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, the modem is connected, dialed and uses the Lynx text browser to surf the internet. It’s slow-slow-slow, but totally amazing considering it is FORTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

Do you have anything tech that’s forty-five years old and still works? Probably not.

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 easy (there are many tools included) and also has the ability to creaty/edit partitions direct-on-disk.

This is actively updated software and not only supports standard file systems but network file systems as well.

Yes it is Linux based and yes it is free to acquire and use.

While it’s true you can use any Linux distro with a "Live" mode to recover data in the event of a crash, SystemRescueCd is specifically tailored for rescue functions to get to what needs to be done quickly.

Give it a try, you may like it.

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. Examples of this are blogs, photos, e-mail and anything else you specifically store online-only.

Here are two glaring examples of the worst possible scenario:

Continued

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 and laid down its own 90-day rule is a victory for privacy advocates. It’s a safe bet that Google and Microsoft will follow suit in short order.

When I say "sparse", I truly mean it. The previous data retention from Yahoo was 13 months. Google strips out some data after 9 months and Microsoft holds on to data for a whopping 18 months.

What does this all mean in simple terms?

For example, if you still use the same ISP you did 18 months ago, any search you performed on www.live.com (Microsoft) is still stored somewhere on a Microsoft server – even if you weren’t logged in with a Windows ID because the searches are recorded by IP as well as ID.

With Google, data is stored whether logged in with a Google ID or not, just like Microsoft. Every single Google search you’ve made from your home has been recorded and stored for the past 9 months.

For those that would say "Yeah, so?", consider how much web searching you do on the internet; it says a lot about who you are and possibly your family as well. Do you really want web companies privately researching you based on your search habits? Of course you don’t – but that’s what is happening at present, save for Yahoo.

Personally speaking I would applaud it if Google and Microsoft would adopt the same 90-day data retention Yahoo does. Fingers crossed.

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 answer that in a moment.

Bear in mind there literally is nothing that makes any CD-R a "music" disc. It’s just a marketing term. Any writeable CD-R can be a "music" disc and any "music" disc can have data written to it instead of audio tracks.

As far as the reliability of a "music" disc goes, that’s where you start to see the real differences.

Concerning reliability, a "music" disc is not as reliable as a data disc because they typically fail what I call the see-thru test.

The see-thru test is this: How transparent is the disc? If you hold it up to a light, can you see right thru it easily? And if so, how easily?

The more transparent a disc is, the less aluminum there is, the less reliable the disc will be in the long run – because you’re got more plastic than aluminum at that point. It will (not might) degrade faster.

To note: Truly good data CD-Rs have little to no transparency at all.

The only reason anyone ever buys "music" discs for data use is because they’re dirt cheap. However there are a few uses for those cheap discs:

• They’re good as throw-aways that you can give to friends (ex: burn a Linux distro on a cheapo disc, give it away..)
• They’re good for game disc backups. For example, I have an old game called Jedi Academy but I don’t use the original discs. Instead I copied them for my own personal use and use those for gameplay. And if the copies screw up, no big deal. I just make more.

It also should be noted "music" discs usually have a maximum write speed of 32x. That’s as fast as they’ll write and no faster.

So the only real differences is that "music" has an inferior life span and write speed compared to traditional data CD-Rs.

If you need some throw-aways, go ahead and buy a few.

But don’t use them as a primary backup.

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" data

You’ll notice that the two photos differ significantly as far as the EXIF data is concerned. In addition to the time and date, the make/model of digital camera is given along with all available photo information as well. In 2005 (the first photo), I had an Olympus D-535 camera. The second was taken recently with my Fujifilm Finepix A820. Two different cameras, two totally different sets of settings based on environment and what my point-and-shoot digital cam "thought" was best for each shot.

Both photos are also geotagged, meaning they both contain GPS coordinates stating exactly (more or less) where each photo was taken.

To note: No, I don’t have one of those super-duper-pooper expensive digital cameras that records GPS positional information. Rather I manually enter in positional information using Flickr’s map function using point-and-click or entering manual coordinates.

Concerning your privacy

With online photo services like Flickr and Picasa, you can opt whether or not to have this information shown.

Maybe you have a super-secret way of taking photos and don’t want people to know how you took specific shots. Maybe you simply don’t want people to know when you took specific photos.

Hiding the EXIF data is the way to do that.

Concerning the geotagged locations, the vast majority of digital cams are not GPS-enabled (and if yours is, trust me, you would know).

Flickr does have privacy options to only let specific people (i.e. your "friends" list) know where shots were taken if you geotag. Or you can simply not geotag photos at all.

I’m not familiar with Picasa’s way of geotagging privacy but if anyone has info on that, feel free to chime in with a comment on their options.

