Tag: time machine

For our February 20, 2024 meeting, we talked about backups and archives. It was preparation for World Backup Day.

Backups and archives are not the same thing. A backup is a copy of things you are working on, or your boot drive, kept specifically for restoring things in case of a disaster. If your hard drive or flash drive fails, you need a backup to get yourself up and running (most often on a new computer) as rapidly as possible. Using Time Machine to back up to a local hard drive is an example of a backup. Copying photos from your iPhone to your computer is a backup. Syncing things to iCloud or Google Drive is a backup.

An archive, on the other hand, is a collection of information that is important to you (documents, ledgers, photos — whatever is important to you) that is copied to a different device and stored away from your computer. Time Machine, iCloud, and Google Drive are not (necessarily) archives, but copying key documents from your computer to a flash drive and saving them in a safe deposit box: that is an archive.

Video recording of the February 20, 2024 meeting

Transcript of the February 2024 meeting

Pro tip: use your browser to search for particular words or phrases if you don’t want to read everything.

18:31:26 Okay. Today the presentation is going to start at 7 and we're going to talk about backing up your computer and archiving.
18:31:36 And they're not the same thing. But I'll get to that at 7 o'clock.
18:31:43 And in the meantime, Anybody have any questions that they'd like to ask?
18:31:54 Yes.
18:31:47 You can ask. Okay, at Lawrence you might be just probably discussing this at, you know, at 7 at the presentation, but I'm interested in finding out what are the most reliable external hard drives to back up an archive with for a Mac that aren't like overly over the top expensive so I don't know if you'll be suggesting that
18:32:21 Actually, I will be as suggesting that, but I'll tell you. I'll give you a brief answer to that.
18:32:30 The answer is for a backup is not quite the same as your everyday data drive for for an everyday data drive that you're storing things that are important to you, you probably want to have a quality drive.
18:32:42 For a backup drive, the important thing is that you actually have it and you have it turned on and you use it.
18:32:49 But the quality of the drive is not nearly as important because it's a copy. Of what you're working on rather than.
18:32:56 The the original it's it's not it's not it's not the bank fault it's the copy that's being sold in stores.
18:33:07 That's what your backup is. So. For that, basically just go out and buy, a hard drive.
18:33:15 There are some considerations for that. Go out and buy a hard drive that you actually have a port for on your computer.
18:33:22 Most, all the Macs sold today come with USBC connectors. A USBC is I happen to have a USBC connector right now it's this really small thing right here.
18:33:35 And the other one that's common is USBA. And you'll notice that this particular cable has both of them on it.
18:33:43 But every Mac sold today has a USBC and it's a small oval connector on it.
18:33:49 And so if you go out and just buy a dry, an external drive of the USBC connector, plug it into your Mac, your Mac should detect it and say, hey, you want me to back up to this.
18:34:00 The if you have an older machine that has a USB a connector, you want to make sure that it's a particular type of USB.
18:34:10 Which is called USB 3.0 or 3.1. And the reason is that the old original USB standard was quite slow.
18:34:19 And you don't want something that'll take forever to back up. So. Having having a reasonable Speed is is a good thing.
18:34:32 But in terms of what drive they are. I tell people that if you find something at Costco that's That's the right size that you should probably just consider buying it and and taking it home.
18:34:46 You do need to a couple things you need to do is you need to reformat it once you have it and when you're choosing the size You want to figure out how big the hard drive is on your, on your.
18:34:57 Home machine and get something at least twice that size. Even if you don't have your hard drive full.
18:35:04 If you have a 1 TB drive. You want to have at least a 2 TB.
18:35:08 Backup drive and it even if you're one terror right drive is even mostly empty you still want to have a 2 TB backup drive.
18:35:18 But I'll get into that during the the presentation and I'm going to I'm going to show off a variety of storage devices.
18:35:28 During the meeting. So I'll actually have give you some that you can. Look at and and think about.
18:35:33 Great. Thank you.
18:35:36 Any other questions?
18:35:40 I had a particular question. Got some old drives that have been really old. I mean, ancient. Their firew and It's like we have a very old computer and someone said you better get that info off of those drives onto your very old computer that accepts a 400 firewire before they get totally out obsolete and you won't be able to get the info off of them.
18:36:10 I, I agree with that. There's nothing out there right now that supports a firew.
18:36:16 So if your computer were to die. You can't really go someplace and have them pull the stuff off of those drives.
18:36:23 Because nobody has, there aren't any computers sold that support Firewire. So, yes, I would definitely, make that a fairly high priority.
18:36:34 If you have 2 Max, an old one and a new one. They can, you can use the old one to transfer stuff to your new one.
18:36:45 So as long as you have 2 working computers, you can get things off the old one. You can also buy a drive.
18:36:52 Well, actually, if you have fireware, if you have fireware, you're actually in a world of hurt because Most Firewire doesn't support high speed USB.
18:37:00 Which means that It would it could take forever to take the information off the drive. And you might have to resort to other means to get that information off.
18:37:11 But I would, I would say that that's kind of a 3 alarm fire in terms of getting the information off the.
18:37:17 Okay. Thank you.
18:37:19 Machine.
18:37:21 Now, I also have a lot of drives. They've got the old USB 2.0 and I know it's slow but I'm like that's where most they're old Western digital drives that's where all of my info is with you know I mean hundreds and hundreds of photographs that's USB 2 and we've got a what is it a little hub that will take the 2.
18:37:48 And put it into the new I Mac, which is a Ca USBC. So is that, are they going to be problematical as well?
18:37:59 Well, with the USB 2.0 drives, you just plug them into your hub and you just pointed at your new machine or your new backup drive and say, Go for it.
18:38:09 It'll be quite slow. USB 2.0 is 1.2, megabits per second.
18:38:15 And. Bye comparison USBC is It depends upon the type of drive you have. I have one that takes 40 GB.
18:38:27 Gigabits per second. Which is just it's like the difference of going into a completely dark room and going on to a stage with floodlights.
18:38:40 It's it's literally night and day in terms of the speed. With 40 gigabits per second.
18:38:52 Yeah.
18:38:46 I could transfer. 10 feature films in a second. And with your USB. A drive running USB.
18:39:02 Hmm. Okay.
18:38:57 2.0. That could take an hour for one. Video. So it's a quite a dramatic difference, but it doesn't make any difference.
18:39:09 You just, you plug in your old drive, you plug in your new drive, you tell your new computer to transfer from the old to the new drive and if it takes all night who cares.
18:39:19 You, you want to do this on your new computer and not your old computer because your old computer in addition to your old computer because your old computer in addition to having a slow USB connection.
18:39:28 Also has a slower processor and it just will take longer for it to transfer things. Your, your, NUM, IMAC can, it's, just, Loads faster than the old machine.
18:39:41 Yes, and we're afraid of that old imac is going to It's gonna go one of these days.
18:39:48 It's way it's really old. So I think, yeah, okay, we, so we'll transfer and you're right, the fire wire is what I think, yeah, okay, we, so we'll transfer and you're right, the firewire is what I really need to work on before that machine dies.
18:39:59 Yes.
18:39:59 Yes. Yes.
18:40:03 Okay, thank you.
18:40:07 Other questions?
18:40:08 Yes, I haven't. I'm having a lot of performance problems with my MacBook Pro.
18:40:14 I'm using a light room, Adobe Lightroom. To process my pictures and it is just dragging.
18:40:22 That as well as Photoshop. And it's that the MacBook Pro M. One Max.
18:40:30 So I'm trying to I've been on the phone with Apple 2 3 times now and I'm getting this thing as well don't open up anything else while you're running it.
18:40:39 Oh.
18:40:38 I've got 32 gigs of memory in this thing. And it's just, it's just ridiculous.
18:40:43 Any idea?
18:40:43 Okay, so well, I happen to have, I happen to use Light Room all the time. And I'm using on an Apple Silicon machine.
18:40:54 And it's not particularly slow for me. There are some things that are slow. like when it's, when I tell it to rebuild the index, the, lightroom has, it has a, it has, it has indexing function so you can.
18:41:10 Go.
18:41:13 Okay.
18:41:08 Yeah, they optimize. I optimize it every time I shut it down. Practically. So, but I almost have in order for me to, in order for the computer to show me the updates that I have made to a photo.
18:41:22 Sometimes I actually have to close out a light room and go back in. To clear the memory, I guess.
18:41:28 And so I can see what I've actually done to that total.
18:41:30 Okay, if you've closed it up before it was actually done, you might actually have some corruption.
18:41:36 There is a way I don't happen to remember off the top of my head. There is a way to tell Lightroom to go back and rebuild the indexes.
18:41:44 And that's something it will take a while if you have a lot of photos. Do you not happen to know how many photos you have?
18:41:52 Oh, probably 20,000 in that range.
18:41:55 Okay, how much spare room is there on your hard drive?
18:41:59 That I don't know right off hand, but I know I had a plenty last time. I looked.
18:42:05 Well, okay, here's, here's a, here's a rule of thumb.
18:42:14 Okay.
18:42:09 The way that light room and and, photos and I'm a movie and other things that do audio and visual.
18:42:19 If you have say a 2020 GB database. Even if you have 32 GB worth of RAM.
18:42:28 You have to have at least 4 times that amount of free space. So
18:42:34 I have a scratch disc. That I use but again that's only 1 GB though
18:42:41 Oh, well, 1 GB probably is not doing much good. And in fact, that, that if that's what you're using, it's your scratch.
18:42:51 Wow.
18:42:51 Good disk, it might actually be slowing things down. Because it's constantly reading things in and out of the scratch desk.
18:42:56 But you want to have you want to have a lot of free space because what light room in photos and imovie and all the rest of these things do.
