The best solution I’ve found is MailStore Home.  It will backup and restore your email from basically any email client native or online and it’s free for personal use.  Once backed up you can access and read it all, plus there’s a good search engine built in.

Installation and set up is straightforward: run the download.  On launch you’re greeted with the screen above (click to enter your name as I have) and then select Archive Email.  Next you pick your mail program, I selected Gmail, enter your credentials and let MailStore Home do its thing.  You’ll want to have IMAP enabled for best performance if using Gmail.  The other options are just as simple.  After it’s initial run any email already archived is skipped on later runs and it gets the job done quickly.

Restoring is a nice feature and for IMAP applications it puts everything in a restore folder where you can then move around at your leisure.  Backup to any media is again simple and straightforward; follow the prompts and you’re done.

MailStore Home is a one trick pony and does the job well.  Free and easy are hard to beat.

Very slick and a 7 MB footprint make All-In-One Tray a must have.

Unfortunately it didn’t matter how long I left SSDLife running it never showed my drive’s estimated life.  I’ll leave it in my System Tray for a while and see what develops.

It’s all very straightforward: click to scan, click to download, click to install.  If you’re very trusting you can select “install all” but I went for the at a time installation.  The process is mostly automated and for the most part gets the drivers correct.  For my ATI graphics card it all went without a hitch, the final install step launching the ATI executable.

I have a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer on my PC but DriverEasy insists I install a Logicool and a Logitech driver, which I decline.  I’ve had two Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet driver updates: the first was from Dell that extracted to my hard drive where I stopped the installation, the second just the actual driver that DriverEasy opened a folder to.  I was surprised to see a Dell installation start on my non Dell PC but if that was where DriverEasy could get newer drivers I was fine with that.  For the second generic driver update I had to go to Device Manager and update the NIC driver myself, but couldn’t locate the folder DriverEasy used since it was nested nine folders deep.  I copied the final driver folder to my desktop and installed from there.

Download speed on the free version was quite fast and I didn’t feel the need to back up my drivers so I could easily pass on the paid version.

I would have to sum up DriverEasy as a hit and a miss: perhaps Driversometimeseasy would be most appropriate.  For the tech savvy it’s nice having the latest drivers for my hardware located all in one place, but suggesting the wrong drivers and making users route around in Device Manger isn’t for most.

The free edition allows the use of the integrated Linux boot CD: the premium paid version lets you use a BartPE disc with your own drivers for RAID or storage adapters.  Great tutorial available from Macrium.  This was a one hard drive system so the free version was fine.  I created a full backup and the restore disc, then pulled the working hard drive and replaced it with a new unpartitioned drive that was the same size.  It booted nicely, asked for the backup location, asked where to restore and started to restore.  A nice little feature is that the CD is ejected when the restore process starts so the system doesn’t boot back into this environment and makes the user aware to remove it.  The restore got so far and then failed with an error insufficient space.  I then partitioned the drive and tried again but with the same error.  Formatted and tried again: same thing.

A backup program that won’t let me restore is not very useful.  I removed the hard drive and replaced it with another and started the restore process again.  This time everything worked well.  I then removed the partition and tried again: success.  For some reason my first replacement hard drive wasn’t liked by Reflect; no real explanation here.

Macrium Reflect Free Edition is a solid backup job as long as you can live with its limitations: no incremental or differential backups, no custom drivers for restoring, no automatic deletion or management of backup files.  So far these limitations haven’t hindered my two installations.

Disk Space Fan to the rescue.  As you can see in the screen shot my hard drive is represented by different sized pieces: the bigger the piece the more space it’s taking.  Colour coding takes out some of the guesswork and then hovering over each piece gives more information.  Right click and you can open the folder, check properties or delete if you’re feeling especially confident.  Well worth the 2.5 MB installation!

Like all great fixes available you need a second working computer or need to download and burn a copy every few months.  The nice feature here is once you boot from the CD it asks to update the program and anti-virus signatures so you know you’re current; as long as your network card is one that generally works with Linux.

Once updated the program provides a simple and self explanatory menu.  For those that are technically challenged AVG has video tutorials available.  Interestingly you can download a version that runs from a USB stick and once booted from the CD an option to create a bootable USB stick is also provided; the bases are really covered here.

This is another excellent free tool from AVG that is a must have for all PC users, just in case.

Update 02-Aug-10.  Download location for ForFiles changed since Microsoft CodePlex page has been removed.

