Preserving and Collecting Facebook Profiles for E-Discovery

Posted on March 9, 2011 by jur1st

The ability to download your Facebook profile was originally announced in October of last year and is now available for all individual users. There have been quite a few hyperbolic articles declaring this to be a “boon for e-discovery in the cloud.” While I don’t necessarily see it as that, it certainly does make preservation and collection of information from Facebook much easier.

How it Works

When you log into Facebook, find your account settings and click on “Learn More.” You’ll be prompted to enter your account password again, and then will see a message indicating that they will email you when it’s ready. If you’re clever, you probably filter messages from Facebook out of your inbox, so make sure to watch for the email. They must not store the download for very long once it’s prepared because it took me three tries to successfully download the file once it was done. There isn’t any error saying that the download had expired, which is kind of a pain.

The download comes down as a collection of HTML files, images and a stylesheet. It’s very well done, and you could actually just post this directory to your own webserver if you’d like.1

E-Discovery Implications

While I haven’t had a chance to see the output from a corporate account or organizational page, I would imagine that the process is very much the same. If this is the case, then when a duty to preserve information in anticipation of litigation arrises then it’s probably a good idea to have the admin of a company Facebook page initiate the download.2

Since the duty to preserve is an ongoing one, regular archives should be made since the data on a Facebook page is pretty fluid. One downside for those who may have to review this content prior to production is that de-duplication through the use of MD5 or SHA-1 checksums will be ineffective since all messages and wall postings come down as a single file.

Things I Thought I’d Never Say

Back when I joined Facebook back in early 2005, I was a pretty big supporter. I liked how it was clean, unobtrusive and showed no signs of allowing the customization which was one of the contributing factors to the decline of MySpace. I also really appreciated how it was private, as did many of the initial users. As the service continued to grow, I lost interest and really only maintain my account now because as an alpha-geek in the legal community I have to talk about Facebook a lot.

Facebook did something very right with this from a number of perspectives. Web based services like Facebook, Basecamp, Salesforce.com and Google Docs are going to continue to grow and users (and their lawyers) need ways to get to this information outside the browser. Even if a magic wand were waved where we could easily do pure native document productions, dynamic web pages like a Facebook profile are still extremely problematic. The only way that the Facebook download profile format could be more friendly to your average lawyer would be if it came down as a series of tiff images with a database load file.

Hopefully the same model of exporting flat, non-interactive versions of dynamic webpages will spread to other services soon.

  1. This would be a terrible idea. All of your private messages are included here. ↩

  2. Not legal advice. ↩

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Thing of the Week: Upgrading from DOS to Windows 7

Posted on March 6, 2011 by jur1st

For the very first Thing of the Week, I’d like to present Microsoft Windows. Up until 2006 I was a pretty devoted fan of the folks up in Redmond. I can still remember watching my dad expound the awesomeness that was Excel running on our Zeos 486DX powered machine. My time on the computer was spent more in things like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and Project Neptune (at one point I could definitely 10 key faster than I could type), but fiddling with Windows 3.11 was how I really learned how computers worked.

How much do you want DOSSHELL on your Windows XP box?

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How I Use the iPad

Posted on February 26, 2011 by jur1st

The iPad easily eclipses my laptop, iPhone and iPod as my favorite device. With the impending release of the second generation iPad I’m sure that the question of which apps to take a look at will be coming more and more. The iPad is an inherently personal device and everyone I know seems to use theirs just a little bit differently. Without further ado, here’s my list of apps that I recommend which I may update from time to time.

