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MasterMind Meeting in Perdido Key

I went to Perdido Key, Florida with one of my mastermind groups last week

Here are the videos I posted on YouTube:

Tip #1 Time Savers

Every program has several different ways to do the same thing. Most of us use the mouse to point and click to do what we need to do. We have made a habit of taking our fingers off the keyboard and moving over to the mouse to do what we need to do.

One of the biggest selling points of the original Windows operating system was that all of the programs that run under windows would have a common user interface, so that if we learned how to use one program, we would be able to do the basic functions, print, open a file, save a file, copy and paste, and even get help.

How many of you remember the days before Windows? How did we do things? We did keystrokes. As we used our favorite programs, we were able to do the keystrokes without even thinking about it. I was a big fan of Lotus 123 and Wordperfect 5.1. I still have these programs loaded on my computer and I still can perform some of the basic functions such as printing and saving files without thinking about the keystrokes involved.

I recently met a young women who had just finished a degree in graphic arts at a local college. As we talked about her courses, she mentioned that one of her instructors demanded that they learn to use keystrokes instead of the mouse when the worked on their projects. She indicated that as she learned to use the keystrokes, her productivity increased significantly.

I decide that it was time to go back and re-learn to use the keystrokes in my programs.

Where do you start, how do you find out what the short cut keys are? It’s very simple! If you look at the command line of your programs, you will see that next to many of the functions that you usually click on are the short cut keys.

Some common short cut keys are:

Ctrl-O to open a file
Ctrl-S to save a file
Ctrl-P to print a file
Ctrl-C to copy
Ctrl-P to paste
Ctrl-X to cut and paste
Ctrl-Z will undo you last action
Ctrl-F will open a find window
With a little bit of practice, you can also learn how to use keystrokes to highlight areas of text.

Let me give you a real world example of how I use there keystrokes to save time. I write a blog entry almost every day. I use blogger, from Google to publish my blog to the Internet. I don’t like the editor that blogger has, so I write my entries in Word and then I cut and paste it to blogger’s editor.

The keystrokes I use are Ctrl-A to select the entire entry, and then Ctrl-C to copy the selection. Then I use alt-tab to switch from word to the web page with the editor on it. I then use Ctrl-V to paste the entry into the editor. I use the cursor arrows to position my cursor at the top line of the copied text, this is my blog entry title. I then use Shift-Right Arrow-End to highlight the entire line, and then I use Ctrl-X to cut the line and I cursor to the Title Box and then hit Ctrl-V to paste the title.

Year-End Hard Drive Housekeeping

I download quite a few ebooks and other pdf files from the internet. A few months ago I took a couple of steps to help me manage these files.

The first step was to create a folder on my hard drive called pdf_to_review. I then created a shortcut to this folder and placed it in a prominent location on my desktop. My problem is that I download a ton of things and then I do not ever look at them.

By putting the shortcut on the desktop, almost in the way of other things, I gently remind myself that I have pdfs that I need to review. It is helping a bit, though I have about 100 pdfs to look at.

The second step I took was download and installing Google Desktop Search. I will sometimes print out a page from a pdf and then when I want to find the original PDF, I can never find it. With Google’s desktop search, I can index everything on my hard drive and do a quick search. It works really well. I can now find what I need.

As I was looking for a particular PDF this morning, I notice that I had quite a few directories that were filled with PDF files. I also has quite a few audio files, mp3s and wavs that I had downloaded from the web. Why were there so many different directories full of files?

I realized that before I had created my pdf_to_review directory, I had not had a common place for all of these files. I counted 6 directories and 176 files that were misplaced. To make matters worse, I had duplicate copies of many of these files.

I spent an hour or so doing a bit of housekeeping on my hard drive. I move all the files to either the pdf_to_review folder or to the archive folder, where the files go after they have been reviewed.

My plan is to figure out how to attach a note to each reviewed file to remind myself if it had any valuable information.

Let me know what you think,

Marc

Another Year Another Backup

With 2006 ending in a few days, I decide I should make an end of the year backup. As I looked at the data on my hard drive, I decided that I should archive the following:

Quickbooks Data File
Since most of my data entry is completed for the year, I am going to make a copy of my Quickbooks file.

Invoice PDF’s
Over the past couple of years, I have been using email to send some of my invoices. As I review the sub directory I created called InvoiceArchive, I realize that it has over a hundred invoices in it. I need to save this also.

Digital Photos
I took many digital photos this year and I am sure that they exist on a backup somewhere. I am going to burn each set to a CD and label it.

Audio Files
I started working on audio products in 2006. The last project with source and edited recording created about 1.5 Gigabytes of data. I am going to burn that to a DVD and store it along with the hard copy of the materials that go with it.

Downloaded Bank Statements
I do most of my banking online and receive statement via email. I am going to burn all of these statements along with any other bank information to a cd.

I suggest that you do this also. Remember that you can never have too many backups.

Any thoughts or comments,

Happy New Year,


Marc

Best Practices – Horror Stories

I talked with the more paranoid client about me posting about his system and he didn’t think it was a good idea. I’ve decided instead to share a few horror stories with you.

