Law Office Technology

Quick Hits: 4-11-2011

The Ernie Challenge

http://theerniechallenge.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/to-edna-and-beyond-the-ernie-challenge/

Silver in the Windy City – ABA TECHSHOW Turns 25 This Week!

http://www.legalitprofessionals.com/Christy-Burke/silver-in-the-windy-city-aba-techshow-turns-25-next-week.html

The Complete Guide to Backing up your Computer

http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2011/04/04/a-complete-guide-to-backing-up-your-computer/?awesm=tnw.to_17hCJ

IDC Forecasts Worldwide Smartphone Market to Grow by Nearly 50% in 2011

 http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS22762811

Top 10 Micro-Apps for Windows and Mac OS X

http://m.lifehacker.com/5790110/top-10-micro+apps-for-windows-and-mac-os-x

MiniTool Power Data Recovery Finds Your Lost and Deleted Files

http://m.lifehacker.com/5789376/minitool-power-data-recovery-finds-your-lost-and-deleted-files

DropTunes Is a Web Jukebox for Your Dropbox Music Stash

http://m.lifehacker.com/5788980/droptunes-is-a-web-jukebox-for-your-dropbox-music-stash

Focus on a List of Projects, Not Just To-Dos, to Relieve Productivity Stress

http://lifehacker.com/#!5788591/focus-on-a-list-of-projects-not-just-to+dos-to-relieve-productivity-stress

Virus and Porn

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/reporting.aspx

How to Flawlessly Backup Large Music and Video Files

I use a great program called Dropbox to backup all my documents and pictures which are about 50gb.  This is fine since the  maximum Dropbox  account is 100gb.  The real problem I have is backing up all of my media (Music and Video files) which total size is about 700gb.  As of now, I find it too timely and cost prohibitive to back these up to the cloud. 

All this media is kept on a  Western Digital 1 Terabyte Hard Drive.  It is small enough to easily carry with me.  In my house, I also have a Linksys Network Storage System.  It has two 1 terabyte hard drives that mirror (copy each other) each other.  Therefore if one of the drives fail, I will still have all the data on the other drive.  

My initial strategy was to keep all my media on my portable hard drive and copy everything to the Linksys Storage about once a month.  The first initial copy was easy, however it was extremely hard to copy the updated files on a schedule.  So, hard that I basically just backed everything up once a year.  

That all changed when I found SyncToy,  a free program from Microsoft that will sync two folders.  All you have to do is press a button. 

The options are:

• Synchronize: New and updated files are copied both ways. Renames and deletes on either side are repeated on the other.
• Echo: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames and deletes on the left are repeated on the right.
• Contribute: New and updated files are copied left to right. Renames on the left are repeated on the right. No deletions.

Since I only download new files to the left (My Portable Drive) hard drive and not the right (Linksys Storage System),  I have it set to echo.  If I were adding Items to both drives, I would set it up to Synchronize.  There is no way to automatically set this up to sync, so I manually run it about once a week.  It took me about 3 days to do the initial sync and about 4-6 hours to run the echo. 

Virtual PC’S

I also use the program to backup my virtual pcs.  I keep demos of different software packages on virtual pcs.  They are usually between 6-10gb in size and it works perfectly as well for that.  This also makes it very easy to copy and send virtual pcs to other people in my office. 

ThompsonWest Webinar Series

 Tom O’Conner, Browning.Marean and I have been doing some Webinar’s on legal technology for ThompsonWest.  We did one on Basic Law Firm Technology yesterday and we are doing one on 1/21/2008 on disaster recovery.  Certain states will give CLE Credit. 

Here is the description:

Disasters come in many forms -- hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, power outages even terrorist attacks.  The best disaster recovery plan is a disaster preparation plan so that your practice can be back in business as soon as possible. Technology can assist this process but there are other important business decisions to consider as well: availability of equipment, access to data, staffing issues .....all these are supported by technology in today's law firm and this session will show you how to put the the right technology system in place before disaster strikes.

http://westlegaledcenter.com/program_guide/course_detail.jsf?videoCourseId=18196558

 

 

Backup MyBusiness Retention Policy

BackupMyBusiness sent me this email after my previous post on their wonderful product.

If a file is in the backup selection and deleted from the computer it is retained for 90 days on the data center.  This is to prevent accidental deletions.   

If a file is still on the computer and the user decides he no longer wants to back it up and removes it from the backup selection the file is retained for 7 days.

In addition the 10 most recent versions (at a minimum) of every file are retained in the last 90 days.  So if you have a file changing on a monthly basis you would have 3 or 4 versions of the file available to retrieve.  If you were changing a file daily you would have at a minimum the last 10 days available.  This can be very useful when you accidentally save a file with the same name (meant to do a Save As instead of a Save) and later need to get the old version back.  Another scenario would be a file that becomes corrupted and you need find a good working version.

In the example you gave the file would be retained for 90 days rather than 7.