For anyone that’s ever seen an episode of Hoarders, you know that hoarding is bad because it can lead to destructive habits that can significantly decrease the quality of life. Data hoarding is not the same as regular hoarding because you’re dealing with data and not physical items. And there are some out there who never delete anything. Some keep...

Some of you out there may have read stories like this one and may be confused at the fact as to why Google of all companies uses tape as one of its backup mediums. After all, they own tens of thousands of servers that perform tens of thousands of redundant backups, so what would be the point? The point is one that escapes anyone that hasn’t worked in a...

In the early-early days of internet, web pages and other information were retrieved via static file (ex: a plain HTML standalone document) or flat-file database via Perl. In the later days of internet, MySQL ruled the roost as the #1 choice most people use as a database backend. For example, WordPress blogs all unless specifically engineered otherwise use MySQL...

Someone was fortunate enough to recover a 300 baud modem manufactured by Livermore Data Systems, manufactured circa 1964. It is a true acoustic modem with the large transducers and all. And, the best part, it still works as the video below will show. This is as old-school as you can get concerning modems. Bear in mind this is pre-Hayes era. In the demo below,...

Having an "emegency rescue" CD is an important tool to have in your software collection. Sometimes it’s the difference between saving and not saving data in the event of a major screw-up in your OS or hard drive. There are several rescue type products out there, but one worth looking at is called SystemRescueCd. This utility makes admin tasks...

The advice to back up your data is something that is probably said at least once every 5 seconds by some random person on the internet. Every person who says this is 100% correct. You should back up your data often. However what isn’t ordinarily covered is how to back up your data that you have out there on the internet, i.e. external or cloud data....

Very recently, Yahoo! announced it would limit some (keyword there) of its data retention to a sparse (and unheard of) 90 days. Privacy advocates have been screaming loudly for a very long time that web companies – particularly search engines – hold on to data that can personally identify an individual for far too long. The fact Yahoo has stepped up...

When optical drives started to become the norm in home computers, all of a sudden there were two types of CD-Rs for sale, the data kind and the "music" kind. As to the question of whether or not a CD labeled as a "music" disc is safe to write data to or not, the answer is yes. Are they as reliable as "regular" data CD-Rs? I’ll...

EXIF is the EXchangeable Image File format and is used by digital cameras to store information about the photos you take. Everything and the kitchen sink (figuratively speaking of course) is stored every time you take a photo. Here are two examples of EXIF data using the Flickr service:  View EXIF "meta" data  View EXIF "meta"...

You may have a disc, be it music or data, that is scratched and will not read in your optical disc drive no matter what you do to it. Can it be saved? Possibly. There are a few things you can try to save that disc. Hardware method: It could be just the drive you’re using If the disc won’t read in your optical drive, try another one that’s...

When Apple OS X Leopard (10.5) was launched, one of the biggest marketing points was the inclusion of Time Machine. Time Machine is the backup program that goes on automatic when using OS X and backs up every file on your Mac automatically to an external hard drive. If you ever want an old version of a particular file, just find the file in Finder and then...