What's your computer trick/tip?

[Sabre Tank]

I'm curious to see what kind of tips and tricks we can all share with each other on here, whether it's hardware or software!

I'll start us off.
I keep old MP3 players and such and use them as "external hardrives" for storing files. The MP3 player may not function properly, but the memory is still there!

http://www.imagebam.com/image/b1f268269714951

I'd also like to know any handy commands and interfaces/utilities you might use!
Thanks, y'all

[Eddy]

Related to your tip about repurposing a device, I watch the shelves for prepaid phones on clearance. I recently picked up a Simple Mobile Ideos U8150 for $15 at a grocery store. It's a nice little Android 2.2 phone with a 2.8" touchscreen and can take a mini SD card up to 32GB. It even has bluetooth, GPS, tilt, compass, etc, all the usual features of an Android cell phone. I wouldn't use it for my everyday phone but works great for playing music. And kids love playing with your phone so give 'em this instead.

[Eddy]

My #1 tip is to develop a backup strategy for your files. I preach this to my extended family and it's surprising how few think it's important until something happens and the files are gone.

Minimally, a local backup should be maintained on a separate internal drive, an external drive or If you have more than one PC, you can back up each PC to the other. It's important to find a utility that automates the backup since it's easy to forget to backup manually. I used Cobian backup for this for more than 5 years. I recently switched to Crashplan since it can do local file system, LAN, WAN and Cloud backups and does it on the fly.

Cloud Backup is all the rage right now. There are a lot of pay services for cloud backup but you can also do it for free. Like I said, I use Crashplan to backup to the cloud and it can be used for free for local backup and for backing up to a remote PC that's also running Crashplan. It runs in the background and backs up files whenever your PC is idle. Find a friend you trust and the two of you can back up each other's PCs across the Internet for free. And yes, the files are encrypted.

There may be other services like Crashplan but I didn't find one that is as flexible and supported numerous means of backing up.

Another backup consideration is the OS and a hard drive failure. This happened to me about a month ago but I use Acronis True Image to maintain an image of the OS drive so recovery was simple. After replacing the bad drive, I booted to the True Image Recovery tool and restored the OS image.

One Note: Cloud/WAN backups will consume huge amounts of data transfer when you first backup your data, depending on how much you have. I have Comcast and was looking at bandwidth utilization over the past year. For a couple of months, I increased 10-fold from my usual consumption. Luckily, Comcast didn't come after me but some ISPs might. Now it's back to normal and the added bandwidth isn't noticeable at all.

Eddy

[Axeminister]

The very first thing I learned about pc's is that you need to keep your information backed up. I started a notepad list of passwords since my first pc in 1998 and it has grown massively. Eventually keeping birthdays, addresses, telephone numbers. Keep it on a flash drive so you don't lose everything.

[Zero Angel]

Speaking of storage, portable hard drives can have a linux operating system installed on them and actually run at a speed that is close to a 'bare metal install' even over a USB 2.0 connection, furthermore they can be partitioned to allocate most of the space towards a file storage partition (NTFS) which is accessed from within the portable OS. A portable linux OS can be used to troubleshoot and enhance your capabilities to fix broken Windows machines (ntfsfix, partitioning, password/account unlocking, bypassing obstructions like ACL which prevent file copying, anti-virus).

[Commando]

Any good documentation on setting a linux usb install up? That may come in handy where I work as I do a lot of Windows support, on-site.

Fortunately I work on domain networks so ACL issues are typically a non-issue. Using the domain admin account, I can usually take ownership of files then grant myself full control permissions of said files.

On a workgroup setup, you can be hosed without a backup administrator account. There are programs available that circumvent NTFS permissions. Access Gain was one I had encountered in the past, that appeared to work very well.

[Ded10c]

I've found having Hiren's BootCD invaluable a couple of times.

[Zero Angel]

Any good documentation on setting a linux usb install up? That may come in handy where I work as I do a lot of Windows support, on-site.

Fortunately I work on domain networks so ACL issues are typically a non-issue. Using the domain admin account, I can usually take ownership of files then grant myself full control permissions of said files.

On a workgroup setup, you can be hosed without a backup administrator account. There are programs available that circumvent NTFS permissions. Access Gain was one I had encountered in the past, that appeared to work very well.

There's tools that you can use to do that, and a few online resources. One of those online resources is http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ . Those instructions can also be used for a portable hard disk. My own preferred method is to use what's called a 'persistent live' install where the OS will load off of the disk as if it was a live CD (though much, MUCH faster due to the faster sequential read speed of a hard disk over a garden-variety flash drive) but also have the ability to save the session, including the programs you have installed to the portable OS. After this is done, you can use a partitioning tool to shrink the OS partition (to say, 30GB) and create a new NTFS partition which acts as your big file storage reservoir, as well as a swap partition if you think you'll operate on machines with 1GB of RAM or less.

If you have some linux knowledge and can have your storage partition automounted upon boot (do it by UUID), you will always have that readily available from both linux and windows and can even integrate parts of the storage partition into your home folder via symbolic links. There's no good documentation on doing all of that in one go, but if you've used linux quite a bit then chances are you'll be able to pick up how to do those kinds of things.

[Red Spot]

Be carefull with that 'trick' Sabre.
Those 'memory sticks' in my experience tend to be of lesser quality than a proper memory stick, wether thats cause of the software on them or the way they opperate I cant say, but I 'no longer' rely on them functioningafter having recharged them a few times.

Related to your tip about repurposing a device, I watch the shelves for prepaid phones on clearance. I recently picked up a Simple Mobile Ideos U8150 for $15 at a grocery store. It's a nice little Android 2.2 phone with a 2.8" touchscreen and can take a mini SD card up to 32GB. It even has bluetooth, GPS, tilt, compass, etc, all the usual features of an Android cell phone. I wouldn't use it for my everyday phone but works great for playing music. And kids love playing with your phone so give 'em this instead.

I tend to buy my phones with a similair purpose in the back of my mind. Most calls I tend to let go to VM and call people back in the evening from home (when private) or I simply use the phone of my desk at work (when work related), so I tend to buy my phones based on their 'features'.
Radio is a must (needs to be able to play through headphones and speaker), so is a light, and it needs to have a fairly decent camera ... plus, more recently, I need to be able to make my own apps for it

[Nielk1]

Unless someone knows a good online backup that can handle a couple TBs and growing I've gotta do all my backups locally.

My main thing is I write small programs to maintain things for me. For example, I have a program that scans through the different bundle sites where I have purchases bundles (Humble Bundle, Indie Royale, Groupees, Bundle Stars, Game Music Bundle, Indie Gala, etc) and grabs new keys or downloads/versions as they appear. It writes a log file which I read to notice new soundtracks to add to my music library or new keys from a site I couldn't code around the always different ajax syntax off for getting the key.

[Eddy]

I have around 10TB backed up to Crashplan. Their service offers unlimited storage space but I was more worried about Comcast nailing me for the huge spike in bandwidth consumption. No one complained so I have a full copy of all of my stuff in the cloud and a local copy.

Eddy