Tips for the Geek at Home

In Recovery

If your spouse isn't backing up his or her data reliably and regularly, expect to suffer through a protracted data-recovery session, complete with wailing (your spouse's) and teeth-gnashing (yours). But don't overcompensate by treating it like a data-center problem. Resist the urge to set up your spouse with a tape drive, tape rotation, success-and-failure-logs and so on. The bottom line is that tape backup comes with too many moving parts and overhead for the typical home user. If tapes cost $35 apiece, your spouse isn't likely to rotate them that often, causing incremental problems. One Network Computing reader tells us he set his mother up with a tape system, but she never changed the tape or checked the logs. When it came time to restore her data, the then-defective tape in the drive was worse than having no backup at all.

CD burning is a better fit for data backup at home. There's no head-cleaning and the media is less expensive than a data tape--CD-ROM rewriteable media costs around $15 for a 25-pack compared with $20 to $80 per tape. Someone still has to change the disk eventually, and if the disk goes bad, your spouse will be calling on you or, worse, ignoring it. The good news is that CD-ROMs don't have the failure rates of tape drives and tapes.Another backup option is file synchronization with rsync, Unison or Robocopy. This approach is more hands-off: Set it up to synchronize with a location that gets backed up, and no one has to change media or worry about errors. Some go-to geeks say they merely sync to another hard drive in the house, which costs very little. We don't recommend that. Say a virus corrupts your family photos and you have copies on another hard drive. If that hard drive gets sync'd every night, chances are it will have sync'd with the corrupted files, and your precious moments are lost forever.

Online drives like XDrive are good, but they have the same potential corruption problem, so remote backup services are the safest bet. Check out Netriplex, at $19 per month for 1 GB of backup storage, or First Backup, with prices from $40 per year for 50 MB to $14 per month for 1 GB.

Even if you set up a solid backup for your family member, you'll eventually need to recover his or her hard drive. A $1,000-plus clean-room hard-drive recovery facility isn't realistic, so try a DIY recovery, particularly if the alternative is the trash bin. CG Security's TestDisk is a free option that can be useful. We've used this recovery tool for lightly damaged drives, but haven't had much luck using it for heavily damaged ones.

Whether you're going with a free or commercial tool, first get the raw hard-drive data to an image file and then use the recovery tool. The freebie "dd" tool with the "noerr" and "sync" options keeps all bytes in the correct position and replaces bad data with NULs instead of reorganizing it. This is important because file tables are record-size oriented, not delimited. Why acquire the image first? You don't want the recovery tool working on the hard drive while it's in the middle of failure. "dd" is available for Linux, Unix and even Windows through the Cygwin project. On the commercial side, R-Studio, which starts at $80, recovers badly damaged hard drives and captures the image to a file.

A growing technology problem for home users is that their computers are being slowed down by malware infestations--spyware, adware or Trojan. There are even infomercials touting solutions for this headache.Your loved ones invariably will call on you for help with this. Just what you can do to help is the question: It's a spyware smackdown out there, with consumer-grade packages being erased and malfunctioning when freeware fixes are installed. One reader says AdAware destroyed Norton Internet Security without notice. It wiped out several modules as possible pop-up software, and Norton would no longer run. Before he realized the problem, he says, he reinstalled Norton and reran AdAware, which again destroyed Norton.

Anti-malware tools touch your mom's PC on a system level, so this is dangerous territory. It can be tempting to simply avoid messing with anything and let your mom go ahead and run the anti-malware you've recommended. But it's best if you do the install to ensure backup and quality-assurance procedures are in place. Among the tools we recommend are the Google toolbar, HijackThis, SpyBot Search & Destroy and, of course, AdAware, all of which are free.

The Internet can be a dangerous place for kids. But it's also perilous for the grown-ups. Questionable sites can subvert their PCs, leveraging the latest patched and unpatched Internet Explorer bugs. You can save yourself a lot of grief (and time) by encouraging your friends and family to put filters on their PCs. You can't tell them how to use their PCs, but you can warn them that filtering will make their Internet experience safer, especially if their PCs are used by other members of the family as well.

Installing a Squid proxy server with filtering capabilities may work at the office, but NetNanny ($40) or CyberPatrol ($40) makes more sense for the family. These tools filter out inappropriate sites and can set time limits on gaming and restrictions on instant messaging.

Although client security may be equivalent to no security in the enterprise, it's all you've got for your mom's PC. And these consumer-level tools do the job just fine for your family and friends' systems. Technology never sleeps, but maybe you'll finally get to. Jonathan Feldman is the go-to geek for his family in Georgia and New York. Write to him at [email protected].

Tired of being asked to fix PC problems? These smart-aleck excuses might make your friends and family think twice about asking you for help

1. I don't do software. One way to get out of an OS crash or other software-related problem.

2. I don't do hardware. Same strategy.

3. My nickname at work is Vlad the Destroyer. When in doubt, instill it (doubt).4. You don't want to become a "person of interest" to the FBI, do you? Sic the feds on them (or just pretend to).

5. This should be done in person. Pass the buck--refer them to their next-closest geek.

6. Sure, just as soon as I fix my brother's PC ... too bad about his data. Scare them away.

7. Why didn't you unplug the machine before the hurricane hit? Blame the victim.

8. Once you get a Trojan horse and the virus program can't remove it, all you can do is reinstall. Try the "never mind" tactic.9. Put in your CD, hit reboot and follow the directions. A variant of passing the buck for those who get off on inflicting pain.

10. Computer? What computer? Fake ignorance.

Take this test and see how you rate on the geekiness scale

1. You just scored a hot date, but you had promised Mom you'd install a wireless access point for her so she can surf from the living room on her laptop. You would:

2. Your dad asked you to get rid of those weird pop-ups, so you're off to install your favorite anti-hijacking software on his PC. With your luck,

3. Your best friend is starting her own business and wants you to help her set up an accounting application. You:

4. Your son's medical practice is growing and opening a second location. He needs advice about how to link his two sites. You:

Now tally your score: A = 1 point; B = 2 points; C = 5 points

6 or fewer points: The Balanced Geek. You belong in the geek-work-life-balance hall of fame.

7-10 points: Geek Freak. Rein in the temptation to treat every house call like an enterprise network.

15-20 points: Geekius Maximus. You poor, sick individual. Get a life.0