Also remember: If you e-mail a photo to someone direct from your digital cam, all the EXIF data is present within the file(s). This information can be seen even in the standard Windows Explorer as a column. If you don’t want this information shown for whatever reason, you need to bring the file into an image editor and re-save it to remove the EXIF data.

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 close by. If you don’t have one to spare, try a friend’s computer.

Interesting side note: Older optical drives with slower read speeds have a much higher chance of reading a maybe/maybe-not bad disc than newer drives do because they don’t spin up as fast. Being that laptop optical drives are typically slower, if you have a laptop with a CD/DVD drive, try that. You might be successful.

Software method: Using Nero Burning ROM to attempt a super-slow-read copy

Nero Burning ROM (paid application) has been around a long time and is arguably one of the best disc copying software utilities ever made – if not the best.

If the disc you have will spin up but will not read, Nero might be able to save it or at least at a good chunk of it.

When you copy a disc using Nero Burning ROM (part of the Nero 9 suite), it will first try to copy at the maximum speed possible. When it runs into a part of the disc it can’t read properly, Nero will purposely slow down the drive (all the way to 1x if necessary) and try every single possible way to read the data. If it can’t read the data, it will skip that part and go to the next readable portion and move on.

The disc copy make take a really long time – but you might be able to save whatever was on the disc or at least a good portion of it. If it’s just a portion, better to have something than nothing, right?

I have saved discs with Nero Burning ROM that no other app was able to copy, so I can attest that yes, it does work when all others fail. And if Nero fails.. well.. try washing the disc first (see below).

Physically doing something to the disc: Washing it first

CDs and DVDs are made of two things, aluminum and plastic. The outside shell is plastic, the shiny part is the aluminum. The part that is scratched is the plastic.

Plastic can be washed with just about anything, but the goal is to not scratch it any further.

Paper towels and non-scented ammonia-free glass cleaner (like Windex) do work. Why paper towels and not tissue paper? Because tissue paper is an abrasive and will scratch the plastic surface even worse.

Tip on cleaner used: Do not use anything labeled as a degreaser (like Formula 409). "Straight" glass cleaner is what you want.

Tip on paper towels used: Unscented, plain, no patterns such as Bounty or Brawn.

(Incidentally this is the same reason you never clean eyeglasses with tissue paper because it will scratch those up over time as well.)

Can you read a disc that is physically cracked?

Example: You leave a disc on the couch and forget about it. Later on you go to sit on the couch and watch TV, then…

CRACK!

Uh-oh. You sat on the disc. Very cracked but still together.

Is the disc still readable? Believe it or not, yes – or at least with CDs. A CD which has an "outside in" straight crack in it (from the outer edge to inner edge but not to the center) can be read as long as it’s even with the rest of the disc. However there is the possibility the disc might shatter when in the optical drive. Chances are this probably won’t happen – but it might.

DVDs when cracked usually cannot be read at all. If this happens to you, toss the disc out because there’s not anything you can do about that.

Tip to avoid this scenario: Don’t sit or step on discs (duh).

[Cracked CD photo by hermanturnip]

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 activate Time Machine. You’ll take a very graphical trek into time (pictured to the left) where you can find the old version of the file you want and restore it.

But, did you know that Windows Vista has something somewhat similar to this? Yes it does and it is called Shadow Copy.

Shadow Copy is built into all versions of Windows Vista, although only Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate have the necessary GUI setup to work with it from Explorer. But, the idea is that it allows you to browse back in time and restore a file from a past restore point. Shadow Copy is more or less the replacement for System Restore in Windows Vista. If you are running Vista, it runs by default as a Windows service.

Using Shadow Copy, you can restore a single file relatively easily. To do so, right-click on the file you wish to restore. You can also right-click on an entire folder. Then choose “Restore Previous Versions” from the context menu. You’ll be presented a list of dates for which you have restore points for the file. Click Open to view it as it was on that day. To restore, just hit Restore.

If you are not running a version of Vista which has this built into the GUI, you can still use the system by downloading a utility called ShadowExplorer. Using that program, you can browse to a particular restore point in the date dropdown, then find the file or folder you wish to restore and select Export.

An Equivalent to Time Machine? No.

On the Mac, Time Machine backs up every hour. In Windows, it creates restore points on a schedule you set. Usually once a day. Any file you wish to restore would need to be tied to a restore point. A restore point is just that – an entire set of files for your computer so you could restore the whole thing. So, given the nature of it, this is certainly NOT Time Machine. Apple’s Time Machine is much easier to use and is much more thorough in the backups it does.

Also, Time Machine is set to back up to an external drive. Windows Shadow Copy creates restore points on the system hard drive. This defeats the point usually because hard drive failure is one of the more common reasons to have this type of system in place.

So, Shadow Copy certainly should never be your replacement for a good data backup policy. Mac users, Time Machine can be your backup policy and you need not worry about it aside from that.