Daily Cup of Tech

What is the one thing that every IT guys keeps harping on?  Backups!  You have got to do your backups. Regularly. Consistently. Accurately.

In fact, go and do a backup this very second.

Seriously.

Stop reading.

Go and do a backup right now!  Your documents, your websites, your e-mail, your pictures.  Everything!

Go!

Don’t worry.  I’ll wait.

Now that you’re back and you’re not worrying about backups, I can let you in on a little secret.  If you didn’t just perform a backup of your website and suddenly it disappeared, there may still be hope.  And this hope’s name is Warrick.

The purpose of Warrick is to attempt to rebuild your website from different sources on the Internet that make cached copies of your website.

From the Warrick site:

Warrick is a utility for reconstructing or recovering a website when a back-up is not available. Warrick will search the Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo for stored pages and images and will save them to your filesystem. Warrick can be ran through our website or as a command-line utility (directions for downloading, installing, and running are given below).

Warrick is most effective at finding cached content in search engines in the first several days after losing the website since the cached versions of pages tend to disappear once the search engine re-crawls your site and can no longer find the pages. Running Warrick multiple times over a period of several days or weeks can increase the number of recovered files because the caches fluctuate daily (especially Yahoo’s). Internet Archive’s repository is at least 6-12 months out of date, and therefore you will only find content from them if your website has been around at least that long. If they don’t have your website archived, you might want to run Warrick again in 6-12 months.

I don’t know if I would be willing to leave the entire security of my website in the hands of Warrick.  But, if everything is gone anyway, what have you got to lose?

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/20/forget-backups-ive-got-warrick/trackback/

I don’t know if you are an Internet Explorer fan but the latest version is now available for download.

Download, install, and let us know how it fairs.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/19/internet-explorer-8-is-out/trackback/

OpenWith.org Desktop Tool

Do you have files on your computer that you don’t know how to open? If so, you need the OpenWith.org Desktop Tool!

For almost any file on your computer, the OpenWith.org Desktop Tool will tell you what type of file it is, and show you free programs that will open the file. It will even download them for you!

You simply right click on a file and select “How do I open this?” and the OpenWith.org Desktop Tool will look up the file!

OpenWith.org Desktop Tool is compatible with 98, ME, 2000, XP and Vista.

Download the OpenWith.org Desktop Tool

Instructions

This will be a huge help for people who get scammed into buying expensive programs or don’t know how to use a file.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/17/open-any-file-quickly-easily-and-for-free/trackback/

As I wrote in Big Brother Google Is Watching Me, Google’s new interest-based advertising is pretty freaky. So, I thought that I would help everyone out by sharing this Firefox plugin that may help.

TrackMeNot is designed to perform random search engine searches to as to hide your actual searches in a sea of unrelated searches.  The idea is to make your search patterns undetectable and, this, Google can not create an accurate search profile on you.

Here is what the website says:

TrackMeNot  is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.

I’m going to give this a try.  The hard part will be determining whether or not is is actually successful in covering my tracks.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/16/firefox-plugin-to-foil-google-interest-based-advertising/trackback/

Just a quick not to let everyone know that if you have not joined Dropbox yet, I’ve arranged for you to get an extra 250MB in your free Dropbox account.  That’s 2.25GB instead of your standard 2GB!

What’s Dropbox?  I’ll let their website tell you:

Dropbox is the easiest way to share and store your files online.

Works like you do
No complicated interface to learn. Dropbox runs in the background on your desktop.

Worry-free syncing
Sync your files automatically to your computers and the web.

It’s everywhere you are
Sign in and access your files from any browser or mobile device.

Easy sharing
Sharing files with your friends and family is just two clicks away.

Photos
View your photos in a gallery and share them easily with anyone.

Your welcome!

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/15/extra-free-dropbox-space/trackback/