SPAUG and CompuSIR both have received packages of promotional material including:
I think we will try of have a Saturday Session to run Vista Release Candidate 1 through the learning mill.
I personally will be waiting for SP1 because the patches and errors are already beginning to flow in to Vista. It took until SP2 for XP to run correctly. Vista will not be different no matter what Microsoft tells you. In spite of this, most computers will come with Vista. One choice is to dump Vista and go back to XP.
We are in our 25th anniversary year of SPAUG! Just 5 years ago we had 40 people for dinner–among them about 5 past Presidents and many additional support personnel. Your feedback on ideas of when and how to celebrate our 25th is in order.
For years I have had the pleasure of operating a Windows computer in another city from the comfort of my home. Thus, electronically, I can operate the computers remotely and monitor how things are progressing.
With many of you supporting others, it is surprising that more of you have not opted to use any one of the three most popular solutions to remote desktop operation:
All of the above programs are pretty invasive and take over your computer quite thoroughly. Removing ALL of any of these programs is virtually impossible–there are always remainders.
Brad Templeton, Chairman of the Board of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, was our speaker. The topic was Privacy in Cyberspace. Brad discussed the meaning of privacy, why it's important, what threats it is under, and muse on how we can protect it. He touched on the recent NSA warrentless wiretap program and EFF's fight against it.
Brad Templeton, active in the computer network community since 1979, was founder and publisher at ClariNet Communications Corp., the #1 Internet-based electronic newspaper publisher, until selling it to Newsedge Corporation in 1997. Brad participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days, and in 1987 founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the world's most widely read computerized conference on that network. He also founded Looking Glass Software Limited, and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products. He was the first employee of Personal Software/Visicorp, which was the first major microcomputer applications software company, and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products, including VisiPlot for the IBM-PC, various games, popular tools and utilities for Commodore computers, special Pascal and Basic programming environments designed for education (ALICE), an add-in spreadsheet compiler for Lotus 1-2-3 (3-2-1 Blastoff), and various network related software tools. Currently he is building a new startup to reinvent the phone call, and is also on the board of the Foresight Institute (A Nanotech think-tank) and BitTorrent, Inc.
By following our recommendations in the Perfect Backup Approach tutorial (www.ugr.com/tutorials.html), your hard drive is protected from a total hard drive crash to just a file or two becoming corrupted. However, the weakest link in this backup system is remembering to do your backups on a regular basis. The recently released Acronis True Image 10.0 Home edition has solved this problem with new features to let you quickly set your system to do automatic backups on a regular basis. Earlier releases of True Image could do some scheduling of backups, but a lot of function was missing that would permit you to do the complete job. Now, you can just set your backup system and forget it. Your backups will occur automatically without your worrying about them. This article will guide you through the steps of setting up automatic backups with True Image 10, so that you can do it on your system.
We will show as our example the backup approach from the Perfect Backup Approach tutorial. This will help you get your system setup to do automatic backups that follow that approach. The Perfect Backup Approach recommends that you backup your main hard drives to an external hard drive attached to your computer. To keep your backup images organized, we recommend that you set up separate backup folders on your external hard drive for each partition and each hard drive on your computers that you are backing up. The Approach also recommends that you create a monthly full backup image of your entire main hard drive and then weekly incremental backup images of your entire main hard drive. So, that is what we will show you how to do automatically using True Image 10.
Setting up automatic backups is a simple two-step operation. The first step is to specify a backup location where you will store your backup images. The second step is to schedule a backup task to save the backups automatically into your backup location. We will cover each of these two steps in this article in an overview fashion, so that you will understand what is needed. Then you can go to our web site at www.ugr.com/newsletters.html and read the complete article with all of the details of doing this clearly spelled out for you.
Creating Backup Locations: Acronis True Image 10.0 Home edition now has function to define an intelligent backup location on your external hard drive that will manage the backup space you have provided. You need to create this special Backup Location before you start to schedule automatic backups to that location. You will define a backup location for each folder you created on your external hard drive to hold your backup images. So, this is the first step in the two-step process of creating automatic backups of your computer system.
