You should never feel like your hard drive is holding out on you. Anyone should be able to back up, recover files, boot multiple systems, upgrade, or otherwise improve their storage space. These tips explain the possibilities and procedures. More »
I love Time Machine for its simplicity and the fact that it’s free. Apple did the right thing in creating a backup utility that was integrated into the OS and was actually useful. Anyone who has fought with Windows Backup can tell you, this has been needed for a long time. Apple created a beautiful backup utility and then made money on hardware that seamlessly works with it. For the home user, nothing could be more simple.
In the office environment however, users tend to backup to server shares and not local external drives. So, let’s take a look at how to use Time Machine over a network.
It’s easy to do this in Leopard Xserve by sharing a backup folder. Under Server Admin, you can check the box “Enable as Time Machine backup destination.”
This worked great in Leopard but in Snow Leopard, Time Machine no longer saw this as an available destination. Luckily, changing a property for System Preferences solves this.
Enter this command in Terminal:
sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
This tells Time Machine to treat network shares as possible backup locations. Now, when I go to select a disk in the Time Machine preferences, I see my mounted AFP share listed.
So that’s how you get the Time Machine backup working, but what about restoring. Most people don’t test the restore functionality but it’s the most important thing you can do. To restore a Time Machine backup over an AFP connection, first boot off the Snow Leopard install DVD. Then, Launch Terminal by clicking on the Utilities menu. In the terminal window, type the following commands.
mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine
mount -t afp user:password@afpserver.local/ShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine
This will mount your AFP share and make it available to restore from. Quit Terminal and then run “Restore from Backup” from the Utilities menu. You will see your backup listed and you should now be able to restore from it.
Time Machine is a very nice utility and if you aren’t using it, you should be. I even have other Xserves backing themselves up to this share using Time Machine. Sure, there are third-party applications out there can do so much more, but I’m for just getting the job done. Integration with the OS is also important to me. It’s the main reasons I use Safari as my main browser. As with all backup solutions though, you need to test the restore functionality once in a while. If anything, you might sleep better at night knowing your data is not only safe but recoverable.
The great part about your computer is that—unlike you—it doesn't require any sleep. Take advantage of your PC's insomnia by automating time- and processor-intensive tasks while you're counting sheep.
Photo remixed from Remko van Dokkum and Ian Wilson.
Note: We’re all for powering down your PC to save energy overnight, but you can easily schedule your computer to shut down at specific times using several methods, so there's no harm in putting your PC to sleep an hour or two after you doze off—or an hour or two after you leave for work, or whatever times you might want to take advantage of a few extra CPU cycles while you're away from your PC.
On Tuesday we asked you what apps and maintenance tools you run while you’re sleeping. Below we’ve aggregated our favorite overnight computer uses, including some of your favorite methods of squeezing a few more overtime hours out of your computer along with ours.
Ah maintenance; it's the stuff that boring work is made of. Rather than incorporate it into your regular computing hours—and staring listlessly at your computer while your maintenance tasks complete—make computer maintenance an overnight task that your computer performs without you.
Note: All of the below suggestions, naturally, can be set to run on a schedule.
Backup your hard drive: We’ve emphasized the importance of backup time and again, and even if you’ve already got some form of backup in place, there’s still a good chance that you’re doing it wrong.
The bummer about backup: It can take a very long time, especially when you’re performing an off-site backup over the internet (which you should be doing!). We’ve detailed how to automatically backup your hard drive to an external drive and/or FTP server in the past. Backing up to a second local hard drive—like a connected USB drive—is the most important of these two, since most people don't necessarily have an off-site FTP server they can back up to.
Instead, for your off-site backup needs, we’d suggest signing up for a service like Mozy. An annual subscription to Mozy will cost around $55 a year for unlimited backups (free for up to 2GB), but let’s say worst comes to worst and your computer is robbed, lost to a fire, or your hard drives up and crash. That small cost for insurance will likely seem very much worth the money. I personally use and can vouch for Mozy, but you might want to read up on it and other options in our recent Hive Five Best Backup Tools.
Some command-line savvy readers also opt to do their backups using the venerated rsync command line tool. If you’re interested in taking the rsync route, check out our guide on how to mirror files across systems with rsync.
