Recently when my computer died, I realised that even though I was fairly rigerous about backing up data, I had let my backups lapse for at least two weeks. Goodness knows how many important documents I would have lost if my computer hadn’t have been recoverable, though I’d imagine that with the overwhelming quantity of creative brilliance I produce on my PC, it would have been substantial.

Well, no more! I decided that it was time that my backups entered the 21st century, and that I should be backing up my data into the cloud. There are a number of providers that offer such a service – Mozy @ Home, Backblaze, even Dropbox if you please – but after extensively evaluating all my options, I decided that CrashPlan was the way to go for me. This was for two main reasons:

• I have a lot of data to backup (mainly photos); and
• I only need to backup one computer – all my other computers are slaves

So, precisely how much data did I have to upload? Well, I wasn’t kidding; it’s a lot:

Yes, people laughed and mocked me when I said it was going to take three months to get it all up there… but guess what? That’s all done now! And, since the CrashPlan application sits in the background, monitoring the folders that I told it to watch, all it has to do now is upload any changes that I make – which doesn’t take very long at all! Home and hosed!

Paul recently sent me an email to the effect of the following:

I noticed your latest post in Google Reader tonight and it seems to have a title with an odd spammy pharmaceuticals reference! At first I thought it might be a joke but then looking back in the history it seems to have been that way since your Sep 19 post.

Sure enough when I checked it out for myself, my website had been hacked! And by such a weird hack too – seemingly all the content was left untouched, but the title of some posts (when viewed through google) had some cheap pharmaceutical advertising in its place. Even more weirdly, clicking the link in google still correctly sent you to the story, and not to some dodgy online fake chemist. So, what’s the point, hackers?

Anyway, cleaning the infection out was no easy task – Paul also managed to find this link which did a great job of telling me what to do. I’ve also gone through and updated every password that I could find, so hopefully that will keep the hackers at bay for a little while longer.

Stupid hackers! Go and do something productive with your lives!

Don’t get me wrong; I like Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine to rival old faithful.

But as far as I’m concerned, Bing still has some catching up to do. Case in point:

• Search Bing for ZI146786039GB
• Search Google for ZI146786039GB

It’s the little things!

If relinquish is a word, why isn’t linquish? It sounds like ‘re’ is being used as a prefix to me… Maybe linquish had an archaic meaning that has just been lost.

Then again, it sounds like the ‘pre’ in prefix is a prefix too, so maybe my logic is getting a bit circular.

Here’s a tip for all you youngsters out there – deleting a drive’s partition table is a baaaaaadddd idea, if the drive still contains data that you want. Now this is something that I’ve suspected for a while, but last night I proved myself correct.

Of course, I’d never delete a valuable drive’s parition table for the sake of proving a theory – that’s crazy talk! Instead, last night I was trying to format a spare 50GB partition that I’d set aside on my external hard-drive specifically for HFS+. So I had the drive hooked up to the Mac, and I went to the “Disk Utility” program, selected the empty partition, and clicked “Erase”. Disk Utility warned me that the data from that partition would be erased – no worries, it was empty to begin with – so I clicked OK.

Imagine how pleasently surprised I was when Disk Utility told me that it “couldn’t update the partition table”! Actually I wasn’t worried at that point; it was only when I worked out that, “couldn’t update the partition table” really meant, “couldn’t update the partition table, so I deleted it instead” that the feeling of impending doom set in. Without access to the partitions, we had lost all of our digital photos (12+ GB), videos, music (45+ GB), and the install files for a bunch of different applications. *gasp*

Wise man say: backup!

Thankfully, with the assistance of a few programs – TestDisk and PC Inspector (which are both free, surprisingly) – I managed to not only recover the main partitions, but almost all of the data as well. The only real loss looks to be a few install files which I have backups for anyway.

So the real lesson in all of this, was that it was frighteningly easy to resurrect partitions and files that by all counts should have been dead (once I got past my initial shock, that is). So keep that in mind next time you think you’ve erased a sensitive document; with the right tools and a little know how, it wouldn’t be hard to get it back! To really get rid of something, you need to use a tool like Secure Erase (or if you have a Mac, you can just turn on the File Vault and use the built-in Secure Erase).

I just read a very interesting article about a guy’s insight from working for Microsoft. It’s a bit long, but certainly worth a gander, especially for you software engineering folks.

Very few projects at Microsoft have “small” impact. Everywhere you turn, the projects people are working on are likely to be used by thousands or millions of people. You have the opportunity to earn, save, or cost the company millions of dollars through your work.

From what he says, it sounds like Microsoft would be a sweet-as place to be working. Just don’t know how I’d handle having only 2 weeks holiday per year!