HomeMade Monitor Wall Mount

A week ago I decided to upgrade to a new 23″ flat panel monitor (since I spend about 80% of my waking hours at the computer).  I was thinking about buying a wall mount, but I discovered two problems:

• Most didn’t extend from the wall as far as I needed (about 18 inches)
• The prices for the ones that extended only about 13″ were $60 +

Here is my setup before I started:

Well, once again my overwhelming impatience and desire to do-it-yourself won over.  I did some internet searching and was surprised there weren’t a lot of homemade monitor wall mounts out there on the net (at least few I could find).   I did stumble upon this one, but I didn’t need fancy articulating arms, etc.  Well, while I was laying in bed about to go to sleep I came up with a few ideas (as often happens).

My first idea was to have a two 3″ pieces of 1/2 inch pipe, one for the wall and one mounted to the back of the monitor.  Then I’d bend a 2 ft. piece of rebar into a z shape which would fit into the pieces of pipe.  At the last minute I opted for just going with a bent piece of pipe by itself which would fit into brackets.   Here are the supplies I used:

• 2″ – piece of 1/2 inch electrical conduit
• 4 – 1/2 inch brackets
• 4 – M4 .70 pitch metric screws (about 1.25 inches long)
• 8 washers
• 8 wood screws
• 1/2 pieces of scrap wood

The first thing I needed to do was to find a way to attach the brackets to the monitor.   I created a diagram based on the 100 mm square holes for the VESA mounts.  To the right is the image I created.  I simply printed the sheet at 5″ x 5″ exactly (including the 1″ white border) and taped it to my board.

From there I pre-punched the holes with an awl and drilled all 4 holes with a 3/16 bit.  (I also countersunk the holes on both sides)

This provided a perfect backing for the VESA mount on the back of the monitor where the M4 screws would fit.

The metal Arm:
This was one of the more complex parts of the project.  Fortunately I had a 1/2 ” bender on hand, but I discovered that the bend radius was so long that I was using up much of my pipe.  I ended up doing a mix of using the bender and the vice to get the angles I needed (You’ll see in the pics below).

Working with the metal arm to get it just how I wanted was a bit of work.  Make sure you get 100% level bends or you’ll end up with my problem… when the monitor is rotated it is a bit off center and not level.

Next, the brackets:

The 1/2 inch brackets are meant to hold the conduit very snugly, but I needed at least a tiny bit of play so I could insert & remove the whole thing.   I was able to solve this problem by bending out the brackets ever so slightly and then putting a 1/16″ washer between the bracket and the wood.

I attached one bracket to the wood that would go on the back of the monitor and inserted my metal arm and then attached the other bracket and made sure it had just the right amount of play.

Next I found a stud in my wall (what a pain that turned out to be) and used 3″ screws to mount the other board.   I propped up my monitor to a height I wanted and then put the metal arm in place and fastened the other two 1/2″ brackets with screws and washers just as before.

It took a few adjustments to get my pan and tilt just right, but I’m pretty happy with the results:

(click for larger version)

Here is the monitor swung completely out of the way… I’ve never had so much desk space!! 

It isn’t pretty (as most of my “get it done and make sure it works projects end up) but it works really well!

I’ll keep testing it and make notes of future adjustments I’d like to make including painting everything black.

I’m sure you guys know about that “middle button” that is hiding underneath your scroll wheel on your mouse, right?  Usually it is set to some useless feature like “auto scroll”…  I mean, come on… who uses auto scroll anyway?   Well, the very first time I discovered that button (and how useless it truly was) I opted to change the default behavior.  Instantly I fell in love with the “minimize all” command and mapped that to my middle mouse button.   Just like many of you reading this, I’m a desktop icon junkie.  I drop anything and everything onto my XP desktop (downloads, new images, stuff I’m working on, etc.) to the point it looks like this:

Well, I’m also one of those guys that has about 15 windows open at any given time… browsers, spreadsheets, Dreamweaver, Outlook, Explorer, etc.   I find that I often need to quickly get access to my desktop to edit, move, or upload a file.    Hitting the minimize button on each window isn’t an option, and the “Windows Key + D” command just isn’t comfortable to me.   So, having the ability to hit a single button where my finger is already hanging out is just super convenient!

Up until a year ago my software allowed me to easily set this middle button, via a pull down option, to one of many things.  Minimize All was there and so mapping that function to the button was just super simple… well, that changed and so this is why I’m writing this post!