Make your hard drive repair itself: You can't do much to save a hard drive from dying if it's fated in the stars, but you can do your part to keep your disks healthy—specifically by regularly defragmenting and checking for and repairing any disk errors. Our oldie-but-goodie guide to the self-repairing hard drive will allow you to schedule this maintenance once or twice per week, while you’re sleeping, so you can rest easy that you’ve done all you can to keep your disks running in tip-top shape.
Keep your computer up to date: This one’s kind of a no brainer, but still very worth the reminder. Granted, some power users would prefer vetting each and every Windows update before it’s applied, but for most folks, there’s not much of a reason not to automate this process while they’re out. To schedule updates via Windows Update, just launch the Update tool from the Control Panel, click the Let me choose my settings link, and choose your preferred automated update settings.
OS X users, your Software Update tool isn’t quite as friendly about setting specific times for checking for and downloading updates, but Macworld’s Christopher Breen has some clever tips for scheduling Software Update that’ll do the trick.
Clean house: Whether you’re talking antivirus, crap cleaning, or other general PC cleanup, there’s no better time to run those scans and maintenance tools than while you’re catching some Z’s. It may depend on your antivirus application of choice, but you should have some sort of built-in scheduling option for running antivirus and spyware scans. And for the CCleaner crowd, the How-To Geek details how to set up CCleaner to run automatically every night.
Now that you’ve got your PC taking care of its most important maintenance tasks overnight, let’s look at a few other common overnight uses.
Downloads: When we asked about overnight PC use, downloading using tools like BitTorrent ranked very high among those who responded, and for obvious reasons: Downloads can take a long time, and those hours you're sleeping are hours that big downloads can be completing. But rather than keep your PC on all night long—even after it completes your download—most popular file downloaders have built-in options for shutting down, hibernating, or otherwise powering off your computer when the download in question completes. Everything from the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent (whose options are pictured above) to download managers like DownThemAll have these options built in.
Video encoding: Many of us will never know the time it takes to do some seriously heavy video encoding (we’re none of us Pixar), but if you’ve ever tried ripping a DVD (here are five of the best ripping tools out there), you know how much time and CPU cycles video encoding can take. Outsource your ripping and other encoding jobs to the night so you can actually use your computer the next day.
Share your computing power with researchers: Distributed computing tools allow researchers across the globe to use your extra CPU cycles to run a few algorithms of their own in the background using your computer. That might not seem like much, but with enough computers, researchers can do some serious work with distributed computing. (Wikipedia notes that Folding@home, the most popular distributed computing network, has up to 400,000 active machines running at a time and has reached computing speeds of over 5.0 native petaflops.) If you’re interested in putting your PC to use to help the world while you’re sleeping, you’ve got plenty of options:There’s Folding@home (a project to understand protein folding), BOINC, the World Community Grid, and LHC@home, to name a few popular options.
Clever (or just less common) overnight uses for your PC suggested by Lifehacker readers included:
Okay, fine. Sometimes the best thing you can do with your computer is simply turn it off. You save on electricity, you lose one extra hum and a few flashing lights in your home at night, and you may stop thinking, “Oooo, maybe I should google that” while you’re laying in bed with your pre-sleep mind wandering. Remember, though, very few of the options highlighted above should require an entire night’s worth of your powered-on computer. Check out our guide to automatically shutting down your computer at a certain time for more ideas on how you can make the most of some after-hours computing power without keeping your computer on all night long.
Got a favorite that didn’t make the list above, or want to expand on what we already mentioned? Share your thoughts and experience in the comments.
Adam Pash, editor of Lifehacker, enjoys the god-like power of automation more than is healthy. His work can be found every day on Lifehacker, and he’s listening on Twitter.
It’s frustrating to not be able to get your DVDs onto your portable devices or media server. Last week we looked at the best tools for ripping your DVD collection and we’re back to announce the winner.
Handbrake led by a healthy margin and took home 34% of the vote and with good reason. It’s free, cross-platform, and has grown easier to use with each new release. Following Handbrake was DVD Shrink">DVD Shrink (23%) and DVD Fab">DVD Fab (15%). Rounding out the Hive Five was AnyDVD (11%) and DVD Decrypter (13%). It’s worth noting that as awesome as Handbrake is, it doesn’t include any tools for actually circumventing DVD encryption, so you’ll need to pair it with one of the other solutions in the Hive Five. Check out the full Hive for additional information about each contender.