Daily Use

  1. Reeder is a wonderful RSS feed reader. I don’t do a lot of “surfing” anymore as I’ve identified a few websites which I tend to enjoy reading and getting the content delivered to me is great. Reeder leverages Google Reader for management of the feeds that are coming down. This is kind of a pain when you want to add something new, but it is what it is. I put RSS feeds at a relatively high nerd level, but a little bit of work to set things up goes a long way. Here’s a great video about how RSS feeds work if you’re not familiar.
  2. Instapaper is a close second and is where I head after cruising through news. You can send articles to Instapaper from Reeder, which is great. All the content that gets pulled down is available offline, making it great for the airplane.
  3. Omnifocus is how I manage all my tasks. I was so excited about the release of this program on the iPad that I actually bought it from iTunes when I was on that potentially frightening network at DEFCON. I use OF on my Macs and iPhone too, but I think there’s great potential to use as a standalone tool as well.
  4. The Apple Remote is where things really start blowing your mind. In it’s simplest form, you can control the music that’s coming out of your iTunes library. When you add an AirPort Express to your stereo or maybe an AppleTV1 to your home theatre you can push your entire iTunes library to any of your speakers and control it all from the iPad. This is so amazing during the summers when I’m cooking on the deck it nearly makes me speechless. We’ve come a long way since I used to plug an external drive with my music into a laptop tenuously plugged in with a wire to my stereo in law school.
  5. Netflix is kind of a no brainer if you have a subscription. I manage my DVD queue with the app, and usually pick what we want to watch on TV using this instead of the AppleTV interface. I’ve been slowly moving through the Ken Burns Civil War series and Cosmos too.
  6. TuneIn Radio is how I finish my day with a little Coast to Coast AM. It starts at 10:00 central time on WNIS out of Norfolk, VA.

Regular Use

  1. Epicurious is a very cool cooking app. It lets you build shopping lists that you can email or print which is really handy. What I really am looking forward to is Cooks Illustrated. They have an iPhone app, but the double pixel thing just isn’t that great.
  2. NPR is a great companion to Epicurious (when I’m not listening to music while I cook). I’ll bet you found that one pretty quickly.
  3. FlipBoard is pretty interesting for following high volume sites which I don’t want to add to my Reeder library like reddit or Hackernews.
  4. The Economist is pretty passable. As you’d expect, there aren’t too many bells and whistles but the content speaks for itself. I’m hoping for some attractive iPad only subscription pricing soon.

Honorable Mention

  1. The Financial Times was my favorite newspaper app when I got the iPad this spring. Once again, the subscription price is crazy high so I removed it after my free trial ran out. One of the biggest “whoa” moments came this summer when I was up late, moved to have a beverage outside and was reading the next mornings edition of the FT on my deck.
  2. TED. Speaks for itself. (no pun intended)
  3. Angry Birds. I’m not providing a link because I don’t like to directly contribute to the addition of others. Same goes for Snood.
  4. Wired has found a way to add value to the magazine. I normally pick up a single issue of this the night before I get on an airplane. The issues are BIG so leave plenty of time for them to load before leaving.
  5. Pocket Cloud is obviously great for remote desktop and is a must if you’re connecting to VMWare View.

I prefer to use the iBooks app for reading, although the selection is much better from the Kindle app. I’m sure you’ve already noticed that all your Kindle books and content got pushed to your iPad when you install it. That kind of platform independence is where Amazon has Apple beat dead to rights. Of course I read the New York Times, although that app seems to get slower and more buggy with each update.

I really wish that I could find a good podcast manager for the iPad or the iPhone. Downloading individual episodes through the iTunes store one at a time, then flipping back to the iPod app is all kinds of clunky. First world problem.

  1. In the spring my parents ditched their Windows computers for an all Mac setup. My mom got an iPad for her birthday (she loves it more than her laptop) and I got them an AppleTV for Christmas. It’s the AppleTV that they talk about the most because of the music streaming and how they can put all their pictures from iPhoto on their TV when friends come over.  ↩

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Network Intel Script

Posted on February 23, 2011 by jur1st

I’ve known about GeekTool and it’s open source cousin, NerdTool since before I even switched from Windows to OS X. For some reason, I always stayed away. Perhaps it was terrible flashbacks to those desktop customization tools like StarDock which takes a professionally designed interface and lets people with no design sense remake their user interface in ways which bog down the system. So far, NerdTool has shown no signs of this nasty behavior.