A while ago I got a new wireless keyboard mouse combo (a Logitech Cordless Desktop LX500).  I was super happy with it… but wait, what’s this:

NO OPTION FOR MINIMIZE ALL?    Oh my gosh you’ve got to be kidding me!  

Well, I wasn’t going to trash my keyboard for the lack of minimize all, so I resigned myself to simply using the “Minimize” option which just minimizes one at a time.

I can hear you geeky types now, “Just assign the keyboard command “WindowsKey + D” as a “Keystroke Assignment”!  Yeah, well, I tried that about 20 times and the software doesn’t recognize the WindowsKey!

Well, today my combo went looking on the net for an upgrade to the software during a periodic update check and found one.   I downloaded and installed with my fingers crossed hoping for an answer to my prayers… but alas, I was left with the same boring options as before.   But this time, there was a difference… I was determined to find an answer, so here’s what I did:

First Step:
Find or create the application that minimizes all called “Show Desktop” (instructions on how to create a minimize all shortcut here).

Second Step:
My keyboard allows me to map to a program of file, but of course my mouse does not.   I read the instructions on how to create a keyboard shortcut (bottom of page) to a program.

Third Step:
After some trial and error I realized I had to create a regular desktop shortcut to the “Show Desktop” application (copy it and paste as shortcut) to my desktop.  I then clicked “properties” on this shortcut and assigned ctrl+alt+9 to that shortcut.

Final Step:
Finally, into the Logitech software I went and assigned my Middle Button to the new key command, which triggers a shortcut, that triggers the “Show Desktop” command that actually minimizes all the windows…. PHEW!

If you know of a better way to do this (other then “Hey stupid, get a different keyboard”) then please let me know.  

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 I host and manage about 50 different websites.   The vast majority are static sites for friends and family that don’t require any backup processes above the daily backup provided by my webhost.   In the 8 years that I’ve been running websites I’ve been with about 12 hosting companies and even though my current server has had amazing uptime and backup availability I don’t like to have all my golden eggs in one basket.   This is especially true with the 5-8 sites that I manage that have very dynamic content populated into MySQL Databases including forums, blogs, etc.

I needed a process that would help me sleep peacefully at night.  As mentioned twice before on this site I’m pretty diligent about computer backups.  In my opinion it is exponentially important to backup the constantly changing information on my sites.  Just a single day’s loss of data could be a huge problem.  For example, on one of my sites, http://www.backyardchickens.com/ there are about 20 new members signing up per day and members are posting about 1,200 new posts per day.  Imagine loosing a week or a month’s worth of members and posts!!!

My Database Backup Process & Software:

1. After trying a few different MySQL backup scripts I found a gem hidden within a blog.  Ameir’s MySQL Backup to FTP and Email script works flawlessly and does everything I need.
2. I have the script setup to run every morning around 3:00 AM EST to do a full backup of about 7 MySQL Databases.
3. The last 3 days worth of backups are kept on one of my secure folders on the server.
4. Each day’s backup is also sent to a completely different web host and server in a different state.
5. Each day I synchronize (using SyncBackSE) my desktop computer with this second web host server and download each day’s backup files.
6. Every month I burn all the backups to a DVD and put them into a fire safe.

 If you’ve been counting that is 3-5 copies of my databases that are backed up in different locations throughout the US.  If you count the daily backups my hosting company provides that bumps the number up to about 7 copies of each day’s DB backups!

Database Backup – Only Half The Battle: 

Well, the process above sounds very impressive, but about a year ago I made an almost fatal mistake.  Learn from my experience and know that your backups are only as reliable as the last time you attempted to restore one of the backups.  

Prior to using Ameir’s MySQL Backup to FTP and Email script I was using an application that had been working fine for me for the previous 2 years.  I hadn’t needed a DB restore for about 10 months when I had someone come in and hack one of my forums.   I attempted to restore my most recent DB backup file and got errors.   I tried to restore one that was 2 days old… same errors.   After trying 2 more backup files I gave up and called my server admin to have them restore their backup… phew!   After this fire drill I discovered that my backup script has stopped working about 4 months prior!!!   I don’t know if it was a change in my hosting environment, the size of the DB’s or some other odd problem, but that’s when I abandoned that application for something new.   Since then I’ve been using Ameir’s script without fail.   BUT, the moral of this story:

1. Backup soon and backup often
2. Frequently try to restore your DB backups to ensure all your hard work and preparation is paying off.

