How do I manually back up my Outlook PST file?

So I got a frantic phone call yesterday from a buddy of mine who lost his PST file due to a crashed hard drive.

The thing is this guy normally backs up EVERYTHING! I was shocked he didn't have another copy ready to go.

When I asked him why he didn't back up his PST file regularly he kind of stared at me like a deer caught in my headlights and e said:

"Whats a PST? Is that like pssssst?" He made a come here gesture with his finger and I laughed.

So here we go! Your PST file is where Outlook stores your information like email and calendar information, on your local machine. These directions will do for all outlooks 97 or better.

First things first; we need to shutdown outlook and locate your PST file. So just follow these easy steps and you will be golden.

1. Search your PC for *.PST and make sure you select search hidden files and folders is checked. Also make sure there is a check box next to search system folders.
2. Highlight your PST file on the right it will be the one with the most recent access date.
3. Right Click --- Copy
4. Paste your file to a USB memory stick, dvd, cd-r or a network share. (Make sure outlook is closed or you will not be able to perform this step!)
   

You can now rest easily that all of your contacts and saved email pictures of your friend with a felt tipped mustache will be saved forever - or until you destroy the disk!

Come back for how to archive data out of your PST to make it smaller.

_TheBackedUpAdmiN_

Access your Tivo's hidden webserver! Download, strip and rip. Part One.

After figuring out I could edit Blogger blog posts from my mobile I decided to see what I could do with my TiVo while I am away. I went online and did some research. I found this tid-bit from Dave Zatz (Sling Media) and gave it a shot.

Allow me to bring you kids up to speed. Essentially, TiVos are just nicely packaged Linux boxes with TV capture cards, hard drives, and a cutesy visual operating system that everyone has grown to love. It's nice to know the open Linux spirit is in full swing at Tivo, because the developers at Tivo have happily included an already running, https, port 80 web server!

You heard me correctly, I did NOT stutter. As long as you enabled the transfer option from TiVo online you can access a web server built into your Tivo. To do this all you need to do is simply point your browser at your TiVo's local IP address using https://...

The address bar would look like this:

https://192.168.0.3/

I simply entered this address into my browser and it prompted me for a username and password. The username to use is always tivo and the password is your Media Access Key.

Your media access key can be found via your tivo interface or on your TiVo.com account.

Now how can you use this information while you are away?

Point your router to forward port 80 and 443 to your TiVo, Now by typing in your routers external IP address from any where in the world you can download your .TIVO files.

I hear you all saying:

They are encrypted and all Admin what good is that? and How does this help me?

Well these .TIVO files are just MPEG2 files with a shiny restrictive layer of prohibitive crap. But, no worries lets get that file cracked open so you can burn it to DVD or move it around at your own will. TiVo to go lets you do some of this stuff but The Admin hates being restricted to, well, anything.

Lets get you Downloading, Stripping and Ripping... (This is for your own access we are not teaching you to be nor advocating piracy...)

Tune back in for part two of our TiVo - download, strip and rip series tomorrow.

_TheTiVoHappyAdmiN_

Backup your Windows Mobile device

Hey Boys and Girls,

Commodore here bringing you another installment of geeky goodness.

Every once in a while an application comes along that simply becomes a staple in your data diet. A requiem for your software library that just seems to always be useful, especially if you follow the advice and antics of The Admin here at AskTheAdmin.com.

One of the most talked about subjects here is the issues that arise from being caught without a backup. Now, usually we talk about backups in the PC or laptop sense, but these days PDA's , especially Windows driven ones, are becoming more and more prevalent in society and in our every day life.

It's also inevitable, especially under any build of Windows, that you chance losing your data. Notwithstanding the inherent faults in Windows; having all your life's info in a device that can be dropped, stepped on, kicked, flung accidentally while speaking in an animated fashion (git her done), melted, forgotten and otherwise mistreated can be very precarious.

Yes, People use ActiveSync to "Sync" their data up to a computer but what if you want to do it on the fly or you simply detest Microsoft Activesync. What if you are a MAC or Linux user?

The need for a backup solution for Windows Mobile has arrived. And along with it is the need for our beloved readers to have access to a totally FREE solution that will allow them to breathe a little easier next time something happens to their phone. Outlook is both costly and sucks up your memory And does not help our everyday users on the go.

Enter PPCPIMBackup (Authors HomePage), This tiny little program, with its itsy-bitsy little footprint, does everything you need in a PIM backup solution. Scheduling, an intuitive and simple interface, and the level of depth to name a few; it has all the options you could think of for a PIM backup and more. After all is said and done it will give you a single small file with your data in it.