I started considering using this tool after seeing that this really is the easiest way to confirm that your nightly SuperDuper! backup completed successfully. Getting this functionality takes a little bit of work (including a little work in the terminal) but it’s worth it. It’s great to grab a cup of coffee in the morning and see whether or not your overnight backup successfully completed.

Since I’d taken the plunge to start running NerdTool, I figured why not throw some other stuff together? You can be as minimal as simply printing the date and time on your desktop, get dangerously close to teetering over the edge by adding an image that changes the weather, or go overly geeky and just run top all the time.

NetworkIntel.sh

Every time I connect to a network, I’d like to know a few things that are surprisingly difficult to display all at once in just about any operating system. Confirming my IP address is an obvious and anyone who has had to troubleshoot an internet connection can tell you that the address for the router is equally important. I take it one step further and like to know who else is sitting within striking distance of my computer.

The script below is pretty self evident but the script works by running a couple basic terminal commands, grabbing content from a static and predictable web page and displaying only the information for which you’re looking. I grabbed the actual syntax from a couple of easily found websites (just look for geektool scripts and you’ll find a bunch).

This goes one step further and performs a quick nmap ping sweep and pulls out the results.


echo “Network Intel”
echo “——————————-”
myen0=ifconfig en0 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
if [ “$myen0” != “” ]
then
echo Hard Line : “$myen0”
else
echo “”
fi
myen1=ifconfig en1 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
if [ “$myen1” != “” ]
then
echo “Wireless : $myen1”
else
echo “Wireless : INACTIVE”
fi
myRouter=netstat -nr | grep '^default' | awk '{print $2}'
echo “AP :” “$myRouter”
wip=curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[a-zA-Z<>/ :]//g'
echo “External : $wip”
echo “——————————-”
echo “Nearby Machines”
echo “——————————-”
nmap -sP 192.168.1.1/24 | awk ‘/report/ {print $5, $6}’
echo “——————————-“

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The Daily Disappointment

Posted on February 6, 2011 by jur1st

The Daily, a digital only newspaper produced by News Corp [launched this week][1] to a pretty high amount of fanfare. Since the iPad was announced close to a year ago, there has been a lot of speculation about how it can reshape the landscape of journalism and paid for content distribution. Taking away the ability for content providers to take advantage of subscriptions, the Daily does a great job of showing how not to persuade people to start paying for the news they’ve gotten for free for a long time. The downfall of The Daily isn’t technical as much as editorial. The publication has too much in common with USA Today and US Weekly than the New York Times and The Economist.

The last time I subscribed to a newspaper was in college. I took advantage of student rates for the pre-News Corp Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. There was normally a pile of copies of the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch[^post] which I’d read for some sports news and I’d always find a copy of the Economist. Once I got to law school, the landscape had started to change. I read lots fo the same content, but online. I’ve never had the inclination since then to throw down for a paper.

So after a week of The Daily (including a grey and cloudy Sunday morning) how excited am I about this? Other than my enthusiasm for deleting it at the end of next week, not at all.

The interface is slow, buggy, pixelated and kind of confusing. After tapping on the icon, you wait first for the animation (which probably ought to go away after the initial launch) and then for the loading of new content, which [Gruber][gruber] has measured at over a minute. Yes, it’s too long. A counterpoint is that it takes longer due to all of the rich media which is being downloaded. That’s okay if I’m downloading something that I want to be image a video heavy like a game or a digital copy of Wired, but not for something looking to supplant all other sources of news for me. This morning, I happened to be listening to the latest edition of [Hypercritical][5by5] until I launched The Daily. Thanks, The Daily, I did want to give priority to your startup sound over what I was listening to. Trying to keep my iPod playing while the Daily was open caused The Daily to crash. Awesome.