UPDATE 7/27/08:  The other day a member of my community deleted a bunch of their content and said they would try to re-submit it.  They said it would take them a while to get all the pics and text back up.   I said, “Don’t worry about it.” 

In about 15 minutes I had restored a backup from 2 days earlier into a copy of my community system, exported the data the member had deleted, and then imported it into the production site.  Thanks goodness for daily backups!

UPDATE 8/23/08: Regarding backups: For the “static” content of my sites I will occasionally (read very rarely) do a “Full Backup” from within each cPanel hosting account (at least for the top 10 accounts). For the most part I rely on my hosting company for the more frequent backups of my static content…. so a I had a question to ensure I’d sleep a little bit more soundly at night:

What is the most simple way to do occasional (i.e., quarterly) do full backups of all my sites? I’ve read people mentioning using the backup systems in WHM and some talk about using rsync, etc.  These sound good for frequent backups, but I feel I only need to do this relatively infrequently (again, I rely on my daily database backups and the backups my hosting company performs).

After some discussion with one of the NOC engineers, here is what worked REALLY simply for me (using cPanel):

1)  I have a secondary hosting plan at another hosting company (i.e., good backups = all eggs NOT= one basket).

2)  I logged into root cPanel / WHM and edited the backup settings under “Configure Backup”.  I selected all the options to only backup accounts and their respective databases. 

3)  I loaded the FTP info for the other host

4)  I then manually selected my most important accounts to be backed up

5)  I logged into ssh as root and ran the command:  /scripts/cpbackup

6)  For the system to completely tar, backup, and FTP 26 accounts and a total of 3.1 gb of compressed data took about 1 hour in the background.   I didn’t see any obvious changes to server load (I did this at about 10:00 pm PST).

7)  I downloaded all the files to my desktop via my DSL line:  Transferred 26 files totaling 3,146,615 KB in 6 hours 30 minutes 55 seconds (134.2 KB/s).

I don’t expect to do this very often… quarterly at most.  I have a lot of faith in my hosting company and their backups but I still like to cover my bases.

UPDATE 2/2/2009
It has been over a year since I posted this thread so I thought I’d do an update, especially as my BYC forum reaches 22,222 members on 2/2.   From the time of the original post my DB for this forum alone has doubled and then doubled again!   Two of the search tables were taking up at least half of that space so I asked Ameir to write a unique version of his backup script that would backup all the tables except the search tables (which can be recreated if they are dumped).    This cut my backup sizes in half, which has made a huge difference in my ability to do frequent backups and store copies in multiple locations.  This process of daily backup stored in multiple locations really helps me sleep better at night.

I’ve mentioned that I’m pretty anal about computer backups.  I recently purchased a new computer from the Dell Outlet, a Dimension E521 with Windows Vista.  I’ve heard nothing but bad reviews for Vista and am quite happy with my XP setup so my plan was as follows: 

1. Install a 400 GB SATA drive I got from the Staples ”Black Friday” sale ($59 after rebate)
2. Partition the drive into 2 partitions, one NTFS and one FAT32 (seems easier to work with Ghost using a FAT32 drive).
3. Installed Windows XP onto the NTFS partition of the new drive.
4. Create a full Ghost Image of the brand new XP install AND another Image of the original hard drive from DELL with the Vista OS (just in case I ever want to give Vista a try).
5. Wipe Vista off the original hard drive giving me another 320 GB of storage.

Well, my plan came to a screeching halt at step 4 when my Version of Ghost (which I’ve been using since 1999) kept freezing at the intro screen.  I couldn’t figure out if it was a problem with the SATA drive or something else with the new system… bottom line:  Ghost wouldn’t work. 

What to do, what to do…  I had the choice to try a new version of Ghost or a different solution all together.   I’ve been speaking with my brother and reading some articles on the new versions of Ghost and I wasn’t too impressed.  To the Internet I went and searched for the term “alternatives to ghost” and found a GREAT resource: http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_alternatives.htm.  This is where I found the $19 program “Image For Dos” that offered a free trial.   Well, I loaded it up and it worked like a charm!  I was able to fully backup AND restore my whole hard drive partition data.

Being all about simplicity I decided to try to find a way to automate my backup process.  Here’s what I did:

1. Created a bootable CD using a modified Autoexec.bat file that would automatically run the batch file below on my FAT32 drive (c:/)
2. Used the Batch File Sample for Maintaining a Rotating Backup designed by “Image For Dos” –  This runs the backup script automatically and rotates the backups through the letters A, B, C then back to A.  I edited the script so that it will go through the whole alphabet before it overwrites A again.