To create a backup location in True Image, bring up the main True Image screen and click on the “Create and Configure Backup Locations” option near the bottom of the main True Image screen under "Pick a Tool". On the next screen you see, click on "Create Backup Location" to bring up the Create Backup Location wizard. This wizard will guide you through the steps to identify a folder on your external hard drive to use for backup purposes. Then it will help you define how big you will let your backup folder grow to, the maximum number of backup images the folder will contain, and the maximum number of days that you want to keep backup images. One of these three ways will control how many backup images will be held in the backup location before True Image automatically starts to delete the older images from the location.
The final screen in this wizard is to check to make sure you have entered in the right folder for your backup location and the right limits to work with. Carefully read this list and if everything is correct, click on Proceed to complete the function of Creating a Backup Location. In a few seconds, you will get a message saying that the creation of the backup location is completed. That's all there is to creating a backup location for one of your folders. Now repeat this operation for any other folders you have on your external hard drive.
Create Scheduled Task: The second step in the process of setting up automatic backups on your computer is to create a scheduled task for each of your backup folders that you defined as a backup location in the prior step. To schedule a backup task to automatically run on your computer, click on the Task option under Manage Tasks on your main True Image screen. This will bring up the Scheduled Task screen.
Here you will see a list of all of the tasks that you have scheduled already. It also gives you a set of buttons to create, run, edit, or delete tasks. At this point, we want to create a new task to schedule it to run automatically, so click on the Create button near the top of the Scheduled Task screen. This brings up the Scheduled Task Wizard.
The Scheduled Task wizard will guide you through the steps of selecting the type of backup you want to do, selecting the partition you want to backup with this task, and picking the backup location to store the backup images in. Be careful to select the folder you want to backup that is found under the heading of Backup Locations. The same folder will appear down the list under My Computer. You do not want to specify this other listing of your folder, but only those folders under Backup Locations on the directory tree.
You will also define the Backup Policy you want to use. Following the Perfect Backup Approach, you should select Incremental Backups and to make a new full backup after 4 incremental backups are made. The wizard will also guide you to password protecting your backup image, setting backup options other than the defaults, and to indicate some comments that will be attached to your backup image.
The Start Parameters option in the wizard will let you pick how frequently to make backups. The Perfect Backup Approach recommends Weekly backups, so select that option. Then you can select what time of the day to make your backups and what day of the week to do this. You can also specify which Windows User is responsible for this backup task and you can specify a password needed to sign on to this users account. Again, let me remind you that you can go to my web site at www.ugr.com/newsletters.html and read all of the step by step details in picking these various selections. They are not included in this article to keep the size of the article small.
When you reach the final screen of the Schedule Task wizard, read down the various options that you have selected to make sure they are correct. If you see one that needs to be corrected, click on the Back button to go back to the screen where that option was entered and correct it. If everything looks correct, click on the Finish button to post this automatic task to your list of scheduled True Image tasks. That's all there is to setting up an automatic scheduled backup task on your system. Now, setup a similar task for each of the backup locations you have on your external hard drive. That will complete the process of setting up your backups to run automatically. Once this is done, you can sit back and True Image will manage your backups for you. You don't need to worry about forgetting to do backups again.
To order this excellent backup utility, go to www.usergroupstore.com and look in the Backup section of the web site for Acronis True Image 10.0 Home. We are offering a special price on this outstanding product right now for just $29. With this you also get our Perfect Backup Approach tutorial. The order code to use when ordering is UGNL1206.
I hope this information helps you take advantage of this exciting new feature in Acronis True Image 10.0 Home edition. Just setup your backup locations and tasks and forget them. If you have any questions about this article or the use of your True Image software, please send them to me. I look forward to helping you if I can.
Gene Barlow, User Group Relations
PO Box 911600
St George, UT 84791-1600
This is one of a series of monthly technical articles that I distribute to those that have subscribed to this newsletter. You can subscribe at www.ugr.com/newsletters.html. Watch for them and learn more about your computer and its hard drive. User group newsletter editors may print this article in their monthly newsletter as long as the article is printed in its entirety and not cut or edited. Please send me a copy of the newsletter containing the article so that I can see what groups are running the articles.