I don’t want to belabor the interface itself too much. Those are things which aren’t central to my disappointment in The Daily. The problem is the editorial content.

For some reason, The Daily can’t decide whether it wants to be Sports Illustrated, USA Today, or US Weekly. The articles in the News section are amazingly shallow. With all of the resources of News Corp, you’d think that they would have started pulling in pieces from around the Murdoch empire once someone sporting a reading level above the 4th grade read through the pre-release editions. The second section listed after News is Gossip. I have less than an interest in having this be part of a newspaper I’m paying for. There appears to be no dedicated business section, which makes no sense at all. None of the editorials really struck my eye, except for the one which blamed traveling Americans for polluting and ruining the beaches of Jamaica.[^jamaica] Most striking is that they couldn’t find a single well known columnist to contribute during this trial period. Arts and Life continues the trend of shallow writing, and this is where you can find things *highly* appealing to the educated user such as an advice column, crossword puzzle, sudoku, and a horriscope. Seriously?

Moving along we find Apps & Games, which unsurprisingly has some banal writing about iPad apps, further solidifying my distaste for the word “app.” I enjoy the idea of the “What I Love on my iPad” feature, but tapped on the screen and swiped all over only to find that a list of five apps with a 20 word description was all there was. Not exactly what I’ve [come to expect][usesthis] from this kind of model. Finally comes Sports, which is a place where they could find some traction. I’ll be interested to see what in the world they do after the Super Bowl, considering most of the writing this week has been dedicated to nothing but.

Overall, the best news about The Daily is that it opens up subscription possibilities for better publications. The price point of $.99 a week is perfect, and I’ll happily pay that to the Times (once their app returns to stability) and the Economist.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/business/media/03daily.html
[gruber]: http://daringfireball.net/2011/02/the_daily_wait
[5by5]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical
[usesthis]: http://usesthis.com/

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When Everyone Takes a Snow Day

Posted on February 2, 2011 by jur1st

Even though it didn’t affect places like Atlanta, DC or New York it was pretty hard to avoid noticing that a lot of the country got slammed with a big snow storm this week. Even the Chicago School District decided that it was best for everyone to stay home for a while. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but there seem to be more posts than normal this week about the benefits of not being at work or shutting out other inputs to get Work done.

Seeing that it’s been over 10 years since Chicago cancelled school reminded me of the first time that I stayed home just so I could work. It was one of those assignments that you actually start hearing about from upper classmen your first week of high school. Even then, there was nothing like a full pot of coffee and jazz before 9:00 to get things going. I noticed the same things this week.

Yesterday the Firm closed for the first time in a long long time. Everyone holed up, pulled out their lists and plowed through them. I received maybe one phone call of major substance and no more than a few emails. Not only that, those emails didn’t come until the end of the day. The timing and substance of the emails that we exchanged after about 4:30 in the afternoon tells me that people avoided bugging others for most of the day and instead took time to get some depth out of their work for the day. I know I did.

I remained snowed in today, but with the office officially open it was somewhat back to business as usual. Tomorrow everyone will be back and I’m sure the volume of interruptions will be back to normal levels. In the meantime, I think there will be lots of people who look back (in the short term at least) on the blizzard not because of the volume of snow, but how incredibly nice it was just to get some things done for once.

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The Price of Apple’s Retail Success

Posted on January 24, 2011 by jur1st

I started looking around to find out what it will cost to have the internal drive replaced, and it’s turned out to be a bit of a frustrating experience. I’d talked to Ax0n about doing this ourselves down in the cave, but if it was going to be somewhat reasonable I’m happy to have someone do the swap that is used to taking these things apart on a regular basis. Even though I just know that the Apple Store will overcharge for the drive and probably the labor, I felt like I should give them a shot.