18:43:06 They don't have everything in memory at once. They, I movie, for example, takes a, essentially a thumbnail of your movie and as you're doing things with it, it loads it into memory, writes it back out to memory.
18:43:21 And the same with light room and Photoshop. So they're not everything's in memory at one time.
18:43:26 So it's constantly using this space and the more stuff you have the more disk base it uses.
18:43:34 So The couple things that we do is give it more disk space to work with. And the other thing I would do is At some point and I don't remember how to do this off the top of my head launch light room.
18:43:48 Sure.
18:43:50 Pointed at your photo database and say rebuild the index and that will take if you have 20,000 photos that'll take a long time.
18:43:59 Okay.
18:44:04 Yeah.
18:44:00 If you've ever had to quit it because it seemed like it was taking a long time, what you're doing at that point is you're actually damaging the database.
18:44:08 So tell it to to tell it to go and do its thing. Well.
18:44:07 Oh, Oh, just be patient. I really thought I had, but how would I know if I had a virus?
18:44:18 Maybe I'm thinking a virus may have done this because I didn't always have this problem.
18:44:19 Does it? Well, viruses don't normally affect photo applications. Viruses, you'll notice that you have a virus because it screws up your mail or it'll screw up your web browser.
18:44:32 Oh, no.
18:44:37 Yeah
18:44:32 But, it not, Photoshop. Not, Not light room.
18:44:41 Okay.
18:44:40 Okay. Oh. If you have time, another quick question. So this.
18:44:46 A scratch just that I have I used to have plugged in to the one of my USB ports on my MacBook Pro again, left hand side if I plug that in it gets my operating system keeps ejecting it without me knowing it.
18:45:02 I'll come back to my computer. It's you've ejected a disk.
18:45:05 Incorrectly or whatever the heck that message is.
18:45:07 Okay, that's that's probably it depends. Is this a 1 GB disk?
18:45:13 Yes, but here's the thing the previous MacBook Pro I had did the same exact thing
18:45:20 Well, yes, but is it 1 GB 1 TB?
18:45:23 No, 1 TB, I'm sorry, not one, Yeah, Yeah.
18:45:25 Okay, okay. One terabytes, a horse of a different color. It could be, do you happen to know the manufacturer?
18:45:32 Well, Sandys is the one, but it's done it with I know the previous backup pro I had before prior to this actually did this for every different drive I had and I had a number of different manufacturers of Western digital and this and everything else.
18:45:48 And it did this consistently.
18:45:50 Alright, when you got the drive originally. Did you reformat it?
18:45:56 Yes.
18:45:57 And how did you reformat it?
18:46:00 Through the operating system on the map.
18:46:04 Oh, what?
18:46:12 Yeah.
18:46:15 Right.
18:46:20 Okay.
18:46:02 Well, yes, but you see most. Most third party, most third party drives. Come formatted, using, fat, which is the, It's the operating system used by old versions of Windows and to work with with Photoshop and so on and so forth.
18:46:25 They need to be particularly with a MacBook with with an M. One MacBook. They need to be, formatted is APFS.
18:46:33 Okay
18:46:33 Which is Yes, I'm going to, among other things, talk about that when I'm talking about data drives because one of the first things that you do with data drive is reformat them.
18:46:39 Okay. Okay. Alright, I will try that. Thank you.
18:46:45 And well, you have to take everything off because of course if you reformat it will destroy everything.
18:46:47 Exactly. Well, if it's, it's on a scratch, it's not gonna matter.
18:46:52 But the reason, the reason why APFS it works is it's a much more modern.
18:46:57 File structure, it's sort of like if you if you go through and you're going to a a library that still has the old paper card catalog.
18:47:18 Okay. Okay.
18:47:06 That's kind of the. The fat format that Windows used to use. Whereas if you go into a modern library and they have a computer terminal, you're using a computerized database that's the card catalog and the computerized database is much faster and that's basically what APFS is compared to.
18:47:26 Okay, I I will try that see how it goes. Thank you so much
18:47:31 Any other questions?
18:47:31 Hmm.
18:47:32 I have a question. I have an imac that I purchased in 2,019 November 2,019 and I'm having a lot of trouble with it.
18:47:44 It's running slowly. And then when I go in. And put in my password when it's needed and then it doesn't recognize my password.
18:47:53 And then they go and change my password and it's all confirmed. And then I go in and try to get into something where I need my password and it doesn't recognize my password that I just changed.
18:48:05 Pastor.
18:48:05 So I'm wondering if I got hacked or if I have a
18:48:08 No, when you say password, when you, where are you entering the password? What are you doing?
18:48:13 Well, my Apple ID, cause I I decided I would go in and see if I could find some answers to this.
18:48:26 Okay.
18:48:20 It's my. The whole system is running really slowly. I mean, just really slowly. And and and so I went into you know the Apple Care place.
18:48:32 Or not app anyway and you have to give your Apple ID. Which I did and they didn't recognize it.
18:48:39 And it shook and said, you know, no, so. So I did a recovery and with through my phone because they had my phone number and and then I changed it.
18:48:50 And they that it was okay and then the next time I needed to get back in. It didn't recognize it.
18:48:58 So I'm having trouble with. Apple IDs and, IDs that are connected to.
18:49:05 You know, my different mail accounts.
18:49:09 Okay, the first question, what kind of machine is this?
18:49:12 An imac, it was, it's, it has 6 gigahertz.
18:49:18 8, 8 GB. And I'm running on Sonoma, 14 to point 2.1.
18:49:26 Okay. This is not something that you can fix unfortunately. The first thing I'm going to tell you, but I would I would highly recommend that when you buy a Mac today, no matter what kind of Mac, whether it's a desktop machine or laptop or something, that you get 16 gigs of, memory.
18:49:47 Okay.
18:49:47 And the reason is Apple will say that it'll work fine with 8 GB and that's true, but
18:49:54 When it has 8 GB of RAM, it means that it's constantly going to be writing things out to disc.
18:50:01 And reading things off of disk when it runs into memory issues. And so you'll never run out of memory, but it'll be constantly writing and reading and writing and reading when it bumps up against the limit.
18:50:16 And to give you an example of how can run out of memory, if you run Chrome. You can use that 1 GB of memory for one page.
18:50:25 Okay.
18:50:25 So if you have 3 tabs open. You could use up 4 GB worth of memory just for Chrome.
18:50:35 Okay.
18:50:32 And then the Mac needs to do other things as well. So if you had like, 20, or 20 tabs open, you could be using 20 gigs of memory, which means that every time you switch a tab, it has to write stuff out and then read stuff back in for you just to change tabs.
18:50:47 Well.
18:50:48 So Unfortunately, with the Mac you have, you can't really add more memory. Most If 2,019 you're probably have a machine.
18:50:55 I think I'm ready for a new machine and I was considering the Mac Mini that you talked about a couple of weeks or a couple of months ago.
18:51:04 Yes.
18:51:04 And I thought I would just go into an Apple store and. And then with my current imac and have them transfer everything.
18:51:14 Yeah.
18:51:14 And then, and then I have to have a monitor, some kind.
18:51:18 Right. The nice thing about the Mac Mini, my Mac Mini, I have a Mac Mini city next to me.
18:51:30 Oh.
18:51:26 It's got an LG monitor that I bought at Costco. So It you have to be a little bit careful about about the monitors because the monitors can actually slow down your machine if you get, if you get a low performance monitor, but But, no, I went to, I went to Costco and bought this, the monitor I originally was running it with.
18:51:57 Ouch!
18:51:50 I bought in Maybe 2,005. And what I, what I couldn't stand about it was that the color wasn't right.
18:52:01 Okay.
18:52:02 And I'm a photographer. So. It drove me nuts and I complained about it and Kathleen threatened to kill me if I didn't go by a new monitor.
18:52:12 Yeah.
18:52:18 Okay.
18:52:12 Was that the way you phrased it there? Yeah, she agrees. She threatened to kill me because she got tired of me complaining about it.
18:52:22 But in terms of that one issue is you probably have some memory issues but the second not not you personally but the computer these The second issue.
18:52:27 I do. That's true.
18:52:27 Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
18:52:31 Is that. That.
18:52:35 You really shouldn't be asked for your icloud password that much because the iPad, I mean, when you launch when you launch mail it goes out to icloud to get your mail and so on.
18:52:49 So it should know what your password is. If it's if you think it's missing it, then the most problem that people have with passwords is they accidentally turn on caps lock.
18:53:00 Or they do something to. To screw up the passwords of case sensitive. And so they'll do something like that.
18:53:09 I had this one person at work. That they were constantly having problems with their password and I was not working for the help desk and I kept on getting annoyed with them coming and asking me for help but they begged me to come over.
18:53:22 Okay.
18:53:22 Went to another part of our campus to go visit them. And I took one look at their desk and I knew what the problem was.
18:53:28 Their desk was very cluttered. They had paper that was touching the the keyboard and it was doing among other things touching the option key.
18:53:37 So when they thought they were typing in A's, they were actually typing in option A.
18:53:42 And so I, I saw what the problem was and I just made fun of him for 1520 min until they.
18:53:48 Clean the stuff off and then it steadily match, but magically started working. But usually if you have a password problem, it's because the cat of a caps lock issue or something else.
18:54:00 That you're doing. This one person I knew they had a keyboard that was supposed to help them with accessibility.
18:54:07 And it was set up in such a way that they were accidentally resting their palms on the keys when they were typing.
18:54:14 Yeah.
18:54:15 So there are a lot of things that you can do, but it probably has something to do with the.
18:54:21 Taste sensitivity of the of your bra. Of your password is probably not a problem with your account or being hacked or anything.
18:54:29 The other issue that some people might have is that the, the, your, map keeps track of passwords in the browser.
