pctoolbox.co.uk » tools

Backup Poll

Grae — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 08:00:49 +0000

Last months poll was asking who backed up and the results were interesting! Most people that voted do apparently backup up, but almost as many people have said they don’t! And then half as many say they sometimes backup. Let’s be honest, sometimes means…we think about it but never get round to doing it!

Having a computer break down is bad enough but loosing irreplaceable data is devastating for anyone, photos that can’t be recreated or business data that if lost could cripple the business.

With so many backup tools out there and portable hard drives now available for around £50 for 250 GB there is no real excuse!

Browse our backup posts here, and watch out later this month for a post of our top 3 backup external drives.

Together we can save you’re data!

12 Days Of Christmas – Day 4 – Amazon

Grae — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:00:24 +0000

Our fourth recommended retailer for Christmas presents is Amazon.co.uk! You name it, Amazon sell it! Amazon have a wide range of products available for very reasonable prices! Products vary from Books to DVDs to Cd’s to Games Accessories to Garden Equipment to Jewelry and much more! A great way to get your last minute presents is their voucher system where you can choose to either email, print off or have your vouchers posted to the recipient.

Check it out!

Quick Tip Series: Basic Website Setup – Tools

Grae — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:04:35 +0000

Part three in our Basic Website Setup Series! So far we have looked at

This week we are looking at Site Building Tools. Now professionals tend to use a program called Dreamweaver by Adobe, or something similar. However for beginners this is a steep learning curve and one that can often be avoided.

We recommend that you use a pre-written tool to create your site and manage it as well. For most people a simple blogging tool will be more than enough, however for those that want something more they will need a Content Management System (or CMS for short!).

The tool you use will need to work with your hosting provider, for this tip we are going to work with tools that come with Fantastico as that is often installed on the control panel of a Linux hosting package.

For full details on how to install these tools you will need to see your hosting providers support pages, but just to give you an idea. You can log into your control panel (cPanel) and select fantastico and without any programming or web building knowledge install tools such as:

The first two are Blogging tools and the last 3 are CMS tools. Our favourite is WordPress, it is easy to use, easy to install, there are many themes and plugins available to make a site that does just what you need it to. Check out our User’s Review of WordPress here.

With a tool like this you just have to learn to use their Admin area, which in my opinion is much easier than learning Dreamweaver and getting messy with an FTP application. It often involves just filling in form types pages to get your content online!

Once your domain and hosting is setup (see your hosting provider on how to do this, you will need to point the nameserves of your domain to your hosting space) you can literally have a site up and running in minutes with a tool like the ones we have listed, all that takes the time is you coming up with valuable content to put on it!

I hope this helped, let me know if you have any thoughts or comments or if you get a site up and running like this link us to it!

Backup Tools – Two worth looking at

Grae — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 20:53:47 +0000

For years I have not found a decent backup utility but over the last 20months I came across two, they are like London buses, you wait ages and none come and then there they are…all in a line

Memeo and SecondBackup are the utilities and I will look at them separately as they are both good in their own ways and suitable in different ways for different people.

Memeo – I came across this by accident when I ordered a Buffalo Drivestation it was on the disk that came with the external hard drive. It is very simple to install and setup and it runs in the background backing up as you go. So you are nearly always 100% backed up if the computer is on and the drive is connected. The utility also allows you to register an account with Memeo to backup to their online service, an excellent way of keeping data stored off-site. You don’t have to buy a Buffalo External hard drive to get the software, you can buy it direct from Memeo.

The software also has a very useful One-Step Data Restore utility with a shortcut created on your desktop when you create the backup profile.

It is not free but at the same time it is free and you can try it for 30 days before you commit to buying.

SecondBackup – I came across this program when I needed something a bit different from Memeo. SecondBackup allows you to create a backup profile which consists of a selection of files/folders that need to be backed up, the location, the backup start time and the frequency. It also allows multiple profiles so for example you could backup your photos every Monday to 1 external hard drive, and your music to another external hard drive on a Tuesday.

SecondBackup seems to work incredibly quickly and a feature that Memeo doesn’t have is that it can backup from an external network location. So one setup we have is the software installed on a Small Business 2003 server backup data from a shared folder on an old Novell server. Which works brilliantly!

As I said both programs backup in different ways, so it is very hard to say which one is best. But if I am honest I am leaning towards SecondBackup, however if Memeo worked for me and I was buying a Buffalo drive then I wouldn’t buy Memeo as well.

No excuses not to backup when these two programs make it so easy!