So far, I’ve tried three times to get a quote for what a hard drive swap will cost. Once over the phone (I was told I needed to talk to a Genius and they would make me an appointment) and twice in person. I was told that the company policy was that they couldn’t quote anything until the Genius had run a full diagnostic in person. Explaining that I understand that sometimes something that appears to be simple will end up being more expensive upon further examination made no difference. The only way for me to get a quote on service for an out of warranty Mac is to physically tote the thing to the store. This brings us to a real problem with what I’ve seen the Apple Retail Stores become in the past few years.

Rewind the clock to mid 2005. I was still a relatively content Windows user, but had been curious about OS X and the announcement of the move to x86 processors. One afternoon, I strolled into the Apple store and found five or six guys sitting around and maybe a few other customers. After starting to play around, one of the guys came over to ask me if he could help. We talked about the benefits of the BSD core and some of the changes which made my preconceived notions developed from using prior operating systems. He was able to speak, not only about stuff like iTunes and iPhoto, about geeky things. If it weren’t for the retail store, I might never have made the switch.

After I got my MacBook Pro (which is still a very functional machine) I’d stop in every once in a while with a question…always sufficiently obscure that I couldn’t find the answer on Google and always something that presented some challenge which was met by the Genius.

It’s this kind of service which helped Apple retail survive while other computer manufacturers see their retail operations die and take down the company with them. Fortunately for Apple (and their stockholders) products like the iPod have brought lots more people in to the store. Most of these people aren’t geeks and really benefit from the hand-holding nature of the in-store staff. It was this additional foot traffic which brought about the reservations for the Genius Bar, and the throngs of glassy eyed Apple Store employees standing between you and someone who really knows their stuff.

So what about the customer who really knows their stuff and wants straight and fast answers to their questions? This guy is out of luck. What about the guy who knows exactly what he wants when he buys a new piece of hardware? This guy still has to sit there and get the pitch about Mac tutoring, Apple Care, Apple Care Plus, MobileMe, a “free” printer and a whole slew of other things that I don’t need.

Listen, Apple, I know you do a great job of tracking your customers. Through my email address you know the number of pieces of hardware that I’ve registered and how long I’ve been a customer. I wouldn’t be surprised if you know how many times I’ve emailed Steve Jobs about making AirTunes stream from my iMac to my iPad. Use that information to the advantage of your customers. Maybe you could have an optional check-in for people that have clearly been OS X users for more than a couple years. Perhaps I could schedule when I come in so I could see a mid-level sales person who understands what the terminal looks like.

All I really want is to be able to not be treated like a 75 year old who can’t figure out how to reset their iPod.

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Adobe Loves Google

Posted on January 23, 2011 by jur1st

I’m not sure exactly what it was that Steve Jobs did to make the upper management at Google so mad, but it must have been bad. In the latest salvo in the resulting battle, Google has started using tactics of a monopolist to the detriment of content producers and users alike.

As anyone who has taken a mid-level economics course or an anti-trust class in law school can explain, it’s not that being a monopolist is bad just because you’re big, it’s when you start abusing that position that the consumer is hurt. I’m not arguing that Google is violating any of the anti-trust laws, just that it’s using it’s starting to act like one.

Back in the 1990s when Microsoft was getting into trouble because of bundling the browser, I was actually pulled for Microsoft because at the time I viewed IE as being a superior product and integration between the browser and the operating system made sense. Bundling IE didn’t seem like a problem (and really still doesn’t) to me. Microsoft didn’t bully web developers into accepting their janky browser specific tags and consumers still could get alternative browsers if they wanted to. While in the short term, browser competition was non-existent the landscape has significantly improved.

This week Google announced that it was going to drop support for H.264 in the browser unless you used Flash (which is bundled with Chrome). Instead, they have decided to support only WebM, Ogg Theora and Flash. I’ll bet that I wasn’t the only person who immediately asked themselves, what the hell is WebM?

We just went through this long and annoying discussion of the relative merits of video distribution via Flash, H.264 and Ogg Theora. Clearly content providers got behind H.264 as shown by the relatively low number of web videos that I can’t view on my iPad.