So, all I have to do is pop the bootable CD into my computer, reboot, go get some ice cream and by the time I’m back there is a shinny new backup image file waiting for me.

In my original backup procedures article I mentioned that I try to do monthly Images of my hard drive and then use an application to do automated weekly backups of all my important documents and email.   I’ve moved from using “backer” as my synchronizing application to a really great application called SyncBackSE.  I use SyncBackSE to automatically do the following:

Backup all my important files and email to another hard drive / partition

1. Synchronize all the images (and we have a lot) between my computer and my wife’s computer.  This allows both of us to edit the pictures and provides a backup of all our important stuff in case one PC / hard drive fails.
2. Download the daily database files from my websites to my local computer
3. Upload about five VERY important documents (financial info, passwords, etc.) to a secure server that I can access from any PC.
4. Synchronize all my files, pictures, backups to an external hard drive.  This is great because only edited files are changed or added.

Well, I’m pretty happy about how simple and clean my new backup process is.  If you have any comments or suggestions on the applications or the process I’m using please comment below.

I’ve been struggling with this question for about… let’s see… 4 years! Do I convert my hobby site www.nifty-stuff.com over to a CMS platform?

Here’s how it plays out about every 6 months:

1) I get tired of creating pages in Dreamweaver and then shooting everything over to the server.
2) I start researching CMS’s (back in the day when I first did this the big ones were Xoops and PhpNuke)
3) I find and install one I think I like
4) I decide it is more hassle than it’s worth (keeping it updated, hacker safe, etc.)

Well, over the past year I’ve been becoming more and more drawn to wards CMS’s for different reasons than pure functionality / tools for me, the publisher. Most of the new reasons have to do with 3 relatively new points of consideration:

1) Blog based systems (see WordPress): SE’s LOVE blogs
2) RSS: It would be great to have readers subscribe to new posts on my site. The old school way of doing this was using a newsletter to tell people there are new articles… what a pain.
3) Comments: I’d love to enable my visitors to add comments to the stuff posted.

Found myself asking the following:

“Do I finally take the big plunge and go all out CMS? Convert all my pages and copy all the data into individual blog posts?

If yes, then which system do I use? Here are my two main contenders: Drupal & WordPress (I know, WP is not a traditional CMS, but you get the point).

For the most part I’m 85% converted to using WordPress. It’s clean, user friendly, has a great community with tons of plugins, SE’s love it, etc. My main problem. I just don’t like the chronologically sorted post structure of Blogs. I’m just not totally sold that a blog format matches my hobby site. This could just be legacy thinking.”

Well, after a few months of going back and forth I decided the pros outweigh the cons.  I paid someone to help me move every page, one at a time into WordPress.  There are still quite a few bugs and kinks to work out, but my main questions / issues were resolved. 

The biggest issue: keeping existing PageRank and back links to the pages without having to create 100 redirects.  WordPress allowed me to use “Custom Permalinks” to have all my posts look like php pages.  Naming the post the same as the file name resulted in a perfect (90% of the time) match up between the old file url and the new blog post url.

Background: We’ve had the Series 2 Tivo made by Toshiba, the SDH-400 (the one with free basic service) for the past year. We’ve been very happy with it. Tivo has converted us to the world of DVR and we realize now we’ll never go back to non-recorded TV. The only problems were: (1) We needed a second DVR unit for my parents and (2) We didn’t want to shell out the extra $13 a month for the rest of the features like “Season Pass” or “Wishlist”.

We opted to upgrade our 2 Dish Network receivers for a dual tuner DVR receiver, the 625 model. We were already paying an extra $5 a month for the second receiver, so upgrading to the 625 meant simply adding an extra $5 a month for what turned out to be two DVR units with full functionality (not the watered down “Basic” service we were getting with our Tivo).

A few instant things we’ve noticed over our first week:

Pros to Dish Network’s DVR over the Tivo:

• Overall, cheaper for more features.

• Better / seamless integration since the receiver and DVR are made to go together.

• Better quality recordings (we were getting about 80 hours of low quality on the Tivo and about 100 hours of good quality on our Dish Network DVR).