I needed a simple and free backup program for a single purpose PC that chugged along day in day out.  It ran Windows XP Professional and had a total used space of 8 GB on a 40 GB hard drive.  For convenience I installed a second 40 GB hard drive that would hold the backup files. Since it was always running the program would need to use the volume shadow service and be able to back up open files.

Macrium Reflect Free Edition fit the bill: it would create a single backup of the entire drive and came with a Linux boot restore CD that would allow full recovery. If you want incremental backup, RAID support, and a lot of other features then the full edition is the way to go.  It supports Windows XP up in 32 and 64 bit editions, is simple to use and set up and works very well.

I set up a backup profile and scheduled a nightly backup and the next day everything was working wonderfully.  I promptly forgot about it and came back a month later to see my second hard drive had filled with backup files.  I started poking around the program but couldn’t find a setting to limit the number of backups created.  Since Macrium Reflect saves all it’s settings into an XML file I checked there and at the bottom found this:

The nice thing about unRAID is that it only does shared storage: you won’t find additional features like FreeNAS; this product is meant to do file sharing only.  I installed it on my same Athlon XP 2800 test system with 512 MB RAM and three 80 GB hard drives.  This time around I had to use a USB storage device since the hard drives are dedicated to the unRAID storage; no running from CD or using a floppy for the configuration.  It’s very simple to set up once you’ve read the manual: everything is done via your browser.  I appreciated the drive spin down options and the manual spin up; power saving is nice to have.  For some reason unRAID wouldn’t recognize my onboard 3com NIC that worked just fine in FreeNAS and every other OS I’ve played around with; I had a spare Intel 10/100 PCI NIC that worked just fine.  If I was Linux savvy I could see what driver is used by FreeNAS and then add that to unRAID but unfortunately I don’t know how to do that.

There is a free version that supports up to three hard drives, so one parity drive and two data drives.  This limited my available storage space to 160 GB but that’s plenty for business storage.  The other limitation of the free version is that all data is visible to all users on your network: if you want to set up users or go beyond three drives you need to purchase a registration key, so play with the free version first and make sure it’s what you want.

The unRAID technology seems to be CPU intensive, as I did my 5 GB copy test and then tried to access the admin page but it was slow to respond; this certainly isn’t any kind of deal killer but it may limit the CPU you plan on using so try to keep it at Athlon XP or Pentium III class which isn’t too high up the food chain.

He had a Pentium III 700 MHz PC, Asus CUSI-M SiS motherboard with a 20 GB hard drive and 512 MB of RAM and a CD-ROM.  Since it had to be free I downloaded FreeNAS and installed it, or tried to.  Let’s establish now that it’s best to follow a good tutorial on installing FreeNAS or follow their setup guide; Maximum PC happened to have a decent tutorial recently so I used that as a starting point.

FreeNAS has a ton of excellent services: iTunes server, web server, Windows file sharing, iSCSI, FTP, TFTP, uPNP, dynamic DNS, bittorrent and more.  They would all come in useful in a home or more robust environment but this was a basic one hard drive machine that was going to one thing only: share files.  I did a full installation with data partition and swap file: enabled the swap file, CIFS/SMB, SMART monitoring and one share.  I recommend a good guide or tutorial because FreeNAS is long on acronyms but very short on definitions or help.

Before anyone gets upset about relying on a single share for small business let me say this is a tiny first step into the waters for myself and the business.  They currently back up their local files to a 2.5″ portable hard drive so that process will continue, plus for now I’m copying the shared files over to another PC nightly.

After this initial success I wanted to get a FreeNAS system running for myself, again built with spare parts.  I had an Athlon XP 2600 system on an Nforce2 motherboard, 512 MB RAM, four 80 GB parallel ATA hard drives and a CD-ROM.  FreeNAS offers software RAID 0,1,5 and a few others so I wanted to try software RAID 5 with my four drives.  Unfortunately the system only supports 4 PATA drives in total so  I wouldn’t be able to use the CD-ROM: I would need to boot from USB after using the embedded install option.

I had a spare 1 GB OCZ Roadster and tried repeatedly to do the installation but it kept failing.  Looking around I saw I could download the embedded image as an IMG file so I did that and using physdiskwrite and physGUI I wrote the file to my USB drive.  That worked and I was able to boot from the USB drive, remove the CD-ROM and have the four 80 GB PATA drives in the system.