I’m not going to get into the debate of what format is more open in the sense of software patents. These kinds of debates are largely esoteric (due to the statements of MPEG LA) and have little to no impact on users like my parents or people in management at organizations looking to publish video on the web.

So what’s really going on here? Google isn’t interested in open formats. They are interested in sticking it to Apple. Google has aligned themselves with Adobe, and must see a pretty significant financial benefit from helping prop up Flash.

I’ve used Chrome on a few occasions, and it just isn’t my cup of tea. Whether it’s the user interface or simply the creep factor knowing that Google has a great outlet to monitor all my web browsing, I don’t know.

I haven’t looked at browser stats for my website or that of CCCKC to determine how much of a share it really caries.1 Why? Since Chrome is standards compliant (along with Firefox, Safari and Opera) I don’t have to worry about that crap any more…and it’s a beautiful thing. This decision has one result on content producers: they have to worry about what browser the user has again. That completely sucks.

The strategy for video distribution was pretty clear before this week. Make your video, encode in H.264 and provide a Flash wrapper for those people who through no fault of their own have to use an older version of IE and throw the raw H.264 version in there through use of the html5 video tag. Over time, we can phase out the Flash part of it.

Google counters that this is no big deal as Chrome users are taken care of through the use of Flash distribution, but that’s not the long term solution. Firefox isn’t going to bundle Flash because of the licensing issue, Safari sure as hell isn’t going to do it and IE isn’t going to either.

Winners and Losers

Google

What does Google get out of this? Not a whole lot on the face of it. Their argument that they are concerned about the licensing of H.264 is a red herring. This doesn’t help attract new users to their browser, desktop OS or to Android. This leaves one cynical possibility: Google is receiving piles of cash from Adobe in return for their abandonment of H.264.

Users

When it comes to web video, users benefit from an increased probability that they can watch funny cat videos without a headache. If a video comes out only in WebM, that means that they need to install or use Flash. Flash sucks because it creates security vulnerabilities, hogs your processor, kills your battery life, etc. We shouldn’t have to have that argument again. If you’re using an iOS device you’re out of luck.

Content Generators

Content generators (and those of us who have to try to explain these formats to management) don’t win either. WebM is pretty darn obscure. I can’t find any program installed on my machines which offers that encoder as an option. Sure, I can continue to distribute in H.264 and Flash, but eventually we should all want to see Flash go away.

Adobe

Adobe clearly wins because their undesirable product will continue to be tied to Google Chrome, and users will still need to install their undesirable product to ensure that they can see as many cat videos as they can.

Can we all just call this what it is? A deal between Google and Adobe which serves only to benefit the producer of an undesirable tied product?

Footnotes:

1. A quick look reveals that Chrome has a pretty impressive share, over 12%.


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Coping With (And Avoiding) Drive Failure

Posted on January 23, 2011 by jur1st

It’s a scenario that can happen to anyone, at any time and without warning. One moment you’re working away, enjoying a nice cup of coffee and the next your Mac hangs.

As you try to figure out what’s going on, you notice that nothing is working. Placing some faith in the traditional OS X voodoo, you reset the PRAM (no help) and pop in the installation disc to repair permissions. Red text everywhere. Maybe repair will work! Nope.

Frantically you try to figure out what data is stored offsite while plugging in your Time Machine drive to another box.

Ah ha! I have a Disk Warrior DMG, maybe this will solve all my problems! Nope…Disc Warrior only serves to give you the bad news. The internal drive is beyond recovery and it’s time to replace it.

Successful recovery from one of the worst case scenarios requires a little bit of preparation and foresight on your part. It’s all about multiple redundant backups.

Firewire to the Rescue

Believe it or not, I’m writing this on the Mac which bonked on me a little over 24 hours ago, and I’ve yet to crack open the case to replace the internal drive, which I’ll get around to eventually. How’s this possible? OS X can be installed on an external drive. From what I’ve read, this can be done with drives connected through USB 2.0 if you have an Intel based Mac, but I’m using the more traditional FireWire connection. I’m using a SATA dock made by Vantec that supports USB, ESATA and FireWire 400 connections that I found at Microcenter when I was buying my new backup drives.