As the picture shows above, it handles appointments, call logs, contacts, messages, tasks, speed dial, AND it also sports a nifty little custom field, shown above, which you can set to a filter for certain file types or you can choose a folder, or subset of files. This program really has everything one would need in a backup solution.

Best of all I can back up to my memory card while I am outside, keep a copy of my installable file with me and always be good to restore my information on the fly! This baby even does scheduling!

The backup took mere minutes, but the piece of mind involved in knowing my PIM data is safe is priceless. All the options, shown left, are pretty much self explanatory.

PPCPIMBackup supports file compression, scheduling and best of all, it can be installed OTA (over the air, for you noobs out there) which means you don't have to run it through Activesync for it to work. In fact, the program has such a small footprint it ran right out of HTC Zip's temp memory. The process took less than 5 minutes and ran smoothly all the way through. Although I'm pretty sure if I ran the backup using compression, it would have been slower, but I have TONS of appointments and contacts and even uncompressed, the file was tiny at a mere 218k.

Though in all fairness, had I enabled attachments in the backup options, I'm sure that 218k would have been much more.

Also worth noting is the FREE screen shot software I discovered today, which runs on Windows Mobile! Ilium Software's Screen Capture app is definitely worth mentioning because it helped me capture the beautiful shots for our review of PPCPIMBackup. This program too, will be a staple program in my collection, simply for blogging about Windows Mobile devices. FREE, quick, easy, and tiny footprints are what we love to see here at AskTheAdmin. - C64

I am signing out for the night kiddies. Pull your teddy bears close, and snuggle into your pillows, because now, thanks to AtA, you can rest easy knowing all your data is safe, and all is well with the world.

Peace
Commodore 64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on)

What do you use for Backup Media? Tape, DVD, CD... or Paper?

Hello AtA! You read that title correctly, paper can be used as a form of backup media. I am not talking about printing out your documents and filing them away in some nondescript binder to gather dust, no this one is a little more complicated than that.

I first want to point out that I would probably never use this as I don't really think that paper makes for a reliable backup media. The main reason for writing about it is that the particular program I am about to talk about is simply fascinating as hell.

Without further ado, on today's what the fluck o'meter, I present PaperBack. Like it says above, this program lets you backup all your files to...PAPER. Very weird. To say the least!

What it does is it converts the binary data of your files and converts them to over sized bitmaps that you print out. To restore it all you need is a local scanner. If you want to try it out, I created a paper backup of a cool new FREE anti virus software I am testing out called PC Tools Antivirus. You can download the file in PDF format, print it out and try to restore it using PaperBack to try it out. Careful though, it is 88 pages. Here is the file if you are brave enough: (Free Antivirus In PDF Form).

Another cool thing about this weird little program is it doesn't require any installation. It is a self running executable so you can run it from your USB thumb drive if you want.

So you are probably saying to yourself, "Why the hell would I want this utility El Di Pablo?" and to be honest, I asked myself the same question. Here is the answer the creators give on their website:

You may ask - why? Why, for heaven's sake, do I need to make paper backups, if there are so many alternative possibilities like CD-R's, DVD±R's, memory sticks, flash cards, hard disks, streamer tapes, ZIP drives, network storages, magnetooptical cartridges, and even 8-inch double-sided floppy disks formatted for DEC PDP-11? (I still have some). The answer is simple: you don't. However, by looking on CD or magnetic tape, you are not able to tell whether your data is readable or not. You must insert your medium into the drive (if you have one!) and try to read it.

Paper is different. Do you remember the punched cards? EBCDIC and all this stuff. For years, cards were the main storage medium for the source code. I agree that 100K+ programs were... unhandly, but hey, only real programmers dared to write applications of this size. And used cards were good as notepads, too. Punched tapes were also common. And even the most weird codings, like CDC or EBCDIC, were readable by humans (I mean, by real programmers).

Do I expect you to run out and start using this program as your primary means of data backup? Hell no! Do I want you to check it out because of its unusual nature? Hell yes! Give it a try, tell your friends about it. If it is good for anything, it is certainly good for a laugh.

This article was written by El Di Pablo a guest contributor on AskTheAdmin.com. You can keep up with his high tech antics at his blog http://www.Bauer-Power.net!

Last night Ubuntu saved my life - How I used Ubuntu to recover ALL my files...

Hello Boys and Girls,

Commodore 64 here to bring you another horror story from binary-land. Lord knows I've been through hell and back with computers. Overheating CPUs, which were fixed by the cold of the winter outside my apt; crashing hard drives which were fixed or accessed by various means; faulty power supplies, which had me gutting and re-assembling my machine; and many more.