Have a topic you’d love to see covered by the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips @ lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line and we’ll add it to the list!
You pay good money for your DVDs, but they’re hardly the only format you need these days. These five ripping tools ensure you can back them up, keep them on your media server, and load them on your favorite portable player.
Photo by jonasj.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite DVD-ripping tool. We tallied up the votes, and now we’re back to highlight the five most popular tools used by Lifehacker readers to rip, backup, and encode their DVD collections.
DVD Shrink is a free and capable ripping tool that excels at, as the name would imply, shrinking DVDs. DVDs come in two common formats: DVD-5 (4.7GB) and DVD-9 (8.5GB); the Reauthor mode in DVD Shrink helps you to ditch disc extras and strip most larger DVDs down to fit into a standard (and less expensive) DVD-5 disc. DVD Shrink does a good job handling many protection schemes, but hasn’t been updated to remove some of the newest schemes.
DVD Fab is a commercial DVD ripper that supports the removal of all current DVD copy protections. In addition to being current on protection schemes, it boasts a large array of options for stripping and repacking your DVDs once the copy protection is removed. You can rip the entire disc, rip only the main movie, or split it into pieces—among other options. Like DVD Shrink, DVD Fab also supports compressing DVD-9 discs to fit on DVD-5 discs.
Handbrake is a DVD-ripping tool with a strong emphasis on not just ripping media but recoding it for playback on computers, portable devices, and other non-disc based systems. Handbrake can help you convert DVDs and other MPEG-based video into MP4 and MKV files. You can tweak settings like video frame rate and audio codec playback to your heart’s content with Handbrake, and even batch encode all your media at one time to make filling up your iPod or other device relatively painless. The one major shortcoming of Handbrake is that it doesn’t have any copy protection removal tools built in, which means you may occasionally need to use a 3rd-party stripping tool to prepare your DVD for conversion.
AnyDVD is another commercial entry in this week's Hive Five. It's not cheap, with a one year license running $60—although the multi-year discounts quickly stack up—but it can boast that it stays on top of current protection and encryption schemes to make sure you're never locked out of your own discs. In addition to stripping protections from the disc, it also has the ability to control DVD playback speed so that DVDs played on media center computers will play slower and quieter, and it allows you to remove things like forced subtitles, warning screens, and disc material you don't want.
Although DVD Decrypter hasn’t been updated since 2005, it still works on a significant number of DVDs and has a strong following resulting from both its original user base and new users who find it cuts through the copy protection on their current DVDs protected with CSS, Macrovision content protection, region codes, and other hindrances.
Which DVD-Ripping Tool Is Best?(trends)
Have a favorite that wasn’t featured or a tip for ripping DVDs? Let’s hear about it in the comments. If you have an idea for a future Hive Five send us an email at tips @ lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line.
Despite the proliferation of laptops and netbooks, the vast majority of students still use their computers like $500 typewriters. Stop working so hard and be a better student by leveraging some clever computer tools to your advantage.
Photo by Brad K..
Every semester I get a new wave of college freshman into my classroom, most of them armed with laptops. For the last several semesters, I have been informally tracking how they use their computers. I always assumed that my students were using their computers to their full potential to help them with school, research, and such, but almost all of them were simply using their laptops as extremely expensive typewriters and instant-messaging terminals.
What good is all the computing power of the pre-1960s world sitting on your lap if you’re not using it to make college life easier? The following is a guide for students everywhere that want to spend less time on the tedious stuff, and more time on the things like study and research that actually produce results.
Never, ever, do something the hard way without checking to see if any easy way exists. Applications come in every shape and form to automate tasks on the computer. Never undertake a tedious task on your computer without first visiting a search engine and searching for a method of automating it. Whether you're resizing photos for a class project, renaming files, or crunching numbers in a spreadsheet, check for the simple—and automatic!—way first. Photo by striatic.
File Renamers: Renaming tons of files has to be one of the most boring and grinding tasks you can undertake. Never waste time renaming files. If you’re on a PC, check out the powerful Bulk Rename Utility for a dashboard of options and the less-overwhelming but still effective Ken Rename. If you’re on a Mac, you can download specialty apps like File List, but it pays to become acquainted with Automator, which can do so much more than simple file renaming.
