The focus of this article is on keeping your data and machines safe, but we might as take a moment and consider the well-being of you, the intrepid owner of said assets.

You shouldn’t eat on or around your computer for its sake, but probably for your own as well.

Studies repeatedly show that overexposure to a computing environment can result in all sorts of maladies that would be far more alarming than a wet input device:

Here are some things you can look forward to if you don’t step away from your desk once in a while:

· Carpal tunnel syndrome
· Vision disorders
· Nervous system problems
· Neck problems
· Back problems
· Weight gain
· Deep vein thrombosis
· Unpleasant odors

We think you should go and have a coffee, or go and have your lunch upstairs, downstairs, or outside once in a while. Isn’t the freedom to actually eat a sandwich part of why you got into this Internet racket?

Earthquakes And The Resident Klutz

For those on the West Coast, earthquakes are not as outlandish a possibility as they may sound.

There have been 23 significant (about magnitude 6) earthquakes in California since 1933, and dozens of smaller ones.

Tremors happen with some regularity along California fault lines and shaking your office building around is not only scary it can damage your equipment, your data and your business even if nobody gets hurt.

In other places, there may be a very large person in your office that likes to stomp around (remember the Refrigerator Perry ads?). If so, or if you are surrounded by a klutz of any size, you may want to do some of the same things.

Some of this is going to sound obvious but think it through. What are hazards when a room is shaking might be harmless or even helpful under other conditions.

There is very little that can be done to truly prevent the possibility of damage in an earthquake (other than obviously, off-site or online storage) but those in earthquake prone areas should take some precautions others might not need to worry about so much.

· Don’t store any equipment high up without securing it. And ideally being certain whatever it is on is also secured! A bookshelf or wireframe that is not moving is one thing, but as soon as it is being shaken, things can fall more easily than you’d think.

· Don’t store any equipment or data repositories (like your shoebox of Zip discs) beneath anything that could easily fall either. Even if your stuff doesn’t move, a wall unit collapsing carries a lot of force, and even good data recovery people can’t do much with a box that looks like Godzilla stomped on it.

· Don’t store equipment right near waterlines if it can be avoided. It’s not that common but waterlines do break in a shake, and if they do, you don’t want your systems drowned instantly.

· Consider paying more for “shock proof” enclosures. They aren’t really shock poof anymore than a pack of Marlboros is “crush proof” but it is does give you some modicum of extra protection if you expect your equipment to get jostled around, just like a “sport” watch can typically take more abuse than a “dress” watch or a Jeep has a different suspension than a sedan. The read/write head on your hard drives bouncing around probably won’t “destroy” the unit but could easily mess up data much in the same way grabbing a needle off a phonograph can leave a scratch.

Remember that science class gross-out moment when you learned that there are little critters living all over your body, in your eyelashes and stuff?

Well they don’t bother you. It takes a bigger creature or one with a nasty agenda to really make life unpleasant.

Your computer, while it is not a living thing, would probably feel the same way if it were.

Your computer is a somewhat sensitive collection of electronics and electro-mechanical devices, and as we’ve already discussed, relatively minor disruptions — and big ones — can be equally disastrous.

We already told you not to eat around your computer. Another reason not to eat around your computer is the little friends who will show up to eat whatever you didn’t…bugs. Bugs can actually get inside a computer case. Flying bugs, walking bugs, crawling bugs.

Keep your computer environment bug-free.

· Don’t eat by the computer and if you must, clean up and don’t leave food around
· Don’t drink by the computer and if you must, clean up, especially sugary stuff
· Don’t have open windows near a computer without good screens
· Don’t keep computer equipment in musty, damp, or moldy environments (you laugh, but we’ve seen some scary semi-finished basements)

If you have an infestation problem in a room with computers in it and you feel the need to use a product like bug spray, either remove your equipment or completely cover it in plastic and turn everything off before spraying.

RAID and all of its ilk are sticky, icky chemicals that will probably hurt your machine more than a few kamikaze ants would.

Don’t bug your computer and it won’t bug you.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, remember?

OK, maybe you’re an atheist. In which case cleanliness is better than broke-down -computerness.

You need to clean your computer, but you need to do it intelligently or the cleaning process will do more damage than the gunk and dust you’re cleaning off.

Here’s a basic list of what you need to have around:

· Cleaning cloths — lint-free and ideally static free, you can get these cheap at any office supply place
· Water — distilled if you want to be anal but any old water will do
· Alcohol — rubbing alcohol. You can but usually should not use other solvents, which can damage plastics and dyes (we rubbed the letters right off a keyboard in about 1987 and had a hard lesson in just how poor our touch-typing skills are)
· Portable mini vacuum designed for cleaning electronics — around $20 for a simple one, don’t use a home vacuum as there is too much air pressure and also potentially dangerous static
· Cotton swabs OR BETTER YET
· Foam swabs — lint and static free
· CD-ROM cleaning disc
· Windex

For monitors and screens you may want to invest in cleaner designed for that purpose, which may work better than plain alcohol, but alcohol when used as below will not hurt them.