18:54:39 But if you change the password on your phone, your Mac. May not know that the password's been changed because it's storing it on the Mac and your iPhone change the phone.
18:54:52 So it's sort of like someone came along and changed the locks in your house while you weren't home.
18:54:57 So you come home and your key doesn't work in the lock anymore because it was changed behind your back.
18:55:00 So that's that's just that that's just a possibility.
18:55:02 Okay. Well, okay, then if I decide to go ahead and do get the Mac Mini go into an Apple store, as you suggested, then my keyboard, my current keyboard, my little magic keyboard that would still work on my.
18:55:18 My old track pad would work.
18:55:20 Yes, they both would work on the Mac Mini. The only thing that you can do on the new Mac Mini that you can't with your old keyboard is that even though the Mac Mini doesn't have a keyboard that comes with it, you can use your fingerprints to log in to it by using the extended keyboards that they have.
18:55:41 Oh.
18:55:41 Alright, there's this little button right here or my finger is. Is a, is a fingerprint button.
18:55:48 And now that may not mean anything to you, but it is kind of cool when once your password users press your finger there and it does it.
18:55:57 That's very cool.
18:55:57 But other than that, The other than that, the, the keyboard you have and the mouse you have will work with, with the Mac Mini.
18:56:06 Okay, on my track pad.
18:56:07 When, one other thing with the Mac Mini to think about a Mac Mini does not have a camera.
18:56:13 Oh.
18:56:12 You can get you can get webcams that stick on top of it but it doesn't have a camera.
18:56:19 So zooming would be a problem.
18:56:27 Okay.
18:56:19 Zooming well it's you you can go out that you can get web cams for like 70 80 bucks that they just clip on the top of your monitor so they Sit there and do a thing, but then the webcam will want to plug into your Mac.
18:56:41 Okay.
18:56:37 And so that's another one of your ports being used for the camera. I really like the Mac Mini, but I you do have to kind of think through the fact that it doesn't have everything that it I Mac or Mac book has.
18:56:47 Yeah.
18:56:50 Because it's just the computer.
18:56:53 Okay.
18:56:50 Yeah. Right, okay. Yeah. I appreciate that.
18:56:58 Thank you.
18:57:01 Minutes. Okay.
18:56:59 Okay, it's about all we can have one more question before we Start the presentation.
18:57:07 Any other questions?
18:57:11 Okay, I have one. Just is about signing in last time I didn't sign in because I didn't know how to do it.
18:57:11 Why is Okay. I'm gonna have something for you to sign in in a second or 2.
18:57:24 All I have to do is find where I put it. Oh, there it is. I'm going to paste the.
18:57:33 Address in the chat window.
18:57:43 And in the chat window now, there should there's the link that'll take you to the sign in form.
18:57:51 Why is everyone shy and how they're, they're Cameras turned off.
18:57:57 I feel lonely.
18:58:03 Madam President, do you have anything you want to impart to us?
18:58:08 No? You're, you're microns turned off.
18:58:16 I don't have much to say. Just welcome everybody. And don't forget to sign in.
18:58:21 But he'd already said that.
18:58:25 Doing it now.
18:58:28 I'll just turn it over to the treasurer since we have a few. Yearly dues that came in.
18:58:36 Yeah, we actually we have a total right now of 17 members that have paid their dues. And so I will balance right now is 2,300.
18:58:50 Dollars. And 93 cents. But the also received 3 dues from 3 people that are not on our list.
18:59:02 Lawrence. So I don't see them on here, but if anybody knows somebody or any of those 3, we would like to get at least the email address.
18:59:13 So then Lawrence can send him the invitations. Hmm.
18:59:22 Yeah.
18:59:18 Yes, that would be. Quite useful. Also. Also, I wanted to tell you that I have a bill.
18:59:27 To send you. But, it's for like, I don't know, 60 bucks.
18:59:29 Yes.
18:59:32 It's for the discussion board software that we have in the. On the website.
18:59:34 Oh good. Yeah, just. Yeah, just send it to me. So does anybody know a Julia H.
18:59:43 Johnson?
18:59:48 She paid to do but I couldn't find the Any information on the?
18:59:55 Computer. On the database. Okay.
19:00:02 Okay, there. Is a Julia Johnson that showed up someplace.
19:00:12 In my email.
19:00:11 So. I'm
19:00:16 Yeah.
19:00:18 Could you send me a list of those names because they they might have written to me and I just need to go look for them.
19:00:26 Oh, okay. Yeah, I can do that. I'll just send. Then the other name is Jay Hansen and Manson.
19:00:34 Those also sound vaguely familiar.
19:00:37 Okay.
19:00:35 No. Well, I am Peggy Hanson. Real name is Margaret. Is that, so I sent a check.
19:00:45 Oh yeah, that that clears that up. This is for a piggy.
19:00:47 Yeah. James and Margaret? Yeah.
19:00:53 Yeah, but it's, that's her. She's saying. Oh, okay. Oh, okay.
19:00:56 Yeah, I'm Margaret. Yes, yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. Yeah.
19:01:03 I'd love to, I'd love to change that, but I can.
19:01:02 No problem. Okay, are you getting the emails? Oh, okay. Then, and that's solved then, okay.
19:01:08 Yes, yes I can. Yeah. Right, thank you.
19:01:15 I'll send you the other one, Lawrence. That I couldn't find.
19:01:18 Okay. Margaret, you said you can't change the name. You mean the name and zoom?
19:01:26 No, I'd like to change my name from Margaret to Peggy. Sorry. Yeah, I know.
19:01:29 Oh, oh, I see. That you have to go to courthouse for that, but.
19:01:36 I'm not, I'm not willing to pay the fee.
19:01:38 Several people are they don't like what zoom calls them like this one woman. She was having trouble with, so she, we had a zoom session and it, the zoom session said that it was iPhone.
19:01:55 Okay.
19:01:54 And she wanted it to actually have her name. And to do that you go into the Zoom preferences and you can.
19:02:00 And you can.
19:02:01 Yes, yes.
19:01:57 You should go. That will.
19:02:04 Anyway, tonight I was going to talk about, backups and archiving. And the reason why I this came up, I asked for suggestions for a topic and one person sent me a dozen suggestions and but at the same time I got several people who were having troubles with their computers.
19:02:28 And they needed to recover information. And one person also needed to recover, photographs. The, I'll talk first about the person with who recovered the photographs.
19:02:39 They had an iPhone that they had never backed up. And they lost the iPhone and it had pictures of their grandchildren and grand nieces and nephews and so on and so forth and they wanted to know how they could get that.
19:02:56 They had a new iPhone on order, but they didn't know how to get the the photos and I asked them if they had a Mac and they did and so I told them to log in to their Mac and launch photos and tell it to sync with icloud and they were astonished that all of their photos appeared on their their computer.
19:03:18 That works if you have less than 5 GB worth of photos because Apple gives you an I call out account for free for up to 5 GB worth of data.
19:03:30 That data can be email, messages, anything you have. If it totals 5 GB or less, you can use the free account.
19:03:38 Anything more than that, you have to pay. For extra storage. Kathleen and I, we have a 2 TB.
19:03:47 Account that's for that Kathleen uses and I uses it and it's a family plan so our daughter also uses it.
19:03:54 Our daughters in England. So you don't even have to be on the same continent, but collectively we can use up to 2 TB worth of storage and I think right now right this very second.
19:04:06 We're using, I don't know. Something like 300 GB. So it's, a nice way of backing stuff up.
19:04:17 That Apple gives you automatically, but most people only use it for their phones and they don't realize that it also works.
19:04:23 For their max and iPads and other thing. So that one was easy. What was more difficult was that a woman had a.
19:04:34 A MacBook Air. And the MacBook Air basically died. She couldn't get it to do anything at all.
19:04:42 She pressed the power button. And nothing would happen. It would just come up with a blinking question mark.
19:04:50 The blinking question mark is usually a bad sign because it means that the computer looked for the disk drive and it couldn't find it.
19:04:59 And if it can't find the disk drive, it says, you know, basically where is it?
19:05:03 And I tried some secret voodoo to get it to find the disk drive and it could not.
19:05:09 In her case, she had a new machine. That she was using, but she hadn't recovered everything off the old machine because while she was setting up the new machine she continued to use the old machine so when it died everything that hadn't been transferred initially was lost.
19:05:27 And this is where I'm having a good backup policy helps. The third instance was somebody who had a Mac Mini to run their route business.
19:05:38 It was an old Mac Mini and it died. And they had a new machine that they were not using for their business.
19:05:45 They had no backup for their old business at all. And when the old Mac Mini died, they lost everything.
19:05:52 And finally there was one other person who had and imac on order. And when they ordered the new imac, I told them, go out and get a hard drive and back up everything off of your old.
19:06:05 I, Mac, and they said, sure, they would do that. They didn't do that.
19:06:08 So when the new imac came they basically had nothing. To put on it. Fortunately for them, They, were able to dismantle.
19:06:21 The imac, which by the way dismantling an imac is a horrendous task.
19:06:27 And then they put the old drive into a case and they were able to suck things off of it.
19:06:35 But in all of these cases, both with the with the iPhone that. Was lost and the various machines that died.
19:06:44 They kind of save a lot of grief with a backup strategy. And I want to talk about different things that you can back up with.
19:06:51 And part of it is going to be a history lesson. When the Mac first came out. It had one.
19:07:00 Floppy disk drive. It was a 3 and a half inch floppy disk. And it's held 400 K.
19:07:06 Of information. By comparison to what that means today. A iPhone if you just take on any old iPhone today the smallest picture you can take is gonna be about 3 or 4 MB.
19:07:21 It means that you'd have to actually have a small stack of these floppy disks just to hold that one photo that your that your iPhone took.