Cons to Dish Network’s DVR compared to Tivo:
(Disclaimer: A lot of these are nit picky items that we probably just need to adapt to)

• It seems to take way more button presses to get the same tasks done.

• After watching / deleting a recorded show on Dish you are brought back to the top of the list of recorded shows. With Tivo you were put back in the same position on the list as you were before.
• When you leave a recorded show for live TV and then go back to the recorded show it doesn’t seem to remember your position (where you left off) and you have to FF to find your spot.
• Speaking of FF, one of Tivo’s coolest functions we miss the most is this: During FF when you hit play it automatically skips back about 5 seconds since 99.99% of the population (and technology) won’t react fast enough once you reach the spot you want.
• Tivo was always recording 30 mins worth of any show no matter what (until you changed the channel). So far it seems that no matter what we do, when we are watching something live on Dish, then go to recorded shows, and then go back to “live tv” there isn’t any history of the live show that was playing during the time we were watching recorded shows. With Tivo we could go back to live TV and watch the last 30 mins of whatever channel was on.
• We haven’t found a way to search for a show (and all episodes) without going through the process of setting up a recording.
• When pushing record on an item in the guide the default is to record all instead of just the single occurrence.

As I mentioned, it has only been a week, so we’re still learning all the ins and outs. I’m especially interested in learning all the secrets and shortcuts (tips and tricks) of using this unit.

Update 10/4/07: I received the following email that I really enjoyed and wante to share:

“I just read your article and I can’t tell you how much I agree, at least with the cons. My wife and I have had TiVo for 2 years and just recently switched to Dish network and the DVR. After 3 months, we can’t stand it. We are considering paying the early contract cancellation fee to get rid of Dish Network and go back to DirecTV and TiVo.

As for your Pros, here is our opinion.

We think the recordings are of less quality than the TiVo, at least it seems that way. I don’t remember a quality issue with TiVo.

The extra 20 hours hasn’t made a difference because we never used all of the 80 hours.

As for more features, I don’t really care for any of the additional features, as they simply clutter the interface and make it more difficult to use.

I develop software for a living and am often tasked with designing user interfaces. I can tell you from years of experience that the user interface for the Dish Network DVR is horrible. I would never let an application out the door with that confusing of an interface. The TiVo interface was much more ‘user friendly’.

To sum up, we will be switching back to TiVo as soon as our Dish Network contract expired and perhaps even sooner.

Feel free to post this to your web site if you like”

Web Hosting Thoughts

I’ve had a bit of experience with a plethora of web hosting companies over the years and thought I’d post some of my thoughts and experiences over the years.

Speaking of “a plethora of web hosting companies” here are the ones I’ve dealt with over the years (that I can remember) in order of when I had my very first family website with e-access.net:

e-access.net – had our family website here for about 3 years starting around 1998. Their site hasn’t changed since.
tripod.com
geocities.com
hostonce.com – BAD COMPANY. Lots of downtime, terrible support.
freeservers.com
netfirms.com
cfm-resources.com – a bit of downtime
ehostingbiz.com – pretty good product and support
worldwebhosters.com – bad support and product
host4students.com – very short stay
prowebspace.com – started off really well, but couldn’t handle growth and had lots of unexplained downtime and data loss
dathorn.com – Very happy with them, but outgrew their services after a bit over a year

I’ve now moved to a server that provides me with way more resources, features, and access than I’ve ever had before!

Update – 1/11/09:

Boy, I haven’t touched this page in a while!   I’ve been at my current datacenter for almost 5 years and couldn’t be happier.   I’m paying a premium for top of the line hardware, management, and trunk internet connections, but it is worth it to have the security and scalability, especially as BYC grows.

One thing that has been frustrating over the years, especially since taking on BYC, is dealing with some people that don’t have server management experience that say, “Why not use one of those unlimited hosting plans for $5.00 a month!?”    It is really hard to convey to some people that these cheap plans are usually provided by companies that are overselling their servers. 

I learned the hard way that these cheap plans (50 GB disk space and 500 GB transfer) are perfect for a family, hobby, small business site, but try loading a CPU / Memory intensive database driven website and you’ll quickly get a SUSPENDED notice from the host and wake up to 300 emails from clients and site visitors (I know from experience).   You, like me, will say, “But I didn’t go over my disk space or bandwidth!!!???”.   The host will either not answer you or will say that you need to get a dedicated server (I’ve received that email a few times too).