How Often To Clean?

If you are following our other advice, and keeping pets, smoke, food and general mayhem away from your equipment, a cleaning about twice a year should do fine. If you have environmental contaminants like smoke or pets, or a lot of dust, probably quarterly would be wise.

In any case this is not a weekly kind of routine, so don’t get stressed.

What To Clean?

You want to clean up every element of the system that will tend to get dirty enough to pose a potential problem. This includes: Cases, drives, input devices, LCD screens, monitors, the internal components of the computer including the fan and boards.

Never spray anything directly on anything. Put any liquid (water, alcohol, Windex, whatever) on a cloth, wipe or swab before applying it. Avoid solvents.

Clean the case

Wipe down all surfaces with a slightly damp (water) lint-free cloth. You should avoid using any solvents including alcohol on plastics if you can. If you have really stubborn stains adding a SMALL amount of dish detergent can help, and won’t hurt the case. Vacuum at all open areas and around the fan.

Clean the drives

For CD and DVD drives, just run the CD-ROM cleaner. This is disc with tiny brushes that will clean the lenses and in some cases motors as well.

For floppy drives (if you have any!) you can buy an inexpensive kit for the purpose. If you don’t want the kit you need to open up the drive and clean the heads, much like you would on an old cassette deck, but we’re not recommending that!
Clean the (desktop) keyboard and mouse

Here too you can wipe down all surfaces with a slightly damp (water) lint-free cloth. You should avoid using any solvents including alcohol on plastics if you can. Next use compressed air and blast gently along each row of keys. You may be surprised how much dust and hair flies out. You can vacuum a keyboard, but make sure to use a nozzle attachment small enough not to suck any of your keys

For an optical mouse just wipe off the finger smudges with a damp cloth. For a ball or trackball mouse, open the case (this is usually a quarter turn of a disc) and remove the ball. Use a cotton or foam swab dipped in alcohol to clean the crud off the internal rollers.

Clean the screen (s)

A glass CRT monitor can be cleaned with a little Windex or alcohol, like any glass surface. An LCD screen can be safely cleaned with a small amount of alcohol, but not any other solvent. While there are “screen cleaners” available and they work well, some adding anti-static properties, LCD screens are actually cleaned with alcohol by the computer companies who then tell you not to use alcohol to clean them. If you’re worried, you can use a very slightly water-dampened cloth.

“Backing Up Is For Sissies”

That’s a funny slogan from the latter days of the “insider” era of computing, an in-joke among computer geeks who were trying to assert that being a computer geek doesn’t mean you can’t be tough.

Being a computer geek — excuse us, Internet entrepreneur — does mean that you shouldn’t be stupid however, and not backing up is just plain dumb, especially these days when the tools and technologies to do it are so easy and so cheap.

Hardware and software options

The world of backing up is primarily about storage, and the storage marketplace is moving so quickly it would be a waste of both of our time for us to list out X equipment at Y price.

As a simple example, there is a pocket hard-drive called the Giga Bank. About a year ago, a 2.2 GB Giga Bank — at the time a wonder of miniaturization — cost about $150. Today a 4 GB Giga Bank is around $89. By the time you read this, they’ll have the next one out.

It’s probably more useful to talk about general ways and means of backing up (or if you prefer, replicating or archiving data). Archiving is not the same as backing up, but you may find doing some of both useful.

We’ll discuss a couple of general concepts about having multiple sets of data, and a little about the hardware and software options for creating and accessing them.

Backing up versus archiving

Backing up means keeping copies of stuff you currently need or use in a second or third place, so if the one you have on hand gets destroyed, you have another one. You want backups pretty easily accessible at all times.

Archiving on the other hand usually means removing data files from a high-traffic place (like your C drive) and putting it somewhere in storage, in case you ever need to look at it again, which you may well not but you want to have the stuff safely stored in case.

Accordingly, backing up is something you do routinely — probably weekly or more, or even several times a day if you have high-volume transaction heavy businesses. Whereas archiving you only do once in a while, like you might do each year, if you do projects on an annual basis. You might not need your 2004 projects on your desktop in 2007, but you might need them tucked away someplace.