Text Replacement: Unless you’re writing the next great American novel, chances are you type a fair number of things with a high degree of frequency. Your email address, common phrases you use, formatting you find yourself typing over and over again when working on papers or taking notes, and so on, it might not seem like much but you can easily save hours over the course of a semester by using text replacement. How does text replacement work? Each text replacement tool handles things a little bit differently, but nearly all of them have two basic methods: instant replacement and hot keys.
With replacement, you tell your computer to replace every instance of a string with another string—like notes1 becomes your favorite bullet-list format for taking notes, or mymail becomes your full email address.
Hot keys allow you to assign a phrase to a bit of shorthand plus a hotkey. For example, I have a phrase that is XXX+TAB. Typing it takes only four key strokes but it types out a phrase that would require 53 keystrokes if I typed it manually.
If you’re on a PC, you can try out our home-grown text replacement tool Texter, or other capable tools like Phrase Express. Mac users should check out TextExpander or become more familiar with the built in text-replacement tools in Snow Leopard, and Linux users can give AutoKey a whirl.
Regardless of what you’re trying to do, you’ll almost always be able to find a tool online to automate or at least make that task easier. Get in the habit of always asking yourself, no matter what the task, “Could the computer do this faster and with less input from me?”. Over time you’ll build up a set of tools for quickly completing common tasks.
Learn the keyboard shortcuts for everything: your word processor, your note-taking tools, your email client. Slinging the mouse around for tasks that can be accomplished with a keystroke or two is a really inefficient way to work, and far less comfortable. If you’re furiously taking down notes in class do you really want to break your stride to dig around in the toolbar or menus for something like a bullet point activation? You can find shortcut lists for every operating system and application under the sun; hit up Google with a search query like “myapplication shortcut list” to find more shortcuts than you knew existed. Photo by John A. Ward.
Note taking is an art form, and it is most definitely not simply writing down everything your professor says or that is in bold print in your textbook. How you take notes is a highly personal thing and heavily influenced by your learning style, but everyone can stand to improve their note taking with a tip or two. Photo by D’Arcy Norman.
Study Note-Taking Techniques: We’ve shared tips with you on how to take more effective notes and how to utilize different note-taking styles and you’ll find no shortage of resources elsewhere on the web for being a more effective note-taker. You can further hone your note-taking skills by researching subject-specific note taking techniques—how you take notes in Medieval Literature won't be the same way you take notes in Organic Chemistry.
Ditch the Pen:
People who love to take handwritten notes love to take handwritten notes, and we don’t expect to dissuade the everything-looks-better-on-a-Moleskin crowd from abandoning their pens. For the rest of you, taking paper notes is, quite literally, so last century. It’s 2010, and there is no reason for you not to have dynamic, media-rich, cross-indexed, and always available notes. At the end of the semester, do you really want to pick through a hundred pages of hand written notes looking for specific bits of information? No, you don’t. You want to be able to search through your notes quickly and efficiently the same way you use major search engines like Google.
Two extremely popular note-taking tools are Microsoft OneNote and Evernote—so popular, in fact, we faced them off in a reader poll last year. The awesome features of the two applications are beyond the scope of a paragraph, but suffice to say they both have excellent systems for searching (with handwriting recognition!), organizing, and accessing your notes—I use OneNote for everything from graduate school to teaching to writing for Lifehacker. You can check out our overview of OneNote here and Evernote here.
We’re not talking about Facebook-ing everyone in your class. We’re talking about actively using online study and collaboration tools to interact with your classmates. Sharing notes, discussing assignments and class topics, and collaborating on group projects are but a few of the ways you can take advantage of the hyper-connectivity the information age has brought about. Photo by krossbow.
Share Your Notes:The first objection I usually hear to the idea of sharing notes is that people don’t want to share their hard work and they don’t think that other people should benefit from it. Fair enough, how you deal with who participates in your class-centered groups and note sharing sessions is your business but as an instructor I can tell you this: the kind of person who doesn’t bother to take their own notes isn’t exactly the kind of person you’re going to have to fight for the top grade in the class.
