Most people take their wireless routers for granted.  They never think about the possibility that their router will ever crash.  However, I can tell you that they do fail and of course thanks to Murphy’s law they crash at the most inopportune time.  In my case the router crashed right when I needed to print from my wireless laptop to a remote printer. Over the past couple of days my router had been acting more and more unreliable.  The performance was slowing down and the connection was being lost.  The quick, but temporary, solution was to cycle power on the router.  However,...

A few weeks ago I was looking for a Network Attached Storage device. My search criteria was pretty basic: 1TB or better storage cost less than $150 works with Windows works with Macs Initially the NAS 110 seemed to fit the bill until I tried to use it in practice.  After some trial and error I resolved the issues and now have a usable backup system. Some gotchas I hadn’t thought about before. Compatibility with Mac’s Time Machine software. I found this article on how to convince TimeMachine to use the NAS drive - how to enable time machine on unsupported volumes. After...

When it comes to backups, redundancy is a good thing.  Having more than one backup is like having a backup just in case “Plan B” fails. Why would you have more than one backup of your data? Backup data loss: Backup media failure – (DVD, TAPE) Backup hardware failure – (Hard Drive) Backup media/hardware theft How would an experienced computer user answer? Do you backup your data?  (Yes/No) Yes = 25 points Is it automatic? (Yes/No) Yes = 25 points Where is your backup data located?  (Onsite/Offsite)  Offsite = 25 points Do you backup your backup? (Yes/No) Yes = 25...