19:07:31 The amount of the amount of storage space that people use today is phenomenal. In the days that they Okay, 400,000 Byte.
19:07:43 Little minis if you wanted to do something else you had to pop out the disk and stick another disk in and you were constantly switching this back and forth on the on the Mac.
19:07:54 But today you don't have to do that because we don't use, 400,000 Byte floppies today.
19:08:00 When I initially started doing backups years ago, I used CD-ROMs and a CD-ROM.
19:08:08 If you format it on a Mac, you can store about 600 MB on a CD ROM.
19:08:15 So in terms of the using that, the iPhone pictures, as a good example, you can put a couple 100 pictures on a CD-ROM.
19:08:25 If you're lucky. But. On my new iPhone that I have.
19:08:33 If I shoot photo raw with this iPhone, 15. The photographs are 40 MB.
19:08:41 So if you think about it, I could get maybe 15 pictures on a CD ROM. Not very many.
19:08:49 We're just overwhelmed by the CD-ROM could do. If you stored it on a Blu-ray disk.
19:08:55 You could get about 12 GB, which you know now we're talking real numbers but the real problem with CD ROMs and blue rays.
19:09:03 Transferring data to those media takes forever. So if you want to write it to the CD or the or the Blu-ray disk takes forever and pulling it back takes forever as well.
19:09:16 So some faster ways to do it. If you have a MacBook. You probably have a small slot in the side that allows you to put in a SD card.
19:09:27 This is an SD card. Actually, it's in a case, but.
19:09:32 This is the SD card. It's really small. It's a little bit bigger than about half your thumb size.
19:09:39 This particular one is 128 GB. And at some point I'm gonna stick it in my machine so you can see.
19:09:46 How much space that that is. And, That's a hundred 28 gigs on this little flat thing.
19:09:54 This is a thumb drive. And this particular thrum dive also holds a hundred 28 gigs.
19:10:02 And if I push it up on one side, it's got a USBC port so it'll fit into a modern Mac.
19:10:09 I push it the other way and it's got a USBA port so it'll fit into an older Mac.
19:10:14 And this is also one way that you can actually transfer information from an old machine to new new. You stick it into your computer.
19:10:22 Copy it from the old machine, stick it into your modern machine using the. Port at the other end and copy it to your new machine.
19:10:30 And I use this basically when I want to do grab things. I'll put things on my church computer.
19:10:36 My church has an IBM. Doesn't have USBC. So I use the USB.
19:10:42 A, this kind of connectors called the USBA connector for the machine at church and I use the USBC for the one at home.
19:10:48 Yeah.
19:10:50 But that's for fairly small task and that's not really good for backup. That's good for transferring information.
19:10:58 You can transfer information. Using SD card, you can transfer information using thumb drives, but it's not really good for backup.
19:11:05 And I'll start with the phone. If you have an iPhone and you take photographs with it, spend the money to purchase a bigger icloud.
19:11:17 Plan. The one that you get for free is it's you get 5 bucks. But the larger ones start at I think it's 99 cents a month.
19:11:27 So for like 12 bucks a year, you can have more storage. And I don't remember exactly how much that is.
19:11:33 But it's not a heck of a lot of money and you get a lot more storage. And if you have an iPhone, the nice thing about it is that you're it'll just automatically store all your photos if you if you tell it to sync it to iclap.
19:11:48 It'll automatically store your photos. An eye cloud. So they're gonna be on your phone but they'll also be on iPhone because they're on icloud it also means you can pull them down and put on your computer or put them onto your iPad or something like that.
19:11:59 The best by far backup plan for an iPhone is to spend $12 a year and get a bigger icloud.
19:12:09 And if that's not enough, then spend, I don't remember what the bigger plans are, but it's not a lot of money to get quite a bit more.
19:12:17 Storage on icloud. The one thing that you absolutely have to have is you have to have decent bandwidth because If you can see this Zoom session, you probably have enough bandwidth to take advantage of icloud.
19:12:32 For your computer though you're going to need an external drive. And I'm going to show you a couple of external drives and then I'm going to show you.
19:12:42 How I use them. This is an external drive. It's made by a company called the C, which is French.
19:12:49 It just means the company. And this is a USBC. 3.1 drive, which means that uses a.
19:12:57 Yeah, USB 3.1. So it's fairly fast. And I just plug it into my Mac.
19:13:05 I don't even need a power cord for it. It uses power for the Mac to power it.
19:13:09 And it'll work on a on a MacBook as well. If you have a MacBook, running in a battery, probably not a good idea, but if the Mac looks plugged in.
19:13:18 Then it'll just be powered from them. From the MacBook. This is one type of drive.
19:13:24 This one.
19:13:24 How much does that cost?
19:13:27 I bought this several years ago and I have no idea. But I'll get to the prices in a second, but this is.
19:13:34 This is a USBC and it's a big. It's a thick thing because it's designed to actually be traveling around with you.
19:13:41 So, you can put it in a backpack or something, our suitcase and take it with you.
19:13:46 This is also a a, USB drive, but this is the USBC only.
19:13:54 And this is, I think, 2 TB. And I think this is 3 TB.
19:13:59 Hmm.
19:13:59 The orange one is 3 TB, but they have bigger and smaller ones. It'll look the same.
19:14:04 And this 2 TB one, again, this one doesn't even have a way for you to plug it into power.
19:14:10 The only way you can power it is by plugging into the machine. And so this is both for data and for.
19:14:17 Power and you can back up to these. And the nice thing about these is that they're small enough that if you have a laptop you can carry it with you.
19:14:25 So that you can back stuff up no matter where you are. For what I have at home, I have a permanently attached, drive.
19:14:36 Hooked onto the computer I'm using right now. Kathleen uses a she backs up over the air.
19:14:43 She has a laptop. She has a MacBook that she backs up over the air to a time capsule.
19:14:49 Apple doesn't make them anymore. But a time capsule is basically a wireless high speed wireless router that among other things has a disk drive and ours has a 3 TB disk drive and her Mac, she turns it on and without even asking it just.
19:15:08 Sees when the lac time is backed up and backs up anything that needs to be backed up. New so she doesn't even pay attention to it.
19:15:15 Kathleen has a PhD in healthcare informatics. On a technical level she knows way more about the computers than I do.
19:15:24 And the reason why she's backing up to the time capsule is that she never bothers to back up.
19:15:30 So I found a way that the computer just backs itself up because that's just not on her.
19:15:38 It's not on her radar is something that she needs to do. So that's those are different kinds of ways to back things up.
19:15:47 Now, how do you back stuff up? I'm going to do a demo at this point and I'll, I'll show you.
19:15:52 And to do that, I need to start sharing my screen.
19:16:02 And you don't want to see that. And you don't want to see that. So I'll make those disappear.
19:16:12 Over here. To the side of my machine. Is, a list of my hard drives.
19:16:19 And I realize there's a picture of. Swans and so on so forth. But this drive right here, time travel is my backup device.
19:16:28 And I use, time machine to back up to it. And if I click on it and say, get info by going to
19:16:39 Going to the. Farm on you and say get info. It'll pop up and it'll say that it's a 4 TB drive.
19:16:50 And it's got 1.4 one terabytes free and it's got 2.5 what's 2.6 TB used and down here oh here right where it says format and I know that you probably can't see this
19:17:05 But take my word for it. It says APFS case sensitive. I wanna show you another drive.
19:17:15 This is a drive that I stored data on. And this one says, Mac OS extended journals.
19:17:22 And my boot drive says.
19:17:30 So I have 3 different filing systems. This is a data drive The one this is, Tanto.
19:17:38 Once this time travel says APF, that's case sensitive and my boot drive on my Mac says it's APFS and APFS stands for Apple file system.
19:17:50 And APS first case sensitive is the one that's weird. And the reason why it's APFS case sensitive is when your Mac is using time.
19:18:02 Capsule, a time machine to back up. It needs the files to be K sensitive. Normally when you go looking for something on your Mac, doesn't care if you is an uppercase A or low case A or anything like that.
19:18:13 But when it's backing stuff up, it wants to back stuff up the same way that you stored it.
19:18:18 And if you stored it with upper and lowercase characters, you want that to be preserved. So before you use a machine, any kind of external ride, the first thing you should do is erase it.
19:18:29 And I'm going to demonstrate that in a second, but I wanted you to just kind of keep in your mind the fact that these are formatted to work with a Mac.
19:18:36 They're not formatted to work with a Windows machine or anything like that. Therefore, manage to work with a Mac.
19:18:42 And now I'm going to plug in. The dry. And let's see if it works this way.
19:19:03 And it showed up. Okay. This thing says, let's see. This is the drive.
19:19:08 It's a it's a 2 TB. I thought it was 3 TB.
19:19:11 It's a 2 TB hard drive. And if I do get info on this to see how it's formatted.
19:19:16 It says that it is. But we're going to need to pretend that it says that it's actually format for Windows or something.
19:19:28 If you go out and buy an external hard drive from Costco or any place else is probably going to be formatted to work with Windows.
19:19:35 Your Mac can work with it, but it's still probably going to be formatted to work with Windows.
19:19:38 So the very first thing you should do is to launch disk utility. And so I'm pressing the command key on my keyboard.
19:19:46 That's the one that looks like a little clover leaf in the space bar and that brings up spotlight and I say disk utility it goes out and finds disk utility and launches it.
19:19:56 And I come down here to L's see. And I have choices up here at the top. It says I can do this first aid which checks the drive to see if the drive is healthy.
19:20:06 And that's what it just did and says, it's fine. Or I can partition it, which means that you break it into multiple pieces, which I never went to do, or I can erase it.
19:20:19 Now if I erase it, it gives me choices. This one that says X fat means MSDS.