I was able to create a software RAID 5 array and everything seemed good until I tried writing to the partition: it would work for a while and then reboot.  I checked to make sure it wasn’t a heat issue but while the drives were warm it wasn’t that.  I then increased the RAM to 1 GB and then 2 GB but the same rebooting occurred.  After lots of tinkering I gave up: it looks like Nforce2 plus PATA drives will not create a working RAID 5 software array in FreeNAS.  Using the system I was able to get a stable RAID 1 software array working with two drives but that was more a test to see if any RAID arrays would work with the Nforce2 chipset.

I have PATA, SATA and SCSI drives and hardware RAID adapters I can use but wanted to start with the cheapest and most bare bones hardware first and work up from there.  I like the idea of FreeNAS and the services it provides but so far it hasn’t won me over.  For what it’s worth Windows Home Server installed on that same system and performed admirably…

Received an email from DC Comics today letting me know issue one of Madame Xanadu was available in PDF format as a free download.  I checked it out and it pointed me to a list of free issue one Vertigo comics: 32 and counting.  An excellent free resource to whet your appetite for Vertigo.

Command & Conquer Red Alert

Like most computer obsessed users I have a home server running at home. It handles my internet connection, stores my files and hosts my web, FTP, email, Certificate and VPN servers. No matter where I am I like access to my files, because you just never know. As well I like to play with a lot of different technologies and try to get an understanding of how they work. There are lots of connection options available to me, but what do you do when something stops working on your server while you’re a long way from home? Remote control software to the rescue.

Remotely controlling a PC is nothing new; PC Anywhere from Symantec has been around since the days of DOS, and Unix users have had remote X windows. This is the modern age of the internet, so of course I wanted a free solution! I had a leg up because I was Windows 2000 Server at home; it allows two Terminal Server connections under the license for servicing, diagnostics, etc. I do use it, since the client fits on a 3.5” floppy disk, but logging in creates a new session and doesn’t show you what’s on the screen on the PC. Terminal Server opens a new session for each login, presenting a new session for each login. I wanted to see what’s on the screen and manipulate it as if I was there in person. Another must have feature I enjoyed was being able to connect from Windows CE devices, which I carry around with me in the forms of an IBM z50 and an HP Jornada 547.

Thumbing through a British computer magazine ( why do they cover enterprise so well compared to U.S. mags? ) I found reference to VNC, or virtual network computing. It’s a free program designed to operate over a TCP/IP network for remote control of a PC. It was developed by AT&T Labs Cambridge to do remote control in their environment, and grew to what it is today. With support for Win32, Linux, Solaris, Apple, Windows CE and Java, this program runs the gambit. It doesn’t transfer files or other fanciness; it just does remote control, but focus is a good thing.

A quick search on Google for VNC revealed a load of modifications and enhancements, one of which I was looking for: Tight VNC. This modification of the original is designed to work over slow connections and present a reasonable speed. Windows, Linux and Java versions are currently available, so I downloaded the Windows version and got cracking.

VNC is made of two components, server and client. The server is installed and configured to wait for a request from a client to handle remote control. The client is installed and connects over a network to control the server machine. It’s that simple. Connections are made via TCP/IP, which works well in our modern world of the internet plus any office space. Included in the install package is the option to run VNC as a service, which I took advantage of easily enough.

The Tight VNC modifications take effect in the client and server, but it’s the client changes that people will appreciate. The user has three options to connect: best compression, fast compression and listen mode. Best compression uses JPEG compression to give you the fastest connection speed, along with the integrated data compression schemes. Fast compression uses data compression but doesn’t do the JPEG compression. I have no idea what listen mode does, and didn’t see anything on Tight VNC’s site. For a detailed description of how they handled the compression enhancements go to Tight VNC. I found fast compression looked good and operated at a reasonably quick clip.

The best feature of VNC is it’s portability. Running on a multitude of platforms, once you have your server running you can carry a floppy disk with every client and be ready for anything. But they’re one step ahead with the Java viewer. VNC server runs a small web server within, so any machine with Java installed can connect. I went to another of my PCs and entered the URL: http://computername:5800/ and was able to connect. You have to give the port number in the name for the Java connection. It worked just as well as the Windows client, and all my Tight VNC options were available. Very impressive indeed.

All in all VNC is an amazing piece of free software that gets the job done. Tight VNC makes a great program even better.

MechCommander.org

PDF Forge

VLC Media Player

SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer)

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