You can share notes and collaborate in quite a few ways but it would help your cause to stick with methods that have a low barrier to entry—most people don't want to sign up for a bunch of services just for a class. Google Notebook and Documents are great tools since having a Gmail account is nearly universal. You could also set up your own wiki with free tools like Luminotes or customize MediaWiki into your own personal collaboration server.
Build a Contact Web: Whether it's a group on Facebook, an email list, or a list of phone numbers for text messaging, it's wise to create a way you can quickly communicate with other students. Many times you have a question about an assignment, something that happened in class, or what you missed when you were absent and sending out an email to your fellow students will result in a faster response than waiting to hear back from the professor. It also helps you build a contact list of your peers—not as important in a freshman Psychology 110 course, but by the time you're in at the end of your schooling you'll be taking more focused classes and meeting people in your career path you'll want to stay in contact with.
You have no excuse for not backing up your data—none. The number and methods for backing up data, especially the small volume that constitutes text-based research and class notes, are so numerous that there simply is no excuse for doing something foolish like keeping all your hard work on a single hard disk or flash drive. Photo by Jeff Wilcox.
Dropbox: It's free, the basic account can more than hold a semester's worth of work—short of a film school project—and it syncs to all your computers and to the web. "I accidentally deleted my homework" wasn't a very good excuse ten years ago and it's an unforgivable one now. You can sync your passwords, your OneNote notebooks, and access your favorite portable apps from anywhere.
Online Backup: While Dropbox is great for syncing files, if you want to go all out you’ll definitely want to check out some full-fledged computer backup tools like Mozy and Carbonite. Check out our Hive Five on best Windows backup tools to get more information.
Windows: Libraries were one of the most useful features in Windows 7, but it’s a bit restricted in what it can do. Free utility Win7 Library Tool gives you everything you need to fine-tune, customize, and extend your library collections.
The only thing you can really do with Windows 7′s default library editor is pick indexed folders to include in a specified library. Win7 Library Tool shows you all your libraries in one window, and when you choose to edit one, you can edit tons of otherwise hidden Library properties. You can change a library’s icon, create a mirror (allowing you to make the path to a library much shorter), add network or other non-indexed folders to your libraries, and even back them up for restoration later on (say, if you decide to do a clean install). Essentially, it’s what library management in Windows 7 should have been.
Win7 Library tool is a free download for Windows 7 only. If you’ve got a great use case for extended Windows 7 libraries, let’s hear about ‘em in the comments.
Our Hive Five asks readers to identify five of the best tools for any job, then vote for the absolute best. Here’s a look back at the winners from each week in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Every week we pose a question to you, the computer savvy readers of Lifehacker. Tirelessly we search for the next “Which is best?” question and through the hive mind we distill down your thousands of nominations into a list of the top five candidates. You vote on the best of the best and we return the next week to declare a champion.
The following list showcases the winners in each of the categories we covered in the fourth quarter of 2009. If a particular category catches your eye and you’d like to see the other contenders, click on the name of the category to jump to the original Hive Five post, clicking on the name of the winner will take you directly to the winner’s web site.
TweetDeck boasts the ability to monitor multiple social-networking services, in this case Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. You can fight Twitter spam with a built-in spam monitor, follow topics with saved searches, and preview shortened URLs from within TweetDeck. You can use TweetDeck to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one interface and thanks to web-based TweetDeck accounts you can back up and sync your TweetDeck profile across multiple machines.
SparkPeople is a comprehensive weight-loss web site. A free membership gives you access to a variety of nutritional information and calorie-tracking tools, weight-tracking tools, and the enormous SparkPeople community. Personal pages, like mini-blogs within the SparkPeople site, help you publish your progress and connect with other users who have similar goals. You’ll find no shortage of ways to track and analyze everything from the types of food you eat to the amount of weight you lift-and lose!-in the reports section of the site. SparkPeople is available in a scaled-down mobile version for use on your web-enabled phone or as an iPhone/iPod touch application.
Process Explorer is the free and portable offering from Microsoft. Process Explorer is like the standard task manager on steroids. You still get a list of processes, you still see charts of your usage, but both give you significantly more information and control over the information. Unlike the default manager, Process Explorer makes it easy to track down which file is being held by which program and get to the bottom of computer mysteries like why a certain DLL or DOC file simply cannot be deleted. It also shows which service is performing which function so you’ll never look at a long and repetitive list of Windows system executables that are indistinguishable from each other-every one will be associated with its function.
