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Software

Submission + - Backing Up Your Photos, Videos, and Music

Submitted by knuckleduster
knuckleduster writes: I'm trying to create a backup schedule at home for my Photos, Videos, and Music. I'm looking at 75+ GBs of data that I want to store out of my house in a bank safe deposit box. I know the simplest solution would be to buy an external hard drive, do a straight copy and be done with it. But that would mean two trips to the bank each month (one to pickup the drive, do my backup and one to drop off the drive, unless I buy two). I'd like to do this with minimal expense and I already have a DVD writer and many DVD-RWs. I'd like to use them to create a master Full backup, then just follow up with Incrementals each month. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have a suggestion for a good Windows-based backup software? I've tried Nero, but it seems to error after numerous spanned discs. I tried Genie's home software but it seems to want the Full backup before doing an Incremental. I also thought of trying iTunes built-in backup for the music, ACDSee's built-in back up for the photos, and who knows what for the videos. Bad idea? What say you? My first Slashdot post so please be gentle. Thanks for the help!
Data Storage

So You've Lost a $38 Billion File 511

Posted by Zonk from the makes-you-feel-better-about-yourself dept.
smooth wombat writes "Imagine you're reformatting a hard drive so you can do a clean install but then realize that you have also reformatted the back up hard drive. No problem. You reach for your back up tapes only to find out that the information on the tapes is unreadable. Now imagine the information that is lost was worth $38 billion. This scenario is apparently what happened in July to the Alaska Department of Revenue. From the article: 'Nine months worth of information concerning the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund was gone: some 800,000 electronic images that had been painstakingly scanned into the system months earlier, the 2006 paper applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter, and supporting documentation such as birth certificates and proof of residence.' Using the 300 cardboard boxes containing all the information, staff worked overtime for several months to rescan everything at an additional cost of $200,000."
Businesses

Submission + - Outsourcing Costs Companies Money

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new report from CIO Insight says that outsourcing I.T. actually costs — not saves — most firms money. From the article: "Outsourcing may be commonplace, but it continues to confound IT executives' expectations. Take the common myth that companies outsource to save money. Not only is this not true in half the cases, but our survey shows that most companies aren't saving money by outsourcing."

The study is based on responses from more than 400 I.T. professionals, and the article includes a slideshow of the report's findings.
The Courts

Submission + - iFilm infringement could land Viacom in hot water

Submitted by Radio Silence
Radio Silence writes: Infringing videos on iFilm could undermine Viacom's case against YouTube. Although it's arguably not a nest of infringement like YouTube, iFilm appears to host more than a handful of videos for which its corporate parent Viacom does not own the copyright. More importantly, Viacom isn't engaging in the kind of proactive infringement identification practices it expects of YouTube, which may cause problems for them in court. 'if Viacom isn't willing to take the same steps with iFilm that it wants YouTube to take with copyrighted content, Viacom may have a harder time making its case before the judge presiding over the case. "It would have some persuasive value with a judge if YouTube says 'look, they're ranting and raving about all this infringement occurring on my site and they're not doing anything about it themselves,'" said copyright attorney Greg Gabriel.'
User Journal

Submission + - Quickly to the matters by suffixed tags?

Submitted by
wrs
wrs writes: "Tags help to thumb through a blog by topic. If I want to refer a analysis of a topic I already did, tags are an priceless helper. However, to remain able to find _every_ posting in which I mentioned the very topic, I need to tag them all — by the very label. Which blows up the work to find the single most relevant posting. — I'd suggest "?" and "!" as suffixes for tags, to find the relevant ones much more quickly and leave alone the unimportant. What do you think?"

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