19:20:29 Fat means MSDS. And then there's macos extended journal, encrypted, case sensitive.
19:20:33 This case sensitive is the one that it uses for time machine. Believe it or not, I'm not even going to care about that because I'm going to use this for time machine.
19:20:40 You don't even need to launch disk utility. I'm telling you this because the first thing you do if you do buy a drive is you should launched.
19:20:50 Discutility, pointed at the drive and tell it to erase it. So pretend I've already done that.
19:20:56 I've erased the drive. Now I'm going to tell it to I'm going to sell my machine to use disk utility.
19:21:02 I'm 2 years time machine and to do that I have time machine in my menu bar but let's say you don't have that in your menu bar.
19:21:10 Let's go to settings. And, that's not the settings I wanted. I wanted the settings, system settings.
19:21:19 And trying to find time machine is probably difficult. You can look in there and. But if you just type it in up here.
19:21:27 It'll go find it for you. So I type in time, it goes to time machine. And then you have some preferences here.
19:21:35 One of the options is. How do you how often you want to be backed up? By default.
19:21:41 A time machine backs up every hour. Would advise you not to ever change this, have it back up every hour.
19:21:49 And then the other thing you can do is tell it where you want it to back up. I'm already using Time Machine to back up to this.
19:21:57 Disk drive that I named time travel But now I'm going to add a second one. You can have multiple ones.
19:22:03 I pointed at, let's see, Petite meaning is a small company. Say setup disc and it says that I can encrypt it.
19:22:13 I don't want to encrypt it. You can if you want. Disk usage, don't care about limits.
19:22:19 I just say done. And I tell it to go do its thing. And among other things, you'll notice that the icon used to be yellow.
19:22:28 And now the icon. Is green. Because it's showing that it's a disc. That it's a time machine.
19:22:37 Disc instead of a data desk. And if I do get info on it. To look at the formatting.
19:22:46 It now says APFS case sensitive. So the first thing you should know when you're using time machine is that just stick an external drive in there.
19:22:55 You reformat it when it comes from the store just to make sure that it doesn't have anything on it that you don't care about.
19:23:00 And then you tell time machine to use that drive and it'll reformat it again. And when it does, it makes it case sensitive so that it can back stuff up.
19:23:09 Now, a couple things that people, some people tried to do, they try to get really cheap and they say, oh, I'm going to use it to store data because if you look at my Time Machine Drive.
19:23:23 It's got stuff on it, but it's also got 1.4 one terabytes free.
19:23:31 So should I store data on it? No, that's sort of like using your parachute.
19:23:33 Jumping out of the airplane using a parachute and on the way down you to decide you're also going to use it as a wedding dress.
19:23:41 You know, it's going to be a parachute. Maybe when you're not using it anymore, you can use it for something else.
19:23:45 But while it's being a parachute, just Leave it for that. It shouldn't do anything else.
19:23:49 The other problem with using your backup drive to store just regular data is that if the drive dies, you not only use the backup, but you lose the, originals all at once with just one loss.
19:24:04 So I took a perfectly good drive and I've now turned it into a time machine drive and it will back up to that.
19:24:11 Every hour. Now, how do you know whether or not, Time machines actually doing this job.
19:24:18 Well, one of the things you can do in this options is you can, hmm.
19:24:24 Why doesn't it? Oh, cause they have it in a different place now. I want I want the time machine menu in my.
19:24:34 In my. A menu bar and there's an there's a there's a way to stick it up there and I don't remember exactly how to do that.
19:24:43 Because it's already up there so it's probably not giving me that as an option. But I wanted up there because you can go and then ask it.
19:24:50 Browse time machine backups. And you get this.
19:24:58 Funky display and I'm glad the I really couldn't show it to you because, mine is Sheen disappeared because it was trying to It was trying to show you the time machine but It'll show you the time machine backup so you can go and grab stuff that you've accidentally deleted all kinds of nice stuff.
19:25:17 But the other thing you can do is if you haven't backed up in a while, it'll tell you just do go and back up.
19:25:24 As an example because my spouses uses a laptop it's not plugged in all the time it's not necessarily connected all time and when she launches it might say I haven't been backed up in 4 days.
19:25:35 And if you go up to the time machine in the menu bar, you can just say. Back up and it'll start backing up.
19:25:42 A couple of things about the backup. The very first time you used my time machine to back up.
19:25:48 It could take quite a while. Depending on the amount of data that you have and how fast the drive is.
19:25:55 This is why you want to get at least a USB. 3.0 or faster drive. It could take a day or 2 to back up the first drive.
19:26:05 But after that, when it backs up every hour, it only backs up what has changed since the last backup.
19:26:12 So for some cases, like right now, it's backing up to my regular backup drive.
19:26:18 And it's telling you that it's doing a backup and you're gonna see it's gonna get over fairly quickly because not much has happened.
19:26:27 People are afraid that if they start backing up while they're doing something, they'll slow the machine down.
19:26:32 No, because from unnowder to the next you probably haven't made that many changes so just let it do its thing.
19:26:39 You don't have to look at it. You don't have to mind it. Several people have something found that they're utilities out there, allow them to look at the backup.
19:26:48 I recommend that you not use it because you can also damage the backup. My strong recommendation is everybody should back up and when you're backing it up, just tell time machine to do its thing and then ignore it.
19:27:01 And that's the best thing you can do for backup. In terms of backup devices somebody wanted to know what to What's a, a, A good drive for backing up.
19:27:18 And the, I will show you, cause I actually have a link here. I was show you what I use for my backup.
19:27:29 Hi, bought it off at Amazon. It's this drive. It's a Toshiba Drive and it doesn't that I'll tell you why this one I like it.
19:27:41 It's a little about at the time that I bought it was on sale for $99 and now it's a hundred 15 but It's a 4 TB drive.
19:27:49 It uses USBC. So it plugs right into my. Mac. And at 4 TB.
19:27:57 It's, twice the size of my. Boot drive actually my boot drive is only 1 TB.
19:28:05 So it's several times the size of my boot drive. But it's 4 times the size of my boot drive.
19:28:10 And I just set it up to be the time machine drive and I ignored it. And in terms of the brand is a brand important?
19:28:19 No. What is important? How fast is the interface and how, what is the fastest interface you can have on your machine.
19:28:28 If you have a modern Mac, you're going to have a USBC connector and it should be 3 USB 3.0 or faster or it might even be thunderbolt or faster.
19:28:39 That's good, cause it'll back stuff up all the time and it'll back it up quickly and you'll never even notice that if you have an older machine you might need to look at USB 3.
19:28:49 Drives because the USBC is not available. USBC is faster, but you want it to be fast enough so that if you ever have a disaster, it doesn't take forever for it to get everything back.
19:29:04 And, and this particular drive is, is what I have, but you can go on to Amazon and you can say, 4 TB type TB for terabyte external hard drive.
19:29:18 And it comes up with. Including the one that I had this, L's see, it's $134 for a 4 TB version.
19:29:27 The one I have is 2. So this is actually less money than I paid for mine several years ago.
19:29:33 But there are lots and lots and lots and lots of them. Or you can just go into Costco and you can see that they got a 2 or 3 or 4 or 8 GB, terabyte drive and they're selling it for whatever and just take it home and they only important thing is the first thing you do is reformat it because it's probably set up for Windows.
19:29:54 The woman who was asking the question about the light room being so slow. There's a good chance that the drive she has is formatted for Windows and once it gets formatted for the Mac.
19:30:05 Things will magically start. Working faster. But the other reason why you want to reformat drives is you don't know what they put on them.
19:30:14 Several companies and I'm not naming names right now to make people feel bad but Western digital a couple of years ago had a security issue.
19:30:24 They were manufacturing drives that came pre-installed with viruses. So anybody who had a Windows machine and they plug it in it would affect their machine automatically.
19:30:35 As they were coming out of the factory with a pre-installed virus. That wasn't intentional, but it's still a good reason to when you get the drive from Costco or someplace, first thing you do is reformat it.
19:30:46 And with a Mac format. But in terms of the cost, the cost is you can you can find if you if you actually tell it to sort load a high you might even be able to find a drive big enough for what you want that's that's Like, $99 for this 4 TB drive.
19:31:07 Buffalo is not really a great. Manufacturer, but I don't really care because it's back up.
19:31:14 Now, why do I not care about the manufacturer for backup drive? That's not your primary storage drive.
19:31:20 That is your backup. And it's sort of like having airbags in your car.
19:31:25 Do you need leather airbags? Nope. Just the ones that the manufacturer puts in the car as long as they haven't been recalled.
19:31:32 They're fine. You don't need fancy airbags. It's a safety feature.
19:31:37 So if you're if your backup drive dies what's what do you do? You go out and buy another backup drive.
19:31:44 It's you haven't lost your original data. It's the backup. So just go out and find something that you're comfortable with.
19:31:52 And reformat it and tell time machine to do its thing and then ignore it.
19:31:58 And that was an awful lot of. Verbiage in a small amount of time. Any questions?
19:32:07 Yes, so what what should I use if I'm, working on my, I'm storing my pictures on something else other than my laptop.
19:32:15 And I'm working on those pictures with Lightroom, they're stored on that disc. So maybe that's why things are so slow.
19:32:22 Yeah, the I mentioned that. Spormat it with disk utility. So launch disk utility pointed at.
19:32:30 Right.
19:32:31 Like this drive right now. I come along and I say erase and the important thing is that if you have a modern Mac that supports it, you want to use APFS, not APFS encrypted, not APFS case sensitive, just APFS, say, erase.
19:32:49 And it'll erase the dry.
19:32:48 Right. Okay, so I'm using, Toshiba disk for, for my photos that I'm working on daily.
19:32:57 So I should be using something better than that or.