The Advanced Packaging Tool, a.k.a. APT, is a free tool built into most Linux distributions and many variants that handles the installation, removal, and updating of software packages. APT is a tool that went a long way toward making Linux a bit friendlier to the masses who aren't comfortable installing or compiling software packages on Linux, but it runs from the command line, so it's still not all that friendly to folks joining Linux from the Windows or Mac worlds. That's where Synaptic comes in. Synaptic is a graphical front end to APT that makes the tool wildly more user-friendly, and—yes—it handles checking for and updating software with aplomb. (Folks using Ubuntu, <a href="the most popular Linux distribution among Lifehacker readers, take note: Synaptic will be replaced by the Ubuntu Software Center—another APT-powered update tool—in April of 2010.)
PortableApps is the Grand Daddy of portable application sites. Between John Haller—the founder of the site—and the dozens of developers, packagers, translators, and the hundreds of people that participate in the forums, the sheer number of people working to polish the PortableApps suite has resulted in a very comprehensive package. The PortableApps suite includes basics like Firefox for browsing and Pidgin for instant messaging but also includes—in the full package—Open Office. You could download all the individual portable components separately of course, but what really ties everything together is the PortableApps menu system. Seen in the screenshot above, the menu system is clean, includes a backup utility, and makes organizing your portable apps and documents simple.
A long time coming, Windows finally enhanced the standard taskbar, creating a swanky dock system to call its own. Windows users trying out Windows 7 for the first time are in for an extra big treat-the change from the old taskbar system to the new dock is huge. You can drag and drop to pin shortcuts to the taskbar, Win+# (where the # is the numerical position of the pinned icon) launches the application, and icons also have jump lists associated with them—quick access to routine features and commands for that particular application. Hovering over the icon of a running application gives you a quick peek and the ability to jump to the application or close it. Microsoft was late to the dock party, but at least when they finally rolled it out, they remembered to decorate with streamers and bring a cake.
The free offering from AVG is one of the lightest, feature-wise, among the nominations in the anti-virus Hive Five. That said, if you’re looking for a basic antivirus application that will scan your computer, keep an eye out for spyware, and keep you from visiting malware and virus laden websites (via their LinkScanner protection), AVG is a solid free offering.
Once you install Dropbox, a folder, appropriately called "My Dropbox", is placed in the Documents area of your computer. Anything you put into this folder will be synced with your Dropbox account. You can sync files, share files by making the folder they are in public, and restore a previous version of your file—Dropbox keeps a change log going back 30 days. All your files are also accessible via the Dropbox web site, which is great for those times you're at a computer where you don't have Dropbox installed, but you still want to access a document. If you want to sync a folder without putting it directly inside the main My Dropbox folder, you can do that with a little elbow grease, too. Dropbox doesn’t have an unlimited option like the rest, but if all you want to back up is your most important documents, it certainly works as off-site backup, and it provides data redundancy on every computer you install it on.
CamStudio is a free and open-source offering for the screencasting market. You can record all or part of your screen, customize cursors and text annotations, adjust the quality of the video output, and save screencasts as AVI or SWF files. The interface is easy to understand, and you won’t be overwhelmed with extensive options. In a nutshell, it’s a free and effective tool for creating screencasts without a lot of bulk or expense.
Amazon's wishlist system used to only support items that Amazon or affiliates carried—which, while limited, still gave you access to a large stable of items. When they rolled out the Universal Wishlist and its accompanying Wishlist Button, however, you got the ease of use of the Amazon wishlist system plus the ability to add items to your list that Amazon.com doesn’t carry. Anything from any web site can now be added to your Amazon wishlists, both private and public, using the Wishlist Button. Creating and managing your Amazon wishlist is free.
OneNote is a note-taking and organization tool that many Lifehacker readers have called Microsoft's best product. It's versatile—it's made appearances here, in the best note-taking tools and journaling Hive Fives—and the outlining functionality is well integrated and easy to use. One of the strong points of outlining in OneNote is the way outlines support the same drag and drop rearranging found throughout OneNote. Almost every single element in a OneNote page can be dragged, dropped, or easily manipulated with a context menu—the screenshot above shows an element in the outline right before being dragged into a new slot. Note: If you’re curious about the GTD context in the screenshot, read our guide to getting things done with Microsoft OneNote.