There is a light at the end of this tunnel!  Every once in a while I run across members of my communities with server management and/or large website hosting experience and find that they totally get it.  They empathise with me and know that as the site’s usage grows linearly that the complexity of running the services and keeping them up, along with other challenges grow exponentially.

Can you believe that approximately 85% of all email is SPAM? Well, if you’ve come to this page, then you probably already know that.

There are a ton of ways to reduce / eliminate spam, but this is what has worked best for me and is something that is pretty easy to do.

Process

Setup Two Email Accounts:
The first thing you want to do is setup two email accounts, a “Personal” address, and a “Disposable” address. Here is what you use them for:

• PERSONAL: This is the email address you give to family and friends ONLY! You never signup for anything using this email, and never post this address on any forums or websites.
• DISPOSABLE: Of course you also want to sign up for things like rebates, forums, notifications, accounts, etc. etc. etc. The problem is, you never know which of these will let your email address “slip” or just plain out sell your information.

Hopefully, if you are careful, you’ll never get SPAM into your Personal account and you can keep it forever without worry. But, your Disposable account is completely different… it isn’t a question of IF, but WHEN you will start getting SPAM into this email account.

Here’s what I did. About two years ago I started this process. I had my personal account, rob@domain.com, and my disposable account, rtl@domain.com. I used the disposable account for all my signups, registrations, etc. Sure enough, after about 8 months the account was getting close to the 80% SPAM mark. It was time to go to action, so here is what I did:

1.  
   1. First I deleted all SPAM email from Outlook Express (my mail client).
   2. Next I did a search in Outlook Express for all email sent to the disposable account rtl@domain.com (this showed me all the Non-SPAM email that was sent to this account.
   3. Setup a new disposable account, rtl2@domain.com
   4. Visited the institutions (ones I was still interested in receiving email from) and changed my contact email to rtl2@domain.com
   5. Left the first account (rtl@domain.com) open for about a month to make sure I was no longer getting any important emails to that account.
   6. Deleted the first disposable account.
   7. Enjoyed my new SPAM-FREE email accounts!
   8. Repeat process when SPAM overwhelms your inbox

NOTE1:
I’d suggest staying away from “free” email accounts. I can’t prove this, but I suspect that many of them actually contribute to your SPAM (they need to make money somewhere). If you are interested in your own domain name and hosting / email accounts, I can get you a 50% discount on any package at this host (where I host my sites) click here.

NOTE2:
When you first start out you may not be getting any SPAM at all, so instead of setting up a whole separate disposable account, simply setup an email forwarder. Your email will forward from your disposable address to your personal address. When you start to get a bunch of SPAM into your disposable address then I’d suggest deleting the forwarder and creating an actual account.

NOTE3:
Unfortunately I have some email accounts that I just can’t delete. Since I’m stuck with these accounts I needed a program for filtering out my email. I tried a few different approaches and then I read in a forum that someone was getting 95% efficiency in a SPAM filter. This is how I discovered Popfile, the best SPAM filter I’ve ever used. Below is a screenshot of my spam statistics. Most important, note that I’m still getting 87% SPAM but the filter is 99.55% accurate!

When it comes to backup I’m pretty anal. I’m not one of those people who learned the “hard way” how important it is to backup data and systems, but learned through others’ mistakes and frustrations.

I’m by no means an expert at this, but I’ve found a system that has worked PERFECTLY for me, and has saved my behind on numerous occasions. Not only has this system saved me from losing data, but has also saved me literally weeks of time, and months of frustration associated with the re-install of applications and settings.

The programs I use for this system are:

Norton Ghost: For complete system backups.
Backer: For backing up / synchronizing specific files & folders.

PROCESS SUMMARY:

Weekly: Run Backer (or similar program) to backup most commonly used / edited files.
Backer File Storage: Most recent on second hard drive, next on CD in my briefcase, older CD gets moved to fire safe.

Monthly: Run Norton Ghost (or similar program) to backup the COMPLETE system.
Ghost File Storage: Most recent on second hard drive, next on CD into the fire safe, older CDs to offsite location.

DETAILS BELOW

TOTAL BACKUP (Monthly):
Using Norton Ghost I create a complete system (OS, Programs, Data, Settings) backup. These backups will be used if I encounter: a virus, malicious attacks, physical catastrophe (flood, fire, earthquake, etc.), a bad application, or anything else that causes a negative change in my system that would require a total re-install of the OS, applications, and program settings. I’ve also found that even if there is a fix to some of these problems it is often more effective to simply restore a previous version of my system then to spend hours monkeying around with the problem.