Installing OS X on an external drive is surprisingly simple. Even with a bonked internal drive, you can still boot to the Snow Leopard installer disc and simply run the installer on your external drive after formatting it. It took the installer about 30 minutes to run…not too bad.

Booting to the external drive is as simple as holding down the Option key when you start the Mac. At this time, the EFI firmware doesn’t even recognize my internal drive.

Building Your Image

Recovering from a recent Time Machine backup is an option, but the problem with that is that there may be no way to tell when things started getting wonky on your system. Restoring broken files really won’t help things out so I’m taking this opportunity to build a new base image for OS X at this point. On top of that, almost everyone I know did a “dirty” install of Snow Leopard which worked like a charm. Starting from scratch can be a nice thing depending on how old your system is though. I guess that’s the former Windows user in me.

After running through the OS registration, check your user and computer names to make sure they match your preferences. Changing these after you install certain software like Textmate can cause some problems. Start setting your system preferences back to what you had them before and kick off Software Update. OS X will download the combo update, which will be quite large.

My image is going to be pretty sparse, containing only the stuff that I use all the time.

The last thing I’ll do is move over my data, and I’ll probably do it only a little at a time. This is a good opportunity to clean up that documents folder which can become a mess over time.

Installing the Drive

If I end up having Microcenter or the Mac repair place down the street pull my old drive, I’ll probably have them install the drive I’m building out now. If you take your Mac to Apple to be worked on, they definitely won’t give you the option to show up with your own drive. From my experience, you’ll get the machine back with whatever OS was installed when you bought the machine…in this case Leopard. Bringing over your image from the external isn’t very tough. You’ll just boot to the Snow Leopard DVD, reformat the internal drive and restore from the SATA drive you built out.

Preventing Disaster

So what can you do to avoid this scenario? Probably not a lot. As long as drives continue to have moving parts, mechanical failure is always a possibility. To mitigate the damage to your data, you need to have plenty of backups and keep as much data offsite as possible.

DropBox

Even if you only have one computer, Dropbox is a great way to keep offsite backups of your current working files. Unless you’re doing photography, music or video editing the 2GB which is free should be more than ample. Take advantage of baked in Dropbox sync for programs which support it like 1password

Time Machine and Bootable Disc Backups

Even though your documents are pretty critical, the most precious data you have probably won’t work well with Dropbox because of the size. iPhoto libraries and all your media files would overwhelm the free storage pretty quickly. Time Machine is the obvious choice to take care of most of your data. It’s easy to set up and only minimally intrusive. You can always detach the Time Machine drive and plug it into another machine to browse through files…this was extremely handy during the freak-out phase when you think about your photo library.

Backing up external storage that houses media is pretty important too. My media is stored on an external drive, and I cloned it to another one of these internal drives last night using Disk Utility off the installation CD. It didn’t matter to Disc Utility that I was copying from a USB drive to a FireWire drive. Pretty handy really. I’m planning on setting a chron job which will copy my iPhoto library to this drive on a weekly basis so that it can be included in more than one off-site backup disc.

Finally is the operating system backup. This drive will serve as a lifeboat if/when this happens again. I’ll be using SuperDuper to create these bootable images of the OS. I’ll run backups once a week and once a month (or when OS updates come out) I’ll cycle the drives. One drive will live at my office in a safe, and the other will just live at the house.

Ready for Anything

Backup schemes like this protect you and your data from hardware failures, theft and fire. With bootable backups of your machine, even if it’s stolen you’ll be able to plug the drive into another Mac (any Mac) and be back and running in no time.

