I’ve already covered backing up your DVD and CD collections using cathy.exe. Strangely enough, I ran into a problem with my own advice. Sure, I’d made backups using cathy.exe then I switched computers. I’d already backed up my backups, meaning that I’d put my cathy folder on a DVD. The question now was, where is that DVD?

Here’s a tip that will save you all kinds of grief. Zip up your cathy folder, that would be the one that contains the cathy.exe files and also the files that cathy creates when it catalogs your DVDs and CDs.

Once you have the cathy.zip file, or whatever you want to call it, email it to yourself. Better yet, take my advice in a previous post and use gmail drive to send the zip file up to your gmail account.

This is a very short post but, to me, a very important one. Now I can access my latest cathy.zip file on whatever computer I am using, simply by opening my email account. Thanks for reading!

In the last post, I explained how to make DVD backups of any important stuff on your computer. Once you’ve done that, you end up with one or more DVDs full of stuff. Cool! But, as we all know, a box or a folder full of stuff is just that. There is no organization to the material in the box or folder.

Here’s where Cathy comes in. Cathy, which is available here, CATHY is the answer to your needs. Ok, not for the box but for the folder or DVD. Download Cathy and unzip the file onto your desktop. It unzips into a folder so just leave the folder there, where you can get at it later.

Cathy sorts out your DVDs quickly and efficiently. Startup Cathy by double clicking on the cathy.exe file. Put your DVD or CD in your drive and wait until your computer figures out that there is something it has to do.

In Cathy’s menu there is a tab which says ‘catalog’. Click it, find the DVD drive (usually D but it might be different on your computer) then click ‘ADD’. Cathy then goes to work and makes some sense of what you have on that particular CD/DVD. All of the folders and files are itemized and sorted out with a file that Cathy saves for you. Right now is a good time to sync your CD/DVD with Cathy. Cathy will save the file that corresponds to your CD/DVD and name it EXACTLY the same as the CD/DVD title. If you’ve left it as the generic name, it will be indecipherable, just a bunch of numbers. If you have made a title for the DVD, something like Nancy’s backup DVD, then it will save it as that. Mark the DVD with that name so you can find it later on.

What I do, and this is just what I have found to be efficient, is to start with A1 or even just 1. I change the name of the Cathy file to 1 or A1, then I mark the DVD with the same name. Later on, when I search for a file and Cathy tells me it’s on DVD 1 then it’s a simple matter to find DVD 1 and put it into the DVD drive and find what I’m looking for.

I should say that Cathy simply makes an image of the CD/DVD file structure, complete with all the file names in each folder. You can’t open any of the files unless the corresponding CD/DVD is in the drive. It’s like the menu in a restaurant or the index of a book, it has a list of everything on the CD/DVD but not the folders and files themselves.

That’s it! Backup your computer often and keep track of the CD/DVDs that you create with Cathy.

Next time I will talk to you about Dropbox. Stay tuned.

Once you figure out whether you want to do a back up or not, you have to figure out where the things are that you want to back up. I save lots of things from the Internet, movies, pics, whole pages and, in some cases, whole web sites. Since I can’t be bothered to look around for everything on my computer, I save everything to my desktop. If you do that, of course, it doesn’t take long to get a very cluttered desktop.

A solution for this is to make a new folder on your desktop. Right click, new, folder then name it something you’ll remember. In my case, I call it STUFF. My Stuff folder is full of everything I save, all the flv files from youtube (that I never watch again), all of the pics I save from, ahem, educational sites, and things that other people send me on msn or QQ. Every now and then I check the size of this folder, right click then choose properties, and if the folder is up around four gigabytes, then I ‘back it up’!

Burnaware is my weapon of choice for burning CDs and DVDs. Not only is it free but it works quickly and efficiently and does just what it says it does, without screwing up everything else. As far as media goes, I use DVDs almost exclusively. There are two reasons for this, the first being that a DVD holds a helluva lot of stuff and, second, because they are cheaper to buy here in Canada than CDS. Our useless politicians in Ottawa have decided to tax CDs because everyone uses them to rob and cheat musicians, right? It’s not right but the idiots in power think this will actually help the poor starving artists around the world. Anyway, DVDs are cheap here. If I get a deal, I can buy ten DVD blanks for about $1.50. I buy hundreds at a time so I always have a stock of fresh blanks for these backups.