Up to this point, the only time I actually lost data, was to my ex-wife, who got to keep the computer with all my stuff in it, while I made away with a crappy laptop. Other than that, I've always been able to salvage my data somehow.
This time I had a new problem. Upon conferring with the Admin, to whom I have exclusive access (belonging has perks people, hit the comments if YOU want to belong as well) we came to the conclusion, based on past problems that were brought to his attention, that I have a power supply which is not supplying a steady stream of power to my hard-drives and various other internally powered devices. Now so far, to the best of my knowledge, a hard drive and ram are really the only components that can suffer from a faltering power supply. For the past 6 months, my computer has eaten through 3 Western Digital hard drives, which I'm sure were perfectly fine from the get-go. I will note here that I DO NOT blame Western Digital for these issues. I am a fair consumer which doesn't point unnecessary blame where it is not due. I will however give them a call and will update this blog with their responses and whether they are able to help me at all along the lines of some replacements.

My problem started because of me. I let waaaay to much time go by before I blew the inordinate amount of dust out of my computer, and more importantly, my power supply. I have gotten into the bad habit of leaving my case open, as I am also inordinately lazy. This probably contributed to the systematic weakening of my power supply. My hypothesis is that the dust caked up on the power supply fan, causing the power supply to rise in temperature, and over time this started to affect it's power output. This, in turn, caused my hard drives to fuzz in a very weird, intermittent way. At first we thought that my snazzy hard drive enclosure was the culprit. I had one of my drives, my all-important work drive with all my years of work, in an enclosure which, through an lcd display provided me spin-up and temperature info, but more importantly this enclosure allowed my drive to be cold-removed from my machine easily. My justification was, that in the case of a fire, or a world-wide Huxley style pron hunt, I would have the ability to simply slide my drive out of my machine, and make off with my all-important stuff. Karl and I had hypothesized earlier on, that this was the culprit to the failing of my first WD-320 drive. At the time this was my data drive on which I kept all my data, but I also had a recent copy of the data on another drive, so it was no big deal.

So I removed the offending enclosure and drive, and continued on with a slightly bruised ego and one less hard drive in my collection. For about a few months this was fine. Most likely there was now less power being drained from the power supply so this proved to be a stop-gap measure which lasted only a few months, which I only know now.

Then the unthinkable happened. Something that hasn't happened to me in years. A full-out dead freeze in Windows, which upon rebooting, no longer existed according to the cryptic error message my BIOS was giving me. Windows was gone. Since I couldn't deal with the problem right there and then, I popped in my newly burned Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD to leave some semblance of a usable computer intact on my PC.

A few days later I was actually able to spend some time recovering or repairing my machine, whichever came first. Since I had turned the machine off the night before, I booted up and noticed that Windows was beginning to boot. Hooray!
By some miraculous feat, Windows was booting up! However, my beloved work drive was not showing up. Upon checking BIOS I noticed that the hard drive was being detected, but Windows couldn't see it! Before I could do much else, Windows froze again. At this point I realized Windows wasn't coming back, and that I had to concentrate my efforts on damage control rather than repair. Recovering my work files became my top priority.

Enter Ubuntu.

At first, Ubuntu did not recognize my work drive. Then, after a few minutes, my work drive appeared in the My-Computer-esque Home window Ubuntu had given me. Eureka! The OS sees my drive. I quickly connected my LaCie external USB drive and double clicked on the WD-320 drive which contained all my precious work files. One more obstacle: I received an error which said something to the effect of (loosely translated) "Ubuntu needs you to give it the command, in the command prompt, to mount the drive with the force option activated." I popped open Firefox and Googled just the first part of the error and was presented with some results to some blogs which contained the exact command, with switches, that I was to use to successfully get my drive accessible in Ubuntu. The command worked an I proceeded to copy the 130 Gigabytes of precious data from my half-broken, limping hard-drive to my ever solid external USB drive. A few hours later the operation was complete. I can rest easy now.

A later memory test, courtesy of the good people that brought the Ubuntu Live CD, revealed that my memory chips were fried too - looks like a job for Crucial.com.
It's been a week now, and thanks to Ubuntu, getting my data accessible after a hard system crash like that was not something I had to lose sleep over. Since I was able to safely offload my data without having to overhaul my computer, I was able to get some sleep that night, and many other nights following the incident. Sleeping is not an issue when you know your data is safe, even if for the time being.

Now I can slowly work on getting the $500 together to buy 2 new hard drives, and 2 new ram chips, so that one day my computer will be restored to it's former dual-screen, design station ala Commodore glory. But in the meantime, I can survive rather comfortably using my Mac, and my resuscitated PC running Ubuntu 7.10. In all fairness this was a harrowing situation, but the availability of a self-contained, graphical operating system, that can run off a CD on a PC with nothing in working order besides a power supply, a motherboard, and some limping hard drives and memory chips, enabled me to not have to put my life on hold again to ensure access to my important stuff.
Piece of mind, that's what it came down to.