19:33:01 Okay, just so I format it the right way. Yeah.
19:32:59 Oh no no, Tishiva is fine, but I would I would make sure that it's Right, it should be formatted the right way.
19:33:06 Okay.
19:33:06 The machine that I use for my backup is a Toshiva. I have no I have no complaints about Toshiba.
19:33:11 Okay, I was just concerned that it might be good for backup but not for something that I'm really relying on this to store my pictures.
19:33:19 Now it's Sheba's. I have I have opinions about hard drive manufacturers, but I had to have no particular problems with Toshiba.
19:33:31 And you.
19:33:28 Okay. And I'm using back plays, with the web to back up, so. I think I'm
19:33:36 Oh yes, well I was gonna get to that. That's, that's my next step that I was gonna talk about.
19:33:40 Okay. Okay.
19:33:41 But, Actually, we can talk about it right now. In terms of machines in your home.
19:33:51 You want to have a time capsule, you went went to either have a time capsule or an external drive that you use time machine on to back up things.
19:34:01 That's within your home. If we're backing it up someplace else, there are lots of choices.
19:34:07 I cloud is ideal because it's actually designed for the Mac and it's designed for iPads and it's designed for iPhones and it's not really that expensive.
19:34:18 For what you get. But another possibility is Amazon, is not Amazon, is Google. The trouble with Google is that you only get
19:34:30 You only get 15 GB for free.
19:34:35 But you can store all kinds of stuff on Google. Happen to have a hundred gigabyte plan because I share it with Kathleen and my daughter and we have it half full.
19:34:44 Some good news, bad news about Google. It's great for storing stuff, but you have to do all of it.
19:34:50 Manually. So all of the stuff that I have on Google, I've actually put there. And some of the things that I do are kind of weird like, This thing is to duplicate or backups.
19:35:03 These are backups of my website, my website every day at 3 in the morning, not every day, once a week at 3 in the morning backs itself up.
19:35:11 And it backs it up to Google. And this way it doesn't involve my my machines at home at all.
19:35:18 We could have a storm and they can knock out the internet here and my website will still be backed up.
19:35:25 So what I do with Google is probably not something that most of the rest of you want to do, but Google is a place where you can store stuff.
19:35:32 More interesting for most people especially where we
19:35:37 Is backblaze. Backblaze is an online backup. There hope that's their whole business.
19:35:47 They do online backup. And when we were moving out here from Maryland, I needed to.
19:35:53 I needed to.
19:35:57 Make sure that everything that we had on the East Coast showed up on the OS Coast and I was shipping among other things.
19:36:04 My computer, my computer went with, the movers. And if the movers had a problem or they lost the computer or was stolen or something, I'd be out on my data.
19:36:16 So several months before we moved, I bought a subscription to Backblaze and Back Blaze. If I can find the Icon here.
19:36:26 And. Backlays. Backways has a, it, it's a program, but it actually lives on your menu bar so you can keep track of it.
19:36:38 It'll back up your computer. And yes, yes, yes, I know that. I don't care.
19:36:44 Because I don't want to pay for it. But, It's backing up and I say what I went to back up and I give it a list of the drives that I wanted to back up and it backs up continuously.
19:36:55 It doesn't say that actually it says right here continuously and my last backup was at 7 10 . M.
19:37:04 This afternoon and right now I have 2024 TB worth of, of stuff on backblaze and it's in the process of backing up another 24 MB today.
19:37:19 So I have a staggering amount of stuff on back place and back blaze you pay. A yearly.
19:37:26 Backup and I don't actually remember products. Computer backup.
19:37:35 It is. Apparently you have to tell them what you want to do before they Oh, the pricing and pricing is here.
19:37:49 9 bucks a month or $99 a year. And it doesn't make any difference how much you store.
19:37:56 There's no limit. So in my case, it's 24 TB for if you were scattering, you know, like 500 GB for if you were scattering, you know, like 500 GB, it's still and 9 bucks in the month or $99 a year.
19:38:09 And I really like back place because again, just backs it up. And I, and I forget about it.
19:38:16 And if we have an internet outage, then it just keeps track of what needs to be backed up.
19:38:22 The next time, get, a, to talk to the internet will do its thing.
19:38:26 Most of the time, most most of the backup is taken to place between like 3 and 5 in the morning.
19:38:32 So I don't, I really have never noticed when backplace is doing something. If I'm doing something with my computer, it stops backing up.
19:38:40 So it doesn't, it doesn't argue with me, but I really like back place.
19:38:46 There is a referral program. So if I actually refer to everybody and you all. Join Black Place, I actually get a discount, but that's not why I'm doing that.
19:38:54 Yeah.
19:38:56 I just really like the service because again, I don't have to service because again, I don't have to pay attention.
19:39:00 The big thing with time machine, you set it up, you ignore it, it works. Back place, you set it up, you ignore it, it works.
19:39:08 Huge difference though is that time machine is a local backup. Where in back blaze is a remote backup and the difference there is if you want something it can take a long time to get it back down from back place.
19:39:23 Okay.
19:39:24 If you do, if you back up 24 TB and then you try to restore it.
19:39:28 It could take weeks. They have a service where if you want to, if you have a disaster, you want it restored, you can pay them and they'll put your backup on hard drives that they send to you and you pulled the stuff off.
19:39:41 And send the hardware drives back to them. But that costs more money. The nice thing about time machine, it's local, you want something restored, you just tell your Mac to restore it.
19:39:52 Another thing about a time machine that if you buy a new machine and you have a current backup, you can use something on your Mac called Migration Assistant.
19:40:03 And it's called.
19:40:06 Migration assistant, you tell it to do its thing and it continues and it wants access to Mike computer and I give it access to, I don't want to do that so I'm going to cancel that.
19:40:18 Go back. But I forgot it did that. One of the things migration this system does is it disconnects you from everything.
19:40:25 But one of the things that it does is that you if you have a new machine you launch migration assistant and you tell migration assistant to grow, grab your stuff off of the time machine, external drive.
19:40:39 And put it on your new machine. And then you go out to lunch and you come back and your new machine has everything that your old machine had on it.
19:40:46 As assuming that was backed up currently. That's a huge advantage of using time machine. It's free.
19:40:54 It's on your machine. It's reliable. It doesn't bother anything that you're doing.
19:40:59 The only requirement is that you have a machine that's properly formatted and that's available and you tell it to back up.
19:41:10 Any other questions?
19:41:14 Hmm. How are we doing on time?
19:41:18 We got another 15 min.
19:41:22 And since I'm here, I want to, I went to show you a couple things. I'm going to take my, I'm gonna stop the machine guys so I can show you.
19:41:34 What I'm doing, gonna take my USB card. And my USB drive, you'll notice that in terms of size, There, they both hold 128 GB, but they're the drive takes up quite a bit more space.
19:41:53 About these SD cards, SD cards, the Navy has the, I can't remember the US Navy audio visual.
19:42:03 Command or something there in Washington DC. They store all of the material on USB on these SD cards and they put them in these little Manila envelopes that you use for storing keys and such.
19:42:19 And they label it with a date and that's the material that they collected on news stories and press releases and everything that they're sending out and this is their archive system.
19:42:33 No.
19:42:36 Hmm.
19:42:30 They're stored on these SD cards and they got thousands of these SD cards. I think that's kind of peculiar, but it is a way of doing it that it doesn't use any electricity to store it and if they want something they just do what I'm going to do and I stick it in the machine.
19:42:46 And I've got to stick this in my machine. I'm gonna stick this in my machine.
19:42:50 I'm gonna copy some things to it. So you have a idea of. How it works.
19:42:57 And again, these things, if you have us, if you have a small slot about the size of a quarter on the side of your MacBook or behind your imac that's what these cards are that's what they go into.
19:43:11 Yep, that's what they're for.
19:43:17 Oh.
19:43:18 Hmm.
19:43:13 There usually is for storing, photographs. So I stick this into my machine.
19:43:24 And it'll show up on my desktop. Like right here. So this is my SD card.
19:43:33 Says it has a 128 GB worth of Storage on it and it just so happens that I have a Hey, a folder.
19:43:40 That I'm going to it's called test 3 and you don't care what's in it.
19:43:44 I'm going to drag it over here. And it's going to copy it and that just copied.
19:43:52 10, megabytes worth of stuff in about a second. So it and it made it an area dent in the capacity of the cart, but it's just a tiny little sliver, it's kind of a large fingernails the size of the SD card.
19:44:12 And my. Usbc card. I'm going to plug in.
19:44:25 So I noticed she pulled out over to the trash to extract it rather than just pull it out of the back.
19:44:31 Of the machine.
19:44:32 Yeah, if you pull it out of the back of the machine, you'll get a, I'll show you.
19:44:37 If I pull it out, I'll pull this one out so you can see what I'm talking about.
19:44:43 But I gotta drag something over here and I'll grab this folder and drag it there. And again, it's going to be pretty much instantaneous.
19:44:54 But if I pull it out of the machine, you'll see that you get an error message.
19:44:57 Hmm.
19:44:59 And. Where's the error message? Usually there's an error message that says that you dismounted to drive without unmounting it.
19:45:10 Oh, that reminds me that the woman who I had the drive that would disappear every once in a while.
19:45:15 If she's never formatted it for the Mac, it might think it's hooked up to a Windows machine and it's disappearing because the drive's going to sleep.
19:45:24 It doesn't know that it's actually being used. So. Do you have an external drive that disappears?
19:45:27 Hmm.
19:45:29 Oh, there's the message. This man can't can owner can't connect to an icloud.
19:45:36 Okay.
19:45:34 Never mind. That's a different problem. But, there should have been an error message someplace saying that I pulled a drive out and I wasn't supposed to.
19:45:42 Details.