Example: Every month I run Norton Ghost to create an “image” of my complete system. I increment the file names (RL_A.gho and then RL_B.gho, etc.) and save the file to another hard drive. Approximately every 3 months I burn my most recent “image” to CD and put these in a secure “off site” location. I’m compressing the images using the highest compression “z9″ and get my 5 GB drive down to 2.7 GB. Each incremented image is documented with information about the system, below is an example of the text file that accompanies my Ghost images (using FileNote).

Contents of RL_E.txt
Ghost file on: 6/6/04
From Last Ghost: RL_D
Original Disk/Data Size: 5.13GB
Total space used for Ghost: 2.7Gb
# of ghost files at split of 699MB each: 5 Notes:
System running fine
Ghosted prior to Pinnacle Studio 9 installation.
Programs Removed:
MS Plus
Encarta
Moved PageFile to drive g:/

PARTIAL BACKUP (weekly):
This more frequent backup is of data that changes often, for example, mail, My Documents, etc. If the system blows up a week before my next “total backup” then I can still use this weekly data and apply it to last month’s “total backup” and only have lost a week of data. I use Backer (which is VERY customizable) to synchronize my data to a second hard drive. I configure Backer and select the folders and/or files I want to synchronize and the “destination” for the files. I have a drive that is devoted to backups and the files are all put in a folder called “Backer”. This drive also has all of my monthly Ghost images.

Example: Every week I click Backer on my desktop. First the program looks to see what files & folders have changed on the “source” since the last backup and then copies ONLY the newly changed files over to the “destination” & then removes “orphaned” files from the backer folder. After the program is done backing up all of my files to the other drive I burn a copy of the backer folder to a CD. I put the new CD in my bag (which I take with me everywhere and allows me quick access to recent files whenever I need them) and take the old CD and put it in a fire safe.

RECENT EXPERIENCE:
In May I was reading an article on CNN.com. The browser was the only thing running with no other applications or windows. While reading I noticed a bunch of odd flashing boxes down in my toolbar that looked like windows opening and closing. Next thing I knew I was getting popups that said things like, “…. bla bla bla program was just installed, click okay” and “could not install bla bla bla”. I quickly turned off my system and removed the network cable from my PC (so I wouldn’t cause any problems to other computers on my home network). I turned my PC back on to investigate and found that Norton Anti Virus was disabled and uninstalled, and that a bunch of new programs were installed on my PC.

I attempted to re-install Norton AV, but after many attempts, I couldn’t get the application to reinstall. After about 30 mins of monkeying around I decided to go with plan B… restore a Ghost image. Here are the steps I took to get me back to a great working system without any problems.

1. First I ran Backer to put my most recent files on my backup drive.
2. Ghosted the “broken” system so I could recover any files that I may have missed using Backer.
3. Found the most recent Ghost image on my computer and re-installed it.
4. Used Backer (in reverse) to bring back all the files from my backup drive to the newly “Ghosted” computer.
5. Updated Windows, Norton AV, and haven’t had a problem since.

Total process time, about an hour. It would have only been about 20 mins. if I left out step #2.

Looking back, even if I could have fixed many of the problems caused by this attack / virus (which I doubt I could have done), I don’t think I could have corrected all the problems / changes to the registry and other files & programs. Thank goodness for Norton Ghost!

MORAL OF THIS STORY:
This type of situation has happened to me quite a few times before. Most of those times were due to an application I installed or uninstalled that caused my system to go all wonky. Without my backup system here is what I would have had to do multiple times:

1. Backup all my files (hoping that I still have access to them).
2. Format the hard drive
3. Reinstall Windows
4. Reinstall Office
5. Reinstall misc. applications
6. Setup Outlook
7. Setup all other application
8. Remember and change about a million personal config. settings.
9. Restore all my files (hoping that I still have access to them).

Total process time, about a whole day for 1-7 and many weeks / months for 8-9!

Notes:
I don’t always burn my Ghosted images to a CD for two reasons: 1) because it is time consuming with 5 cds, 2) because I’ve never had a hard drive fail, and if / when one does I’ll only be out a max of a few months of programs & settings, but my most often changed files will be handled on my weekly backups

Update 12/28/07: I no longer use Backer or Norton Ghost as my sync applications.  See my new computer backup system article for the new process: New Computer Backup And Restore: Ghost & Image For DOS