CCleaner isn't strictly a startup management tool. Most people use it to clean out cookies and other undesirable elements and to tidy up the registry. A secondary but helpful tool in CCleaner: it also allows you to delete entries from the startup file—hence its inclusion here. It's a bit of a one trick pony, though; you can't alter, tweak, or insert entries. You can only delete them. Still, it gets the job done if the task you want isn't advanced tweaking, but just to get that annoying program to stop popping up every time you reboot.
The last quarter of 2009 was filled with all sorts of useful tools and software to help you get things done. If reading over the list gave you an idea for the next great Hive Five topic, drop us a line at tips at lifehacker.com. Make sure to include Hive Five Idea in the subject so your idea gets forwarded to gnomes at mission control.
A lot of contacts, documents, text messages, games, and other data live on your smartphone, but manufacturers and service carriers aren’t going out of their way to make backing up easy. Gizmodo, however, has you covered on nearly any platform.
John Herrman runs down the best, easiest, and cheapest methods for backing up iPhones, Android units, BlackBerries, Windows Mobile, and Palm smartphones. Some involve backing up right to your computer’s hard drive (which you can then back up to an online service or elsewhere), while others drop your data onto SD cards or onto free or cheap web cloud storage space. Not every platform supports every kind of data backup, but most allow you to put enough aside that a lost, stolen, or memory-wiped phone wouldn’t cost you a whole day’s worth of re-configuring.
Hit the link for Gizmodo’s full guide. Got a better solution not mentioned there or around here? Tell us about it in the comments.
Time and time again, people tell me that they’ve bought an external hard drive to back up their pictures, music, and documents. Great, right? Sadly, that’s not always the case.
There’s one simple rule about backups that everybody needs to fully understand: Your files should exist in at least Two places, or it's no longer a backup—and your data is at risk. Too often people delete the files from their primary PC, assuming they are backed up.
It’s time to educate people on proper backup strategy, so we’ll run through your options and talk about the pros and cons. These days, you’ve got plenty of choices on the Windows side of things, Mac users have Time Machine, and there’s online backup for anybody.
When it comes to local backup applications, it’s really a matter of preference, since most of them do the job adequately without a lot of fuss. The Backup and Restore application built into Windows 7 or Vista is a perfectly acceptable choice, and will handle most backups with ease. My personal choice is a paid version of SyncBack SE, but there’s plenty of other choices for Windows, and all of them do the job.
The most important thing to remember when backing up your data is that you can’t delete it from your main system once it’s been backed up to an external drive. By doing that, you’ve left yourself with only a single copy of your important files, on an external drive that has just as much chance of dying as your internal PC hard drive. Think it can’t happen to you? One of my external drives died last week.
There’s quite a few online backup services to choose from, and while the great thing about online backup is that you don’t have to deal with external drives, you’re leaving your data in somebody else’s hands, and restoring all of your files can take an extremely long time, since you’ll have to download all of the files again. If you don’t have a ton of personal files, online backup is a great choice, if you don’t mind putting your faith in somebody else to keep your data secure.
Without question, the easiest form of backup to restore from is a complete image of your system. We’ve already covered a list of the best free system restore tools, and Gina walked through how to hot image your PC hard drive with DriveImage XML, but if you really want an easy experience you might want to check out one of the paid tools like Acronis True Image.
These tools are the best way to recover from a total system failure, but they usually aren’t quite as easy to restore a single file from, which is a much more likely scenario. There’s been dozens of times that I’ve needed to restore an older version of a document, and was able to easily grab the previous version from Dropbox or my external drive.
When you’re backing up your files, there’s no reason to make a backup of every single thing on your hard drive-in fact, it would be a huge waste of space to back up your Windows folder if you have to reinstall the whole system in order to restore the backups again. Here’s a couple of pointers to help you choose what you really need to back up, and what you don’t:
What you don’t need to back up?
Your best bet is to combine a number of different methods into your backup strategy.
Just remember, all of your files need to be in at least Two places at once. You don’t want to get Journalspaced.
The How-To Geek backs up data to his Samba server with rsync’d drives. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.