_TheSleepingCommodore_

Array down!! Do you know about SATA Raid arrays? now with answers!

I have a buddy with a Buffalo Terastation Pro 2gb in a raid 5 array. They had major power outages in Manhattan yesterday and lets just say there was no UPS. When the power came back on the array smelled burnt and no power...

They have purchased another identical terastation but the drives show as failed and Buffalo Tech Support isnt very helpful. you figure they would want to help a customer that has purchased an expensive array and then bought a 2nd one to repair the first one that is still under warranty...

Does anyone know if I can connect these drives to an SATA Raid Controller card and have it read the data. Should i do this in Windows or Knoppix?

While your at it what are some of the advantages of SATA over IDE or SCSI?

Any reco's for a good controller card that wont give me problems?

Help hurtin' in manhattan. Leave us some comments or solutions in the comment field below or hit us @ info at asktheadmin.com dot com.

_TheAdmiN_

as a jumping off point I found this:

http://forum.linkstationwiki.net/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=1132&p=9965&hilit=terastation+power+CORRUPTION#p9965

and this
http://www.terastation.org/wiki/Data_Recovery

24 hours later I have my frankenstein terrastation connected to a new terrastation and the drives all connected to an Pci-Express SATA Raid Controller. After figuring out their correct order and downloading a SUPER DOPE program called UFSexplorer and reading this information here: I was able to mount my virtual array. Specify my raid 5 settings per that last article and BAM! I see files... Now we are setting up the new terra station to push the data to. Wow that was exauhsting!!!
Boys and Girls the moral of the story is always use a UPS and if you want to be brave and not spend a couple bucks on a UPS then I have one word for you... Ummm maybe two... INCREMENTAL BACKUPS!!!!!

Synching Palm Desktop Contacts with Outlook, Then to Blackberry

I had a call last week from a user wanting to migrate his 600+ contacts from his Palm PDA to his new Blackberry. He seemed to think that we needed to order some special software for him to do this. The funny thing is he already had Palm Desktop software installed. He thought that the software was only to sync between his desktop and his PDA and nothing else. That is not the case at all.

The Palm Desktop software can export your contacts to a file which can then be imported into Outlook. To do it, just follow these simple instructions which I got from Microsoft Knowlege base Article 810930:

Export Address Book from Palm Desktop

1.	In Palm Desktop, click Address.
2.	Click File, and then click Export.
3.	In the File Name box, type Contacts.
4.	In the Export type list, click Comma Separated Values.
5.	Next to Range, click All , and then click Export.
6.	In the Specify Export Fields dialog box, click OK two times. The Contacts.csv file is saved in the My Documents folder.

Modify the CSV File

Before you import Contacts.csv into Outlook, you must create headers for the CSV file:

1.	Open the file in Excel.
2.	Click 1 to select the first row, click Insert, and then click Rows.
	In the first row that you just created, starting with cell A1 and continuing across to cell T1, enter the following fields to create header names for each column: • First Name • Last Name • Title • Company • Work • Home • Other • E-mail • Address • City • State • ZIP Code • Country • Custom 1 • Custom 2 • Custom 3 • Custom 4 • Note • Private • Category
3.	Click File, and then click Save.

Import the CSV File into Outlook

1.	In Outlook, click File, and then click Import and Export to open the Import and Export Wizard.
2.	In the Choose an action to perform box, click Import from another program or file, and then click Next.
3.	In the Select file type to import from box, click Comma Separated Values (Windows), and then click Next.
4.	In the File to Import box, click Browse, find Contacts.csv in your My Documents folder, and then click Next.
5.	In the Select destination folder box, click Contacts, and then click Next.
6.	Click Finish to complete the import operation.

For best results, when asked to map custom fields, take the extra five minutes to do that. You won't regret it.

As far as the syncing to Blackberry part, since we have a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), once I included the new contact list in the users address book (Right click on the contacts properties, click on the Address book tab, and check on the box that says show this folder as an e-mail address book), the contacts synced with their Blackberry.

If you don't have a BES at your company, you can still sync your newly imported Outlook contacts with Blackberry Desktop Software.

Originally Posted on Bauer-Power by El Di Pablo

Friday Morning Question: How do you back up?

I really hope your answer to this is not Back up? What Back Up?

As an Admin on a day to day basis the one thing I say more then

"Have You Restarted Your Machine Yet?"

Is:

"When was the last time you backed up?

Ohh really that's too bad."

So thats your question post how, when and where to you back up. Programs, scripts, straight up xcopy - We want to know. Windows Mac Linux your Brain - POST EM' IN THE COMMENTS!

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