Week in Review, Nov 6 - 13

Have you ever lost an important data file? A hard drive full of them? Then pay attention to this week's blog...

Backing It Up!
A Quick Guide to Backing Up Your Own Hard Drive

Memory is getting increasingly cheap so users are left with fewer and fewer excuses not to back up their important files (if not their entire hard drives).

Macs

- If you upgrade to Leopard, simply enable Time Machine to regularly backup your files

- For earlier versions of OS X, this website provides some step by step information as well as suggesting alternate backup programs. However, if you don't want to worry about missing a few random files with backup, investing in Leopard and having a complete record of your data might be worthwhile.


PCs

- For Windows XP, this website provides a pretty good walk-through of how to back-up both manually and automatically. Automatically is often more oriented towards stationary desktops permanently attached to external drives -- but can still be used with laptops. I'd also amend that 40gb external hard drives are no longer that big (it's hard to even buy one that small). In the unfortunate even that you've lost your Windows CD, manual back-up or using another program are probably your best alternatives.

- For Windows Vista, this official website seems to follow a similar walk-through patten for using automatic back-up.

A few general notes...

- Try to keep organized files so you know that you are actually backing up all your data. ESPECIALLY if you do it manually -- you don't want to find out that the one file you actually needed was in another folder.



As for data loss stories, have any consultants lost data in an interesting way? Laptop stolen? Computer suffered water damage? Strong magnets? To start us off, I lost a good bit of data off a hard drive in high school when the family computer refused to turn on one morning. That day, my mom was on the phone with tech support and a small fire actually started in our computer.

Consultant-Client Interactions (Nov 6 – Nov 13):

Total Interactions: 513

Top Categories:

Equipment Checkouts: 219
Directions and Info: 71
Printer Issue/Refill: 46

Nov 7, 4:20pm Do you rent projectors?
Note: Since this gets asked a lot, I thought I'd elaborate a bit on our typical "nope" response. While Meyer does not provide services for renting projectors there are several places that do. RCCs have access to them through rescomp, residential staffs have access to them through their residential offices, and departments have their own as well. If all these resources fail, there is Stanford Event Services. While starting at $150 for two hours is far from cheap, it's good to keep in mind if all other alternatives fail.

Nov 13, 2:50pm Looking up Meyer Items Online
Note: If you want to see what we check out, you can simply check out our wiki, if you want to see what's in that's slightly more complicated. While you can search for availability status using Socrates, it's not something I would typically recommend. For example, searching "Camcorder" gives you Meyer's typical mini-DV camcorder as the ninth hit. Click on the entry and note that it lists 10 camcorders, one of which was due last spring. At the moment it claims 4 camcorders are on the shelves but none actually are there. Unfortunately, the only sure-fire way to figure out availability is to come in.

Super VHS

Remember back in the days of floppies? Or when you used a zip disk if you had a particularly large file? Well from the vault of technologies no longer used we bring you...


THE SUPER VHS





Introduced in 1987 by JVC, the Super VHS (or S-VHS), raised quality standards from 240 to 420 lines per picture (compared to standard TV at 500). To the untrained eye an S-VHS tape looks just like a standard VHS tape - unfortunately they don't all play in the same VCRS (as we learned this past week with a patron who had exclusively S-VHS tapes he needed to digitize). To tell the difference you actually need to flip the tapes over.



The main difference can be boiled down to one hole on the bottom of the tape. Consumers soon realized that a standard VHS tape could be used in a S-VCR if simply modified by drilling a hole -- by some reports this practice even increases tape quality. Instances of altering S-VCRs to make this hole unnecessary also occurred. Many models of S-VCRs now support playing standard tapes.

The format has mostly fallen out of favor (and never caught on as some had hoped) but, as with formats like floppies, we're left with the vestiges of s-VHS in that people still need to access data stored on them.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
* If a VHS tape won't play for any apparent reason, check to see if it is an S-VHS.

* If it is, encourage the patron to use the black JVC decks. These are the only decks on the floor that will play S-VHS.


Fun Fact:

S-VCRs were one of the first pieces of hardware to use S-Video cables leading many to believe the "S"s stood for the same thing. In fact, the S in S-VHS stands for "Super" while the S in S-Video stands for "separated."