The Help Desk Podcast show

The Help Desk Podcast

Summary: Technology podcast aimed at helping those who may be experiencing issues with their technology. You can be an enterprise Field Tech, a member of a school district IT Department, small business person working at home or just a computer user having trouble with your wifi. Gary will answer your questions involving software, servers, networks, backing up and restoring data, online security, network security, laptops, workstations and tablets. This podcast is opened to you the listener and we hope that you will participate. You can leave a voicemail at (313) 444-3154.

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  • Artist: Gary Hunt
  • Copyright: Copyright © 2013-2015 Gary Hunt The Help Desk Podcast

Podcasts:

 Happy New Year – XP – THDP4 | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: Unknown

This is a much shorter podcast than I had planned but I wanted to break this off into it's own episode and then over this next weekend get our next regular episode out.  Pardon my indulgence here but sometimes you "just gotta" give out props when they are so earned. The Help Desk Podcast – Podcast - #4 – “Happy New Year - XP”  The blog for this podcast is located at:  http://thehelpdeskpodcast.com/thdp4-blog I talk about what I have to give thanks for this year.  I especially talk about Scott Beuhler who really impressed me as a good person last November. Scott is a pure online marketer with a blog called the “Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Google Plus”.  I subscribed to his WebHostingChoose.com. Scott’s Google+ page is here. Tomorrow, January 3, 2013 Scott is launching his new project: Plus Mastermind.  Here is the website:  Google Plus Mastermind Course Launch. The second part of our podcast talks about the impending death of Windows XP. The second blog for this podcast is located at:  http://thehelpdeskpodcast.com/thdy4-blogxp   Show notes are located at http://thehelpdeskpodcast.com/thdp4 Show Links: Shane McGlaun’s blog in Daily Tech, on August 8, 2013 Gregg Keizer of ComputerWorld in his article “XP Migration easy pickings over, say experts.” http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-57579541/the-end-is-near-for-windows-xp/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-57599073/windows-xp-zero-day-threats-every-day-forever/?tag=nl.e664&s_cid=e664&ttag=e664&ftag=TRE000da0d http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238049/Windows_XP_decline_stalls_as_users_hold_onto_aged_OS_flout_2014_deadline

 There’s a New Outlaw in Town, Cryptolocker – THDP3 | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: Unknown

     I think today’s podcast is the most important one we have recorded.  I didn’t realize until last week that there are many people out there that don’t have the slightest notion of the dangers facing them on the Internet.  These dangers are just ...

 How Will You Backup Your Data – THDP2 | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: Unknown

…let me set the stage Now that we have an idea why we don’t back up our data, and (hopefully) we have decided to do that, how will we do it?  What will we use? The Oxford Dictionary defines the word backup as this:  help or support, a person or thing that can be called on if necessary; a reserve; an extra copy of data from a computer.  …so You Need a Backup Plan You need to put some thought into this.  Backups don’t just occur.  You will acknowledge the need for security, for a backup plan, for actually backing up your data……but at the end of the day……I know you won’t do it. The way I see it you must deeply feel the need to save your data.  We are human so I guess you won’t really backup your data until you lose it.  Unfortunately, we learn by experience. I saw a tip online that I run into all the time, nobody ever saves their software installation disks.  If you experience failure these are going to make your recovery much easier. You should back up your data as often as you can.  I always tell clients to back it up as often as they feel comfortable with.  The bad thing about that is that if I don’t give you a set frequency to backup, then you probably won’t.  If you are a business, you may need to backup daily.  Or maybe you are okay with a weekly backup.  Make it automatic and out of your control so it will get done. You need to store all of your data in one secure place on your hard drive.  Windows assumes that will be My Documents.  Desktop is not a storage facility!!  I can’t tell you how many times I see tens of files stored on the Desktop.  In case of hard drive failure, Windows will take steps to save your data.  It will assume you store your stuff in a secure place (like My Documents) and it will try to save it.  Anything on your Desktop is gone…immediately. What if?  Store your data in a secure location.  I always suggest your Mother-in-Laws or cloud storage like Google Drive, SkyDrive, Amazon’s Cloud (AWS), Mozy, Box, and on and on and on… This is very important to businesses….test your backup and recovery solution.  All the best laid plans are useless if your recovery gives you gibberish. This subject within a subject could be an entire podcast.  I know Consultants that do nothing but help businesses come up with a backup and recovery strategy.  Its that important.  A good place to start to research this is here: http://www.techsoup.org/support/articles-and-how-tos/your-organizations-backup-strategy. What do you need to backup? If you are a business you know what data you should be backing up.  Heck, sometimes you have compliance issues requiring you to backup certain data and to back it up a certain way. What you back up will dictate how you back it up.   You back up files and folders, everyday documents, recent documents, application data (applications create and maintain data like contacts, calendars, emails, and these must be backed up daily), Media (photos, music, videos) these are larger files and they may require their own backup strategy, heirlooms, and your system.  Oh yeah, and there is something else too….Windows Operating Systems eventually wear out, slow down and generally become unusable.  Having a recovery disc or a replacement image can be a life saver. A Shoutout First of all, I would like to shout out to Leo LaPorte and his The Tech Guy podcast, episode 1022 because during this episode he had a caller ask about backing up his hard drive.  The caller described how he copied data to his backup drive and then deleted the original.  Justifiably so, that sort of set Leo off. I’ve got to ask here:  Why would you do that?  You have your original data files, you now copy that onto your backup drive…don’t stop now, you are still one step away from safety.  You still need the third backup copy.  Folks, if you have your data and you copy it to the backup drive, and if you then delete the original, where is the advantage??   Where is the backup??