Let’s consider total system backups first. In the old days, you would back up from your hard disk, which was probably about 10 MB, to a floppy disk, which could have been as much as 1.44 MB. You could back up a whole HD to a handful of floppies in about a half hour, just label the floppies, and go on your way. Then came ZIP drives, with (for the time) huge capacities of 100 MB or more.

With today’s 80 GB or bigger drives, it’s not that simple.

To back up an active hard drive the easiest method is to have another hard drive of a similar or greater capacity connected to the same computer. You can use software to manage this (too many programs to list and the hard drives actually sold as backup options will often include something) or you can just drag and drop like you move or copy any files. If you have a lot of data and not much of it changes often, using some kind of backup software will save you aggravation because Windows will want to copy the same files over themselves, every time. This takes forever! And is usually not necessary. On the other hand, if you generally work in files that are unique, you may be able to say no to the Windows system question “do you want to replace files with the same name.”

Either way, make sure you select a real brand, and use the fastest connection available on your machine. For most of us this is USB 2.0. Get the fastest hard drive disk speed your budget (or favorite manufacturer) allows — 7200 will be pleasant, as of this writing.

Hard drives come in all shapes and sizes these days, but here we are focused on comprehensive backups and archiving.

A terrific option for backing up a laptop is something like the Western Digital Passport line, which has several knockoffs also, including excellent models from Fantom. See the Resources section for more.

Currently anywhere from $99 to $299 and frequently available at deep discount merchandisers like Costco, these great units run directly on USB power, are fast and quiet and have rubber coated enclosures. We have a 40 GB Travel mate laptop and find an 80 GB Passport an excellent companion for both backup and archiving.

One important note. Partitions on the same drive are OK for multiple file copies but are totally useless in the event of a hard drive crash. In other words, if you have C and D partitions, putting copies of your files from C on D makes sense if the only concern you have is corrupted files.

For example, if your mail software is on C and a virus were to mess up the C drive files, you would have a clean backup on your D drive. But bear in mind these partitions are like putting up a thin wall in one room. They reside on the same physical disk, so while software problems can be recovered this way, a hardware failure will destroy both “drives.”

For portability, archiving, and in some situations backups, CD or DVD discs can be useful. The drives are ubiquitous, the media cheap and easy to deal with.

Bear in mind however that the media are also more fragile than some people think and they do somewhat degrade over time.

We’re all for saving dough but don’t be penny wise and pound foolish here: When using CD or DVD disks for backup or storage, do not go cheap.

Go with a major brand you know (TDK, Maxell, other well-known media companies) and if you can afford it, go for discs that are packaged as gold, archival, or similar. Unlike a lot of marketing scams (premium gas, anyone?) the differences between junky digital media and high-end stuff is very real.

Cheap CDs will often not read or write properly, they are more sensitive to scratches, heat, and dust, they use inferior metals for the data surface and inferior plastics for the disc itself.

When the difference between junk that will have you tearing your hair out and the best stuff you can get is about 40 cents a disc for crap or 75 cents to a buck a disc for good stuff…forget the percentages and get the better discs.

Discs are good for storing data but not so good for keeping prying eyes away from it.

Your Security Options — Beyond Passwords

Passwords are OK but if you want real protection, you want biometrics. Surprisingly, this is now no more expensive than a dinner in most cities. See Resources section for more.

Your Security/Platform Options — Remote storage

For extremely important files that you may need to access from anywhere at anytime, there are a number of ways to utilize the Internet for storage. You might even want to keep some things only online.

A “quick and dirty” solution is to open one or several free email accounts and email important things to yourself. This is easy and cheap but you will usually be limited to 1—2 GB of storage. That’s a whole lot of Word docs but only a few minutes of high-def video, so consider what you need to store.

X Drive has several programs but the basic service is 5GB of storage for $10 per month. They also have a free trial of the 5GB option. (Try and get a free trial on any hardware system).

Now that we’ve covered a lot of ground in terms of what you should be thinking about doing with your systems to keep them safe from threats large and small, let’s get practical and tactical and spend the next bunch of pages taking a much closer look at some of the equipment and services you might want to look into.

General reseller/retailer recommendations

Almost everything we talk about here (except specialized services like X Drive ) can be purchased from any well-stocked computer equipment store.

You can certainly go to CompUSA, Best Buy, or any of the other big box retailers. Some Radio Shack stores are nicely stocked and the prices are reasonable.

But for computer equipment in general we strongly endorse two “open secret” stores, where all of our serious techie programmer type friends have gone for years.

These are Tiger Direct and CDW.

Tiger is located in Miami. They have huge selections and often, ridiculously low prices. They carry everything from high end gaming systems to bare bones boxes, and everything in between. They recently started selling DVDs at a discount also. Tiger tends to be more of an “insider” place to shop than CDW, and caters to small businesses and individuals mainly.

