Simple Guide to Backing Up Your PC

Jon Jacobi shares backup and restore techniques and strategies for Windows and Apple computers. Jacobi considers his guide "absurdly simple", but the terminology will be confusing to many of the true novice users I meet day to day.

-DD

Prezi

Don Butterworth, a tech savvy librarian, recommends Prezi as an alternative to PowerPoint. I have been amazed by dynamic Prezi presentations. I have also attended workshops that were complete failures because the presenter relied on their Web-based Prezi. As the presenters discovered, if there is no Internet connectivity at the location, then the Web-based Prezi is not available. My recommendation is to base the Prezi on a PowerPoint, so that the PowerPoint is available as a backup should the Internet be unavailable.

-DD

 

What follows is an example of the techniques for creating a Prezi presentation:

 

Prezi technology can be misused in the same way that PowerPoint can be misused:

Data Mining and Backups

Chris Poelker suggests that data mining can be run against disc-based backups of consolidated date.

IT administrators can use the number of links to an object to find out how many copies of that object are out there in the wild. Then, he can use the metadata about the object itself to search for other information that would normally be too difficult to find if he had to search across all the systems, files, databases and other applications located across the organization, not to mention any remote locations.

-DD

Care of Flash Memory Devices

Kingston has a very good guide on "Caring for Your Flash Memory." One tip that is not mentioned, but that I discovered on my own: If your computer offers to correct possible file corruption on your drive, do a backup of your data before running any "repair" utility. I discovered that after I ran the Windows utility, the drive was unusable.

-DD