A few years back I got a call from a client who was in a panic. Her Dell system was giving her fits and she call Dell’s tech support and ended up putting the restore disk in and completely wiping out here system. We had just done a partial backup a few days earlier so all was not lost. It was a 5 hour project just to get her to the point that we could restore data.

Another client who had promised me that she was backing up every day and taking the zip disk offsite called with a problem with her Peachtree Accounting program. The program had “lost” an entire month of data and at the point I was called, she couldn’t even access the data at all. When I checked the backup I found that it was 2 months old. She said she thought about backing up a lot, but was too busy to do so. Fortunately, we were able to find a company on the web that recovered her data completely. It took them less than an hour and the charged her $450.

Just last week a client called and asked me to recover some data off her floppy disks. She had save a dozen or so time consuming reports to the floppies and for some reason all the data was gone. I was unable to recover the data. I suggested in the future that she store things to the hard drive and back them up to the floppies. Better yet, I suggested that she get a flash drive.

I was visiting a friend a few months back and she asked me if I would mind looking at her laptop. She said she was working on it the night before and it made a weird noise. It was late so she set it aside for the evening. In the morning, it never would reboot. The hard drive had crashed and was not recoverable. She did have backups from a month earlier. She had created several websites over the past few days that she had not uploaded. She figured she lost about 20 hours worth of work.

What’s your horror story…

Let me know,

Marc

Best Practices – Case Study #1

Let me use on of my long term clients as an example of how we make sure that his office system is protected. This client is a small law firm with 3 attorneys and 5 staff members. The firm has 10 computers and a Novell file server. One of the attorneys lives in another state part of the time and logs in remotely from a laptop.

The law firm has a proprietary case management database that by itself (data only) is just under 100 MB. The firm also has another program that is used for filing bankruptcy claims what has about another 100 MB of data. Also, the groupware program that the office uses for its calendaring and internal email has another 325MB data.

Several years ago the firm started scanning all incoming and outgoing correspondence. At this point, anyone who needs to access a client file can do so via the network. The attorneys and staff no longer have to track down a physical file. This data has grown to almost 40 GB. The scanned data grows every day by about 1 MB.

The system has grown over the years and we have always tried to keep it simple, and also, we have not replaced things that did not need replacing. The Novell server was put into service in early 1993 and other than replacing a hard drive a few months ago, has never upgrade or for that matter, turned off.

When the firm started scanning documents, a new computer was purchased that was used only to store the scanned documents and run the scanning software. This system has a 100 GB hard drive in it. Originally the system had Windows 98 though that was replaced several years ago with Windows 2000. Instead of upgrading the existing OS, a second hard drive was installed with the newer OS and the old drive with all the scanned data was made a secondary drive.

As you might imagine, the data is a bit scattered around. In addition to the main shared data, each computer has it’s own data that needs to be backed up. Internet email is stored by Outlook Express in a hidden folder on each machine. Most of the users also save documents in the local “my documents” directory.

Ok, it’s a mess and a gigantic pain to make sure that everything gets backed up. Trust me, it does and we’ve used our backups many times to save someone’s bacon.

We have setup a machine on the network that works primarily as a backup system. This machine has 2 hard drives installed in the system and a third hard drive that is in a removable tray. We have two drives that we rotate into the removable system.

The primary data that we are concerned with is on the Novell server. This is the case management system, the bankruptcy system and the groupware system. This also is our smallest amount of data.

Due to the nature of the programs and the data, we make a complete backup of this data to a separate directory for everyday. These programs grow each day and over the years we have experienced corruption in our data files. Experience has taught us that sometimes we have to go back a few days to find a backup that has not been corrupted. Data corruption can occur and unless you try to access data in the corrupted area, you may not learn about the corruption right away.

On a daily basis, this same data is backed up to our removable drive. Just to be safe, we also backup the case management data to a USB flash drive, we have two or three of them, which we rotate and take off site.

The data on each local drive is backed up to one of the hard drives in our backup machine. This data is then backed up nightly to the removable hard drive.

The scanned data is also backed up nightly, both to one of the internal hard drives and then again to the removable drive. The hard drive in the server, which is only 4 GB in size is then backed up in it’s entirety to one of the internal hard drives.

To add to the confusion, we also have several images of the server backed up in different locations. At the present time, we do not have images of each local machine. We are in the process of upgrading up to 5 of the machines and as soon as they are configured, an image will be created. And we will take a copy of each image offsite.

Does this sound like it is overkill to you? Sometimes I think it is, and if I were starting from scratch, I would certainly do things a bit differently. I do like the fact that we have data backed up in more than one place. This has saved us several times over the years. I do like the fact that we take the data offsite. The primary database is taken offsite everyday. The rest of the data is take offsite at least once a week, usually a bit more often.

Using the removable drive tray allows us to quickly swap out the offsite storage drives. We recently upgrade the trays so that we don’t even have to turn the systems off.

Our next step is to set up a hard drive in a remote location onto which we copy the data that we take offsite. We are still trying to work out the details on this one. We tried using a USB drive that we could store somewhere a bit farther away from the main office, but someone, OK it was me, dropped it and it crashed.

In the next post I will tell you about another client, this one was a bit more paranoid about losing his data.