Sometimes I take for granted some of the lessons I’ve learned about computers over the years. I should be sharing these stories with you so that perhaps you don’t have to learn those lessons the hard way as I did.

Several years ago, before I made the big switch to Macintosh, I had a hard drive fail on me, and I didn’t have a back up. This was not a good thing. This can happen at anytime and to anyone. There were a couple of reasons I didn’t have a back up:

1. Hard Drives were expensive. Standard drives were only about 20 gigabytes at the time but they cost a couple hundred dollars, and as a poor college student I didn’t have that. Now you can get a 160 gig drive for about $60.

2. I had never had any other major hardware fail. The fact that hardware fails sometimes was never in the forefront of my mind.

When my hard drive died I lost a lot of valuable stuff. My entire portfolio was gone. As a designer that’s how I get jobs without it I’m lost. I did have a few files on cd and some jpeg versions of some of the files but all the originals were gone. This has all become painfully relevant again as I spent a couple hours today working on a friends computer and it turned out that his hard drive is dead. He didn’t have a backup. It’s a very sad situation. I don’t want anyone else to go through the same thing, hence this post.

You might ask why you need a backup or is it worth the financial investment. The question you should be asking is can you live if you lose those pictures of last summers vacation? What if all your financial data is gone tomorrow? How about your lovingly groomed digital musical library? If I lost any one of those things it would be the like the end of the world.

Setting up a backup strategy is really easy. It would be easy for me to talk about a Mac only strategy because that is what I’m most familiar with but I’ll just discuss the strategy in general at this time.

There a couple different ways to backup your data let’s start with the most important.

1. A duplicate of all your documents, pictures, and music. This is simple and easy and can be done on cd’s or dvd’s if you have a burner. I recommend using an external usb hard drive as it is faster and can be expanded over time. There are backup programs that you can get that can automate this process but all you need to do is once a week copy all of your important files onto your backup device. Pretty simple.

2. Bootable clone. This is the second most important backup strategy you could implement. This involves making an exact copy of your entire hard drive so that if your primary drive crashes you can just swap it out wit the cloned drive and you’re up and running in just a little while. This does require an external hard drive as you’ll need something equal to or greater in size as you primary hard drive. Backup software can usually automate this process for you as well.

3. Incremental Backup. This is the least important way of backing up your data but can be very convenient. This is a fully automated backup that happens at a specified interval (hourly, daily) in which a backup application makes an initial copy of all the data and then just updates the info that has been changed recently. This way you always have a backup of your most recent data. This is what “Time Machine” in Mac OS 10.5 does.

Now this is just a basic overview of implementing a backup strategy for your data but is not an exhaustive discussion on the subject. If you have any questions leave them in the comments of feel free to send me an email.

This week the Staff of Real Life Community Church is experimenting with the idea of telecommuting or working from home or a virtual office, whatever you want to call it. Three days in and I am a little lonely but getting a lot accomplished. I had my first multi-person chat in iChat today and yesterday had a short video chat. Technology is so much fun. I think that is why I like working from home because I get to use so much more cool guy tech than I usually get to use. Above is a picture of my setup at home. I get a lot done with everything setup like this but sometimes I want to get out of the house and work at a coffee shop or something and I miss my big monitors. But I’ve got syncing setup between my computers so if I do leave, work and come home then my files are automatically transfered to my iMac. I’ve seriously had way too much fun setting up a home office this past week.

The Associated Press: Polaroid Closing Instant Film Factories

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High Schooler Gets Detention for Using Firefox? [Ha]: ”

Now this is a sad story…if it’s true. According to this alleged school report, one student received a detention for using Firefox—as opposed to IE or Safari, we assume. And while there could be plenty of explanations for why the school would want to control student browsers, we loved the teacher’s write-up of the event:

Today in class [name] had a program launched called Foxfire.exe. I had told [name] to close the program and to resume work but he told me that is was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. I had given him two warnings but he insisted that it was just a ‘better’ browser and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I had then issued his detention.

Either this is the funniest detention we’ve ever seen or the best viral marketing in history. But the school, phone number and names on the report seem to be legit.

It’s OK, faceless teenager. High school is tougher for the smart kids, if only because it’s the last chance the world has to kick you in the balls before you take it over. [image via digg]

(Via Gizmodo.)

For all you music lovers out there I’d like to introduce you to a new beta software that may make finding new music easier. The software is “Songbird” and you can get it over at http://www.songbirdnest.com.

Songbird is a mash-up of sorts, it is built on the mozilla/firefox browser, a built-in RSS Feed reader, and a media player. Here is an example of how it works:

So you have found a website or blog that reviews new music and has links to mp3’s to listen to and you want to be able to grab these songs automatically without having to click on each link individually. On a mac you could do this with an automator workflow but with Songbird you can download only the ones you want or all an listen to them right there. If it’s a blog you can subscribe to the feed in Songbird and download the songs automatically as the feed gets updated.

I’ve just spent a little time with this application and I’m sure it does more than I know about and the fact that it is still in beta means it will only get better with time. I’ve been working on a automator workflow that will take the downloaded songs and import them into itunes automatically, tag them with “new music” (or something), add them to a playlist and have it sync to my ipod. But I’m still working on that part. I can’t seem to get the songs into itunes automatically. I have run the workflow on selected files currently.

Anyway, check out Songbird and let me know what you think.