--especially small businesses that want a centralized backup solution, then EMC has something for you.

The company announced Tuesday the availability of its Retrospect 8.1 backup software for the Mac platform, which, unlike the previous version 8.0, now also supports the the legacy PowerPC Macs. This is good news for businesses that still have the older Mac computers.

According to EMC, on average, users of Retrospect 8.1 on Intel-based Macs can expect local backup performance to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent over version 8.… Read more

Backing up a computer can be tricky for many people, especially those who access data via the software applications without knowing where the actual data files or folders reside on the hard drive. I have some friends who used to believe that you could back up all your office documents just by dragging and dropping the icons of Microsoft Excel, Word, and Outlook over to an external hard drive.

This is where products such as the SimpleSave external hard drive series, like the SimpleSave Portable that Hewlett-Packard made available Monday, comes into play. (The other drive in the series, the SimpleSave desktop, will be available in September.)

… Read more