Chicago-based CDW has been around since 1984 but recently started raising its profile. You may have seen their ads on big news and search sites. They now move about $6 billion in material per year.

We tend to like Tiger for “stuff” and CDW for systems. Visit both to comparison shop.

General brand recommendations

We like saving money as much as anyone, but we also think there are places (like CD discs for storing business information) where paying a little more now is worth it later.

You’ll find in each category there is a brand leader, for example, in power management it’s APC. Is APC worth the extra money? In general, we think so, because the extra money isn’t much extra and you get a lot more real value. On the other hand, is CyberPower a good bet? Absolutely. If they offer a product that meets your needs, and perhaps is on sale, you won’t go wrong.

When it comes to things like cleaning solutions, like bottled waters, it’s mostly marketing. Plain old rubbing alcohol is a perfectly good solvent for most situations — but if the new-age anti-static whose-awhat-sit spray makes you feel like you are taking better care of your screens, go for it…

Let’s take a look at a few major product areas, and get pretty specific about what you might want to actually buy.

Know Your APCs

As previously mentioned, the king of the heap in power products is APC — American Power Conversion. Once premium priced across their lines, APC have delivered a huge variety of options that can meet the power needs of almost any individual or business.

Based in Rhode Island, these guys have been around since 1981 and more or less created the UPS business. APC stuff is available at both Tiger and CDW as well as hundreds of other retailers like Staples, Office Max and Wal-mart. Almost all APC products come with a $50,000 to $150,000 equipment protection warranty, which helps make up the premium price in our opinion. (Note that these warranties never protect data)

CyberPower, SmartPro, and ULTRA are among the quality competition for APC, though not every company makes every kind of unit.

Power is nothing, without power

The most important things to understand when buying an “uninterruptible” power supply are:
· What exactly you need the unit to do
· How often you probably need it to do it

The main categorical difference among units is their wattage. Generally speaking 700 Volt Amp units and smaller are viewed as one group, and 700VA and higher as another. Roughly speaking this is “desktop” units and “network” units although wattage needs vary. Bear in mind that most stand-alone UPS solutions are intended to allow you to backup your system and shut down safely, not keep running any great length of time (which would require a generator). Think of them somewhat like a donut spare.

Desktop examples

Desktop UPS systems were once rare and expensive but are now common and relatively cheap. These units typically include a world-class surge protector so that is a piece of equipment you will not need to also purchase, depending on how many outlets you need. For example: If you need to keep a desktop going in the event of a short-term power failure, you need to decide, for example, if you want to safely shut the computer down, or actually keep it up and running off the emergency batteries.

The APC Back-UPS line designed for a single desktop ranges in price from about $39 to about $199 as of this writing.

For $39 (Model Back-UPS ES 350) you get about 50 minutes of runtime with three battery-powered outlets, three additional surge-protected outlets, 200/350 watts/VA and a $50k equipment insurance policy. Each of the price points up to $199 (Back-UPS RS 1500) gets you more outlets, more peak wattage, longer runtimes to 110 minutes, and more insurance.

If you are buying a UPS for all of your core equipment, you almost certainly do not need to buy suppressor equipment additionally. All UPS units are suppressors and some even have dedicated outlets for extra equipment that goes beyond the UPS power supply capacity.

If you don’t have a UPS or you have only some equipment connected to it, you want all your equipment plugged into suppressors, including RJ11 phone type plugs, cable and coaxial lines, and Ethernet cables. Any outside line that can carry a charge can fry your expensive stuff in a lightning strike and protection is so cheap it’s truly foolish not to have it.

Protect the family Joules

The most important thing to understand when buying surge suppressors is “how much of a jolt can the thing take” and that is a rating expressed in Joules. As a rule, the higher the rating, the better off you will be. Joules ratings run from a few hundred up to about 3400 or even more.
Since the top rating will cost under $50 for even the best brand, get the best.

As discussed previously, this is not a place to cut corners. Saving 10 bucks on a cheaper switch can cost thousands or more in damaged equipment.

· Buy the highest Joules rating your budget allows
· Buy high-quality name-brand stuff like the examples on the next page

While most power supply and UPS makers make stand-alone surge protection products, so do a lot of other people.

In addition to APC and its competitors, we also like Belkin (available everywhere in the free world) and Power Sentry (available at Tiger and at stores like Costco and Sam’s).

Tripp Lite is among the “gold standard” professional grade manufacturers — nice quality but expect to pay for it.

Surge protection products are made by many lighting and supply companies, and can range in price from literally a few dollars to literally hundreds, as the examples below (which we like all of, for different situations) amply attest.