I returned today from a week long vacation, but due to spending a night near the airport in Charlotte before and then spending Easter after at my daughter's house near Charleston, we were actually away for about ten days. I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that "only" about six hundred spam emails were waiting for me. But the scheme I employed to handle them seemed to work OK. I turned back on the spam filtering that my domain server offers and let it accumulate all the spam it could identify. When I got back, I logged onto their webmail page and just viewed the emails to be sure that nothing important was flagged as spam, and then deleted it. It was much easier doing it that way than reading all 600 emails into Outlook.
You may ask why I don't use their spam filtering facilities all the time. As a private individual, I probably would. But as a professional, I have realized that no spam filtering is 100% accurate and that some valid business emails were being flagged erroneously as spam. So I have to look at them all (uggh) anyhow. Anyhow, my Inbox is clear again for now.
I have seen some adverts recently from a major PC manufacturer that tout the reliability of their new PCs based on the implementation of hardware RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). But since I disagree with this approach, perhaps it is time to remind my readers about RAID.
The RAID concept is to use multiple ordinary hard drives linked together in various ways to achieve either more storage, or more reliability, or both. RAID is accomplished in hardware, so this is something that you would have to purchase with a new PC or to buy as an add-in card. There are a number of RAID configurations possible, each having a unique identification number - RAID 0, RAID 1, and so on. But you have to understand what each RAID mode does in order to understand its particular attributes.
For example, RAID 0 is called "striping"; it basically uses two hard drives and splits all your data and files between the two drives so that half of each file is on one drive and half on the other. The advantage of RAID 0 is that the resultant combination of the two drives looks like one big drive (i.e. two 80 GB hard drives would look like one 160GB hard drive). You also gain performance in this way, as both hard drives can be accessed simultaneously. But RAID 0 has no redundancy at all and thus provides no security or backup capability. Also if you ever had to remove the hard drive and read it in another PC, this is very hard to do unless you remove both drives and the other PC has a compatible RAID system. Thus, RAID 0 not only provides no reliability, but actually needs a better backup system than not using RAID 0 at all.
RAID 1, called mirroring, uses two hard drives but one is hidden from you - even though you might have two 80GB hard drives, it looks like only 1 80GB hard drive to your system. The way that RAID 1 works is that whenever anything is written to the primary hard drive, it is automatically and instantaneously written to the second drive. If the first drive fails, you can continue on the second.
So RAID 1 has no size or performance advantage, but does provide reliability. RAID 1 is what the PC manufacturer I cited above is offering. But is that sufficient?
That type of backup is only effective if the primary hard drive fails totally. But what if you accidentally erase a file? It would have instantaneously been erased from the backup also. If there is some kind of Windows or driver failure that compromises the files on your hard drive, ditto. Since you can't remove the backup medium (the second drive) from the PC, there is no way to take your backup offsite. So if your PC is destroyed in a fire or flood, you still have lost all your data.
Thus I don't recommend RAID 1 as a total backup strategy and I think the manufacturer's ads implying that it provides an automatic backup system do not tell the whole story. As I have often recommended, use an external USB hard drive to backup your data and make sure that the backup procedure is working properly.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)