19:45:43 Lord, so are you saying that if we're talking about archiving important files like I have a lot of fine art files, digital files that I'm not using, but as far as storage, long term storage, Are these reliable or like basically a morning a desktop?
19:46:10 It doesn't have to be a compact or anything because it's at home. What would you suggest is a most reliable brands?
19:46:17 Okay.
19:46:20 Archiving is different than backup. So far I've just been talking about archiving, but that part of the topic for tonight was, was, I've just been talking about backup, but part of the topic for tonight was archiving.
19:46:34 A backup is something that you use to recover from a disaster. So it's like an insurance policy.
19:46:39 Okay.
19:46:41 So you keep a copy of the work that you're working on constantly being backed up to a drive using time machine.
19:46:48 That's a backup. If I take my little SD card and I put all of my writings I've written about 2,000 published articles.
19:46:59 If I wanted to preserve these, or I wanted to send a copy of these to my daughter. I could put a 2,000 writings will fit on one of these cards with lots and lots of room because text doesn't take up that much room.
19:47:13 But what an archive is is a copy of what you're doing stored someplace else. And if you only store it next to your machine and someone comes and steals your machine, flush your time machine drive.
19:47:27 You they've taken everything. If you store it an icloud, icloud is not really an archive but because it's not at home you can recover it from icloud.
19:47:38 You can recover it from back place. But again, those are not arch archives. If I take this card and I put my writings and my photographs on it and then I put it in my safe deposit box.
19:47:50 It's an archive. It can't change. You, it doesn't get automatically updated.
19:47:56 So it's not a backup. But it is an archive of something that's important.
19:47:59 We have a safe deposit box downtown. And on it in that sake deposit box instead of having one of these, I actually have an 8 TB hard drive.
19:48:10 That. That I. Put everything on that hard drive. It's got copies of our married certificate and all, insurance policies as well as photographs and a whole bunch of other stuff.
19:48:26 Tons of stuff. That's on this drive in the safe deposit box. That is an archive because it's not with the machine.
19:48:36 Yes. Good.
19:48:36 It's separate. From the machine. And to have an archive, you can do that a number of different ways.
19:48:43 This little thumb drive holds a hundred 28 GB. That's a lot of stuff.
19:48:48 And if you take this thumb drive and put it in your safe deposit box, now it's an archive.
19:48:53 If you put the same information on this SD card, now this is an archive if you store it someplace else.
19:49:00 So the difference between a backup A backup gets constantly updated with your activities as you're doing them, whereas an archive is really important stuff that's stored someplace else.
19:49:11 Our marriage certificates not going to change. Our insurance policies aren't going to change. The baby photos of our daughter is not that they're not going to change.
19:49:20 So those are the archive that we keep in the states and the safe deposit box. An archive is a different thing.
19:49:27 And in terms of what to stick on an archive, just for SD cards, go out and get a name brand SD card.
19:49:35 This is made by Samsung. Samsung is what is one of the biggest companies when it comes to making flash memory.
19:49:42 Okay.
19:49:42 The other ones that I have are made for the most part by either sand disc or, or Sony.
19:49:49 Sand disc is owned by Western Digital and Sony is Sony. Sony invented this stuff, by the way.
19:49:55 The camera on an iPhone is actually made by Sony. You use a lot of Sony stuff that you probably don't even know about.
19:50:04 But for the archival stuff, yes, I go out and I get some Dame Brand SD cards with thumb drives or something and you can store them someplace else.
19:50:16 In my case with my terabyte drive, the terabyte drive, it happens to be made by Toshiba.
19:50:19 Because I want I want to be able to actually grab that archive and restore stuff. I have a need.
19:50:27 A an archive is not keeping an extra copy on your phone. It's not keeping an extra copy on your iPad.
19:50:35 Why? If you have a photograph on your phone, and it's also an icloud. If you delete it from your phone, icloud says, oh, I'm gonna delete it everywhere else too.
19:50:48 So that's kind of, you know, can be distressing if you don't know what it is.
19:50:52 Yeah, great.
19:50:56 Okay.
19:51:01 Any other questions?
19:51:08 I went to ask again for those. Who haven't. Signed in to.
19:51:19 Sign in to the form.
19:51:23 And I'd also, it, I stuck it in the chat again. The other thing is what would we like want to do?
19:51:32 Next week.
19:51:38 That's not.
19:51:36 And next next week, next month. In terms of topic. Next week I probably want to do something else.
19:51:45 Yeah.
19:51:45 And while you're, while you're thinking about that, I want to tell you about one of my big projects.
19:51:50 I've told you about archiving and backups and so on and so forth. In my case, I have 600 CD ROMs that I used for backup starting years and years and years ago.
19:52:04 One of my next big projects is to take an external drive. And.
19:52:11 Let's see.
19:52:11 You Seems to
19:52:21 This is an external. Cd-rom and Blu-ray dry that I plug into the Mac.
19:52:28 I'm going to stick this on my machine and copy the contents of all those CD ROMs.
19:52:41 Okay. Yeah.
19:52:35 And store it on either flash drives or something and then throw my CD ROMs away. And this is going to take a long time because on average it takes 15 to 20 min to empty a CD room.
19:52:50 And there's 640 MB in size and you saw how I could basically move 10 MB.
19:53:00 Instantaneously to a flash drive. So it's going to take a long, long time to empty all those CD ROMs.
19:53:08 But the recently where I need to do that. CD-ROMs have a life expectancy of between 5 and 10 years.
19:53:15 And I have some CD ROMs that are 15 to 20 years old. So I need to just.
19:53:22 Break down and decide I'm gonna spend the time to just stick them in there, copy everything off.
19:53:30 Okay.
19:53:31 Good project.
19:53:28 Take him out, throw it in the trash can. Yes. But I'm mentioning this because archiving.
19:53:34 Hmm.
19:53:37 Technology changes. All the CD-ROMs that I have. Can fit on 2 of these.
19:53:46 Nice.
19:53:46 And right now they fill up an entire closet.
19:53:46 You see. I don't feel good to throw him away.
19:53:51 The process of throwing them away though is not fun.
19:53:56 Oh no.
19:53:59 I, explained to my 6 year old, grandchild when she was here in, November?
19:54:07 October? October. I explained to her the process of what I was going to do and asked if I could get her to do it.
19:54:16 Okay.
19:54:14 And she thought about it for about 5 s to make sure she really understood what I was talking about and she realized that her grandfather was trying to scam her and she said no and walk away.
19:54:25 Yeah.
19:54:26 Yeah.
19:54:26 No.
19:54:27 Which is a reasonable, it's a reasonable response.
19:54:31 Yeah. No, it's thank you for all this info. And we wanted to know, have you had recently discussions about cybersecurity and malware and all that because we would like to know more with our with our max as to what kind of protection is necessary, etc.
19:54:53 Would that would topic.
19:54:55 Yeah, that was it. We actually had an in person presentation on that last. September? I did, we did a presentation.
19:55:02 Okay.
19:55:06 Was held at Trinity United Methodist Church. Cybersecurity for seniors is basically what I talked about.
19:55:11 Wow, no.
19:55:12 We talked about cybersecurity and privacy because they're both intimately tied. To one another.
19:55:19 But that's something that probably should be done at least once a year anyway. Because the the threats change a bit.
19:55:29 I don't know how many of you have seen the advertisements for Apple Vision Pro. Which is the virtual reality headsets you have.
19:55:36 On day one, several privacy people said that the way that the software worked, we presented a privacy risk.
19:55:44 Because the way you can share information. If you think about it. I'm recording this meeting and I'm gonna put it up on the website so the people who didn't come today can see what it is we talked about.
19:55:57 But in the process of doing this, I'm also recording bits and pieces of your homes and your face and so on and so forth.
19:56:05 We had a woman, member a couple of years ago. Who always turned a camera off and I met her in person at a time the in person meeting she said the reason why she did this is her ex-husband was trying to track her down.
19:56:22 So she was trying to be as mysterious as possible and she didn't want to photograph on here and then in the and the name that she gave was a prior name.
19:56:32 So it was hired for the trap down. All of us have reasons to keep some things secret and private.
19:56:39 And those things have have value to marketers. For example, if you have a thyroid problem. That's not necessarily something you want to go and tell everybody about, but if somebody knows that and they give that information to a drug company, you'll get start, you need getting spanned by drug companies.
19:57:00 And you can accidentally disclose this just by looking for drug. drugs on Google. What does this thing do?
19:57:11 And you asked that on Google. Google sells that information to drug companies and then even though they don't know your name or where you live, you can get spammed with ads for drugs for thyroid problems.
19:57:24 Hmm.
19:57:24 So. Security and privacy are intimately linked. And a lot of people think they have a virus or they think they've been hacked when they haven't.
19:57:35 But a lot of people give away private information all the time. Without being aware of it. So security in Iraq is actually pretty good.
19:57:46 Your ability to keep your your interest private though, you, I would say that most people are not very good at that.
19:57:54 So I remove cookies from when I after I go online, I go into Safari and go into settings and I.
19:58:01 Manage the companies. It's amazing all these websites that I didn't go to there.
19:58:08 Present in this list. You know, where they've left cookies and I take them away.
19:58:15 Okay.
19:58:14 Believe it or not, I used to do that. I don't do that anymore. I do that if like, for example, I did that with Google recently with with Google Chrome recently.
19:58:24 Because at that particular point it had about a 30 GB cache of data and I wanted to just get rid of it.
19:58:35 And I wanted to just get rid of it because it was slowing Google down. Most of the stuff that Google and and Safari and other things keep on you is done to make the browser run faster If you go to the, straight Macintosh user group.
19:58:49 Page for example, and you come in at the home page, the banner at the top doesn't really change that much that still has the same choices.