Burnaware burns the DVD quickly then I go through the DVD which I have just written and make sure that everything on it can be read. If you burn a lot of DVDs you will know that sometimes a burn goes bad. Sometimes a burn goes bad and you don’t even know it. For this reason I always double check that my computer can read the disk. If the things you are backing up are REALLY important, then you might want to make double copies and check the burned DVDs on another computer before you delete the original material.

I should say here, again, that a back up does two things. It can clear up space on your hard drive, and it saves important things from being lost if your hard drive crashes. I don’t really have a problem with space on my drives so, while I back up my important stuff frequently, I also like to have it around to work with, too. How do I keep track of it all? Well, remember my ‘STUFF’ folder? If I burn it to a DVD then I simply rename the folder to ‘Stuff – Already Burnt’ so I know not to burn it again. And, obviously, I don’t add anything more to that folder. I just create a new ‘stuff’ folder and start again.

Next time I will explain how to use Cathy to organize your back ups. Stay tuned!

This week I am backing up my daughter’s computer before she goes off to university. I have stressed backing up your computer data before but, now that I’m doing it for someone who should know better, I’m wondering if everyone out there knows what ‘backing up’ your computer actually means.

Depending on what you do with your computer, you probably have different backup needs. As for me and my daughter, we are both photographers and audio-visual nuts. Our computers get cluttered with photographs, movies, tv shows and music. While I tend to be very anal and backup my computers several times in a month, my daughter doesn’t seem to have the time or the inclination to do a regular backup. Hence the need for my job today. Out of a 100 gigabyte drive, she has over 47 gigabytes of movies and tv shows. The rest, according to WinDirStat, more on that later, is pictures of her and her travels and friends.

If your computer is chugging along a bit slower than it did before, and if you have lots of things on your hard drive that you would hate to lose forever, then backing up your computer is what you need to do.

The first step is to figure out what space you have on your hard drive. If you have a large hard drive and if there is lots of space on it, then you only have to back up your drive if you don’t want to lose important data. While it seems that your computer is safe and sound, hard drives fail, laptops drop and theft and fires do happen. If you have pictures of your babies, your family and things like that, and if you can’t replace them, then back up your computer now.

Step one : Click on My Computer in the Start menu, or double click it on your desktop and then right click your C: drive. This is your main hard drive, although you may have others. I will use the C: drive terminology for now. Click Open and then right click C: again and choose Properties. A little pic will show up :

As you can see in my picture, there are two distinct areas on the hard drive. The pie chart shows how much total space you have, in gigabytes, plus it shows how much space you have left on the drive. Basically, if the purple piece is small and the blue piece is huge, then you don’t have a lot of room left. Since Windows uses the purple space for it’s scratch pad, putting things there while it thinks about other, more pressing things, it’s important to have a lot of room for the Windows scratch pad.

If you think of your hard drive as your bedroom, maybe you can get an idea of what I mean. In a huge bedroom with lots of floorspace (purple area) you can toss your clothes about and not worry about them piling up too much. If you have a tiny bedroom with very little floor area (purple area) you have to take your time to put your clothes away since you simply don’t have room. Windows runs into the same problem and slows down considerably as your hard drive gets loaded with files.

That’s enough for now. Check back soon for the next few steps in a backup routine.

After many years of operation, Yahoo has decided to close their Geocities site, putting thousands of website owners out of a free and comfortable home. I’ve had a geocities site for over ten years, probably more like 13 years. Back in the day when every Internet family had a web presence of some kind, geocities was a lot of fun. Depending on your interests, you could join a community and share your thoughts about those interests with the world. Many people used the free hosting as a launching ground for limited interest sites as well as some small businesses.

Well, it’s all gone now, dammit! I was lucky enough to have one of the more popular pages on geocities, depending on your search parameters, it was continually number one on google. Those days are gone, the Internet changes daily so we have to work out other solutions, right?

My geocities site was pretty small but I had different pages that I wanted to keep, to save for posterity. It had been a long time since I updated the pages and I had forgotten my passwords to the different ones I had. What to do? Well, as always, there is a solution to problems such as these and, as usual, I was able to find a free answer to my problems.

Instead of spending a lot of time saving each and every picture and web page, I downloaded a small bit of free software to help me. A search on google led me to HTTrack, which is available here: HTTrack. I had been thinking of Sitesucker but it’s not free and I love free!

After installing it, I directed HTTrack to my geocities site and in a matter of moments, my site was saved to my laptop for archiving later on. Quick, painless and oh so free. Loved it! Now I want to try it on other sites, just to see what happens if I try to download everything on a larger site. Might be fun!