Digital Power Pro Blog

I have found such a cool and useful feature today that I was unaware of and thought I should share for anyone with a similar situation. We run a computer 24/7 that hosts all our important pictures, database files, Quickbooks file, videos, excel files, word docs, etc. A file server. This of course holds lots of important, irreplaceable files that we rely on and family pictures and videos that are important for our business and personally important as well. We can access these files by laptop or from any of our computers on our network. This computer has no monitor, keyboard, or mouse, we access it via remote desktop another super useful tool (more on that later). So it goes without saying that we need a good easy way to backup the system.  We use a external hard drive that could be grabbed quickly in an emergency, and is easy to access. We have always used a free backup utility called Version Backup. It works nice and keeps an incremental backup, and several version of files that you may use often so that you can go back to a certain date if needed. The only problem is that it would not backup files that are in use, like our quickbooks file, or something if someone left their computer on overnight and still connected to the database. The backup program will just error and not copy the file.  I recently bought a 1.5 TB hard drive and decided to also try and find better backup software. I heard of a program called Cobian Backup 9, so I gave ut a try. There is an option that you can enable on Windows XP and above called Shadow Volume copy. This allows you to backup files that are in use without erroring out, using the operating system backplane. Such a useful and cool feature. I had to share it. So now we are running both Version backup and Cobian, but soon I will stop using Version backup and go with the Cobian software only.

Next I need to figure out what to do for an online backup of just files that I need to protect in case of fire, water damage, etc.

I have been testing Free video editing apps this weekend, after going through about 10 programs that all had issues of one kind or another or did not work at all on My Vista x64 laptop, just to have my OS reduced to corupt files the next morning, I was about to give up. Then I came across a really cool website called www.majorgeeks.com who test and recommend software. They listed a video editing application called AVIdemux 2.5 which did exactly what I needed it to do, handle VOB or MPEG2 files and edit them with precision. Windows Movie Maker almost did the job, except it will not recognize VOB, but even after renaming it to a .mpg file, it would not correctly/acurately cut where I would tell it to cut and splice. Now I can finally add my edited videos to Facebook for my wife.

Next  week we are going to be looking for a HD video camera that will store the video to hard drive and then connect directly to our computer to dump the video. We have been using a VHS-C camera for the last 11 years, and now I have to go through all my home movie tapes and record them to DVD with my DVD recorder. What a pain, but at least once it is all done I will have them safely on my Server which getys backed up every night.