Update:

It’s really kind of amazing how much of a hassle it is to try to recover even a small amount of work lost during a hard drive failure. When the dust finally settled, I’d lost the additions to my iPhoto library since my last Time Machine backup, and any changes I made to my iTunes library since the same time. For some reason, the iTunes Library.xml file wasn’t being backed up. I’m not sure if that’s something that Apple builds in (unlikely) or I’d followed a bit of bad advice in setting up Time Machine while excluding certain areas such as the virtual machines I run in VMWare Fusion.

Currently I’m running the Super Remove Tracks script to pull out those files which woefully now have the exclamation point next to them. I was able to figure out which files I’d changed by creating a Smart Folder searching for all music files modified after my last backup. The worst news here, was that I’d fixed a lot of metadata using beaTunes which included some stuff I’d added (and listened to) ages ago. When this finishes I’ll simply have to eat the loss of play counts and ratings for a lot of Grateful Dead shows. iTunes is great when it works, and will drive you completely insane when it doesn’t. Do yourself a favor and email yourself a copy of this little XML file now and every time that you upgrade iTunes.

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Things of the Year – 2010

Posted on January 15, 2011 by jur1st

It might be a little late, but here are a few of my favorite (and not so favorite) things from 2010

Best Gadget

This was nearly a tie, but since I don’t actually carry the MacBook Air, I have to give it to the iPad. I recently re-read the piece that I wrote shortly after the announcement and it holds up pretty well. One of the things that makes the iPad so nice is the lack of maintenance. Zero hassle computing is what’s hot right now, whether you’re a nerd like myself or my mother, who loves her iPad.

Favorite New Website

American Drink can’t be beat. From the sharp design (other than downtime, you wouldn’t be able to tell it’s hosted at Tumblr) to some tremendous writing it’s great to read through while enjoying a nice Old Fashioned or another cocktail of your choice.

Best Piece of A/V Equipment

It’s about time that the AppleTV got an update. At a hundred bucks, it’s tough not to pick it up just because of photo streaming and Netflix. I can’t wait for some development opportunities to open up, either through official or unofficial channels. I may not jailbreak my iPad, but I’ll jailbreak the hell out of the AppleTV if it means that I never have to transcode another video ever again.

Best Pro-Tip (Non-Computing)

Lets say that you find yourself needing to keep a keg of beer cold for a few days, but the hotel charges for ice and the hassle of dumping out water really crimp your style. The answer? Start out with a mix of dry ice and “wet” ice. You’ll be set for the whole weekend.

Bonus: Dropping dry ice into a pitcher looks cool, but soon you’ll have a monster on your hands.

Most Disappointing Meal

I hate to call out a restaurant for being a real disappointment, but as it’s a place that people in and around wine country might consider I feel obligated. We did the River Road drive, which was awesome, and ended up at Lucas Wharf for dinner. I had the calimari, which ended up just being a brief sauté in about a cup and a half of butter. I know that this seems like a combination that couldn’t lose, it ended up being a total mess.

Best New (to me) Wine

When I was in Sonoma County, we went to the Korbel winery because it was on the River Road. I had pretty low expectations, but was quite surprised. My favorite was the Korbel Sec, which has proved hard to find here in KC but is available for shipment.. It doesn’t take an expensive sparkling wine to taste great.

Favorite Software

If you dig on RSS feeds and have an iPad, you really need to. Shell out a few bucks for Reeder. This app gets more use than probably all others combined on my iPad.

On the OS X front, if you don’t use 1Password, now is the time to start. When you combine this with Dropbox, you have a seriously winning combination. While this makes it hard to log into websites when you’re on a public terminal, it’s a nice reminder that you probably shouldn’t be doing that anyway.

Best New Album

This one is pretty tough. 2010 ended up being a pretty disappointing year, no matter what genre you’re talking about. I entered the year really looking forward to Plastic Beach, but without Danger Mouse it ended up being pretty average. My Dark Twisted Fantasy certainly stood out from the rest of the crowd, but I really hate to agree with Pitchfork on just about anything.

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