074 – Fry Your Pickles. Back Up Your Data.

This week the WELSTech podcast discussion centers on the important but often overlooked task of computer backups.

The discussion:

Rob BensonBackup glam  – Joining Martin and Sallie for a second time is our very own WELS Network Security guru, Rob Benson. The first time Rob was on the podcast, we talked about computer security.  This time around Rob joins us to glamorize the topic of backup and, with Martin’s help, manages to succeed! Topics include why you should bother to backup, schedules, media devices, software and backing up to the cloud.

New Technology Showcase:

Picks of the week:

Of interest:

  • (34:45) WELS Lutherans for Life, Metro-Milwaukee is sponsoring SOUL Ride on June 20, 2009
    • Ride for the Sanctity Of Unborn Life (SOUL)
    • Scenic ride north in the Holy Hill/Kettle Moraine area for any motorcyclist
    • Cost is $25 per rider
    • Details and registration at www.soulride.org

Community feedback:

Coming up on WELSTech:

(45:22) Episode 075 – Pack your bags WELSTech-style and maintain all your computing needs on the road

The featured artist:

(46:30) This week we close with music of WELS artist Kevin Loersch – Amazing Grace from his CD titled “Abide with Me”

Get involved:

1 reply
  1. Jeremy Johnson
    Jeremy Johnson says:

    Hi Martin and Sallie,

    Your discussion of storage and backups got me thinking about a wonderful piece of open source software called GParted. GParted is a graphical frontend for GNU Parted, and it has many uses. As a partition editor, it allows you to create, format, resize, copy, move, check, repair, and label partitions on your disks. It is fully compatible with NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, ext3, ext4, and other file systems. It is installed by default on many Linux Live CDs, including Ubuntu. This makes disk editing easy because the program runs off the CD instead of the hard drive. The GUI is easy to understand. It doesn’t perform any actions until you specifically tell it to, instead making a list of all the things you want to do before it actually begins. I have two examples of GParted’s many uses that I would like to share.

    I recently used GParted upgrade my wife’s hard drive without having to reinstall anything. I popped in the new hard drive with the old one, booted off the Ubuntu CD, and copied the two partitions from the old hard drive to the new one. During the copy, I also had the partitions resized to fill the entire drive. One was NTFS and the other was FAT32. When it was done, I removed the old hard drive and booted from the new disk. My wife’s computer was the same as before, except she now had much more storage space. Therefore, it seems GParted is great for ghosting.

    In the other instance, I was reformatting someone’s computer and reinstalling Windows. When I tried using the Windows XP install disk to format the hard drive to NTFS, it locked up. I popped in the Ubuntu CD and instead used GParted to format to NTFS. After that, I installed Windows from the Windows disk and everything worked fine. If I didn’t have GParted available to me, they may have ended up with a dead machine. (After seeing this, the owner of the computer had many questions about Ubuntu.)

    Basically, if you ever do any dabbling with partitioning and storage, there’s a good chance you can find a use for GParted. Always keep a Linux Live CD handy.

    Jeremy

    Reply

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