 You’ve Lost Your Data – THDP1 | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: Unknown

...let me set the stage. It’s fall and school has begun.  There are three types of people:   one type doesn’t worry about data backup and recovery. The second are practitioners to a degree.  They have made one backup and feel they are well protected.  The third follows Best Practices and maintains three versions of their backed up data.  We will talk about the “why” in why some won’t backup their data.  We will also talk about external harddrives, and flashdrives and the cloud. With the beginning of the new school year you can look forward to a lot of chaos and mayhem.  Why should this year be any different?  Oh, but it is different in one way…..I am getting an ungodly amount of calls from teachers that have lost their data.  Not just the normal thing like, “I didn’t back it up and when you reimaged over the summer you erased my entire career”.  Nope, none of that.  It’s more like “I backed up my data like you guys told me but I seem to have lost it.” …so I’m not even going to cover the first obvious problem with that last statement:  “I backed up my data like you guys told me but I seem to have lost it.”  You lost your backup?  All three copies?  Anyway, that will wait until next week. This week, let’s ask this question.  Why don’t we back up our precious data?  We all know that we need to.  There must be some unconscious reason for this behavior.  I call it the “It Could Never Happen to Me Syndrome”.  So I googled that phrase and what do I find?  That I am not far from the truth. Normalcy Bias I found an article at www.wnd.com.   The WND stands for World Net Daily and the article is written by Patrice Lewis dated April 4, 2013.  Ms. Lewis refers to something called “Normalcy Bias”.  I never heard of that so I looked it up in Wikipedia.  There it is defined as a mental state that “causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects.” It’s sometimes called the “It Can’t Happen Here Syndrome”. The assumption is that since a particular disaster has never occurred before, it never will. Any disturbing indications that something bad may happen are dismissed or trivialized.  So now that we have established a possible reason for our behavior let’s get personal. For more info on Normalcy Bias you can go to the article: http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/the-it-cant-happen-here-syndrome/ So Many Ways to Lose Your Data Let’s get to the point here.  No matter what you do, no matter how careful you are, equipment fails.  You have 10 years of pictures, family reunion videos, or work data….how can you not protect it? Trouble is there are many ways to lose your data: You could oops.  Have you ever accidently erased data previously saved?  Oops. Your equipment could just crash.  How many times have I sat down in front of a computer and see the error message:  “You must first format this drive before you use it.” Don’t forget all the dangers you face by opening up to the Internet.  A trojan in your email, some sort of virus or worm attached to an executable file (.exe) in your email, a phishing expedition, or how about a hacker? It’s So Easy to Backup These Days Hard drives (external or otherwise) have never been cheaper….and they almost always come with backup/restore software attached to them (the external hard drives anyway).  Not long ago a friend called me to inform me that Sam’s Club had a 1 TB (terabyte) external hard drive on sale for around $59 and a 500 GB drive for $49.  I hung up on him and my wife and I went shopping.  At that time I did some online shopping and discovered that MicroCenter was selling a 1 TB drive for $70, Best Buy 500GB for $49.99, Walmart sells a Toshiba 1TB for $69 and/or 32GB Flash drive for just $15.99 or a Centon 16Gb for only $10.29. What Should You Do? / Best Practices First of all let’s get this straight.  It’s never enough to back up just once.  One backup is not a backup.

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