19:58:56 When you go from screen to screen to screen to screen, you don't wanna have it send all that stuff that's already sent you and that's what the cash does.
19:59:05 The cash keeps that stuff so it doesn't have to remember you from every page. If you log in to the a straight Mac site.
19:59:14 And you log in so you can ask a question on the forums. You want it to keep information about you because you log in, you ask your question, you press return, you don't want it to log you out.
19:59:27 Okay.
19:59:26 You want to go and look at the other things. So it has to keep a certain amount of information.
19:59:34 Okay.
19:59:32 Cookies are really not the issue. The issue is things that you are deliberately sharing with people that you don't realize have an implications.
19:59:43 I know government employees who got fired for email messages. They sent a private email message from one government person to another government person.
19:59:53 But that second government person was alarmed at what they said showed it to a supervisor and they got fired.
19:59:59 And that's because the email message was suggesting that somebody do something illegal. In my case, they wanted to kill the supervisor.
20:00:06 Another case, somebody wanted to know if they wanted some drugs, but in both cases it was bad for their career.
20:00:12 Yeah.
20:00:12 Okay.
20:00:12 So your your privacy is not entirely under your control. Other people have access to private information. As an example, I'll give you an example with my daughter.
20:00:24 My daughter has posted. Dozens, well probably hundreds of photographs of her daughter of my granddaughter on Facebook.
20:00:32 None of them show my daughters my granddaughter's face their photographs taken from behind their photographs taken in in the dark.
20:00:42 This, she's coming through the tunnel once and you just see her profile. Why does she do that?
20:00:46 My daughter who grew up in the internet age, we, we gave our daughter a computer at age 6.
20:00:54 Okay.
20:00:52 Now going to go into the story as to why, but she wanted one because she saw a movie and thought it was cool so she wanted a computer.
20:00:58 My daughter thinks that her daughter is too young to know what privacy and security mean. So she's going to preserve her privacy insecurity until she's old enough to make those choices herself.
20:01:13 So in spite of all these hundreds of photographs that she has on on Twitter and on and on Facebook and other things, none of them show my granddaughter's face.
20:01:24 Okay, good. That's good.
20:01:25 And I'm just giving you as an example of the most of the security threats you should be worried about.
20:01:32 Are things that you share that you probably shouldn't. And yes, that is a topic, sometimes probably a good idea because it's the sort of thing that needs to be repeated all the time.
20:01:44 Any other ideas?
20:01:49 Yes.
20:01:44 One more question, one more question about the for sale and give away the Mac things. How do we get to it?
20:01:52 I mean, because when I clicked on it from your email. It said I wasn't, I couldn't.
20:01:58 Anyway, I wasn't, didn't said something I couldn't get to it. So.
20:02:00 Okay. Yeah, well, if you if you go to the discussion board, you need to set up an account and when you click on it, it'll say that you don't have an account.
20:02:12 Do If you if you register it comes to me and I have to validate it. And I validated if you're a paid member of the user group, I will validate it and let you in.
20:02:21 And the reason why the pain thing is what I'm sending to the treasure is the $60 bill for that piece of software.
20:02:29 So we. It would be nice if we had people who are paying for the software actually a cup of cats.
20:02:31 Okay. Okay. So even though I'm a member, then I have to do something else to see the.
20:02:38 If you've paid, then is she indicates that in the list and if you paid then I'll let you in.
20:02:44 Well, I think I'm a member in good standing, I think. But she'd send me a bill if it was time to renew.
20:02:51 No.
20:02:51 Right?
20:02:56 Oh.
20:02:51 Oh no, she doesn't send bills. We talked about that a couple years ago and she she's willing to be, she's listening to us right now, but she said she was willing to be treasury, but she wasn't really comfortable and nagging about people.
20:03:04 So.
20:03:02 Oh, well, so I have to go find my check and see when I wrote it, I guess.
20:03:12 Okay.
20:03:08 Well, actually I can probably look that up. Because she stores this information on the website so I'm not on the website on our.
20:03:18 Okay, and something I can't see.
20:03:21 Yes. What is your last name?
20:03:24 Baker.
20:03:26 Baker. Baker. You're green, so she says that's good. So yes, I.
20:03:35 So then I, so to get to it, I just.
20:03:39 There's a there's a there's a place on the side in the right hand column that says discussion board and you click on that and it says it asks you for your name and password and if you don't have that you give you instructions on how to set it up.
20:03:51 Okay.
20:03:52 I don't remember what it says because I run it so I don't see that.
20:03:56 I do have a question.
20:03:56 Yeah.
20:03:55 Okay, alright, I'll try to figure it. I do affect if they wanna figure it out.
20:04:01 Okay, but I will.
20:04:03 I think.
20:04:06 I will. I can do that.
20:04:01 Okay. Yeah, if you get stuck, send me a message. And I'll Yeah.
20:04:10 Any other questions or ideas for next month?
20:04:14 There are other months.
20:04:15 Lawrence, I just had a quick note when we're new here, but we went to the website and I don't know if this is on purpose and I don't know if this is on purpose but there's like all these I don't know if this is on purpose but there's like all these I don't know if it's flickering kind of sir going real quickly on the looks like almost like confetti it's very distracting it was that
20:04:34 on purpose or is something wrong with that
20:04:37 Oh. I see. It's snow. Okay.
20:04:35 That's on that's on purpose. It's winter time. I added snow. It's now.
20:04:43 It looked a little metallic, so it was alarming. Well, I thought he had a virus or something.
20:04:47 It's like, oh no.
20:04:47 Hmm.
20:04:44 Now they're No, no, they're little white asterisk that are floating down.
20:04:52 Oh.
20:04:50 Okay, no alarm bells.
20:04:54 Yeah, sorry about that. I wasn't trying to alarm people. I just thought it was, you know, it's it's wintertime.
20:05:02 I'll slow down the snowflakes.
20:04:58 Great. Yeah.
20:05:04 One quick question. Do you use it? Do you have a boot disc? Awesome.
20:05:12 Hmm.
20:05:11 And if so, what do you use? For that.
20:05:13 The book this from my machine right now is the, SSD drive that the machine came with.
20:05:20 And I store my data, all of my data is stored separately on 2 rates. I'll show you my desktop, the easiest way to show you this.
20:05:32 Oh, this is a terrible background for this sort of thing. I'm gonna change it to something that's not quite as distracting.
20:05:43 Let's change it to that. At the top here is the boot drive. This is a SSD drive that's built in SSD means, the state disk.
20:05:56 Built into the computers. The rest of these are raids. A raid is a box that's full of hard drives.
20:06:03 And I have a lot of video and a lot of a lot of photographs which is why I have all these this but so this is a raid.
20:06:19 That's got bunch of stuff on it and Let's see. This rate is. 16 tb and it's, it's mostly empty because I was in the process of doing something with it.
20:06:35 But my boot drive, the only thing it has is the operating system. And my, programs and it's I've got a hundred 82 gigs free.
20:06:46 However, as I mentioned, because they do video and photographs as I'm doing stuff that actually a lot of that gets chewed up by the by the video.
20:06:57 So my, My. Boot drive is used just for building the computer and all my data is stored someplace else.
20:07:07 And then in addition to it being stored someplace else, it also gets backed up to the. To the cloud and then it gets back to by time machine.
20:07:13 I'm very paranoid.
20:07:16 Well, I don't blame you.
20:07:16 So I think so my question about the archiving, cause I have a lot of photographs. So you use a raid and are they, I've read like a solid state drive and are they I've read like a solid state drive and I just don't quite understand but for reliability what would you suggest for a lot of photographs that you want to keep?
20:07:36 Well, in my case, I've got hundreds of thousands of photographs and I have That probably.
20:07:45 Oh, I don't know. Terabytes of video. So for my raids, they have regular rotating discs inside, but they're each like that this this one that I showed you that said is 16 TB.
20:08:00 That is 2 terror, 16 TB drives that are mirrored. So the drives themselves are automatically backing themselves up when I write to those through that raid it writes to 2 drives simultaneously.
20:08:15 So if one drive fails, the other one still has the data. When I said it paranoid, I'm really paranoid.
20:08:17 Hmm. Yeah.
20:08:20 And there are 4 drives in each one of these raids so that there are 8 drives total. But they only show up as 4 drives on the desktop because they're mirrored.
20:08:31 And I use, I use a conventional hard drives because they're cheaper. A 16 TB raid.
20:08:39 Is expensive but 16 TB of solid state disk drive would be just It'd be 10 times more.
20:08:50 What? Like. Yeah.
20:08:47 So. I use regular hard drives. Brand? The ones that I use are mostly Toshiba and, something called HGS.
20:09:00 Which was recently bought by Western Digital. But HGST. Is the company that IBM invented the hard drive.
20:09:11 And when IBM got out of the computer business, they sold it to this company called HGST and I use their drives.
20:09:20 Basically Toshibas and HDST. The the place I was talking about earlier back blaze They buy thousands of drives every year and they have a drive reliability report.
20:09:35 If you go to their website and look for drive reliability report, there's a report of all the drives that they've used during the year and how reliable they are.
20:09:47 Okay.
20:09:43 And I use that as kind of my guide for for buying drives. If If I was buying a raid today and I had the money, I would go with solid state drives because they use less power, they're faster, but the problem is they're much, much, much more expensive when you start talking about.
20:10:01 Terabytes of data.
20:10:03 Okay, thank you. Yeah, thank you.
20:10:08 Anything else?
20:10:12 If you have suggestions for, next month aside from, computer security, I do have this list of 10 other topics as somebody.
20:10:22 Suggested, but if you have something that you think is important, please write to me and tell me what it is.
20:10:29 Okay.
20:10:28 Okay, thank you. Thank you.
20:10:32 And good night, everyone.