Big Brother caught watching our Little Children

Recently, it was discovered that a school district in Philadelphia had issued Apple laptops to students that contained “anti-theft” software that was secretly taking pictures with built-in webcams.

Students had been complaining about the little green light next to the camera lens occasionally “flickering” on, then quickly off again.  When parents asked the school, they were repeatedly told it was a glitch.  (a glitch that affected every student’s laptop, and was never fixed?!?  yeah… right ;))

One family had had enough, and sued the school district claiming privacy invasion, but they didn’t have any proof, just suspicion.  My own personal reaction was one of “they must be over-reacting” and “conspiracy theorists”…

Well, now the experts are looking into this.  Bruce Schneier, one of the leading experts of not just Computer security but security in general has found a FANTASTIC blog post by a researcher who has dug deeply into this case, and the findings are SHOCKING.  Not only was the family right, but the extent of the capabilities of the “anti-theft software” are now known.

If you have any interest at all in this sort of thing, you REALLY need to read this guy’s blog entry.  It’s enlightening.  As a parent, this raises the hair on the back of my neck.

The realm of software security has always been a Cat-and-Mouse game between hackers and security researchers.  Typically, you have hackers trying to come up with new viruses to get around anti-virus programs… Then, security researchers improve the anti-virus and anti-malware programs to catch what the hackers have come up with…  Then, the hackers create new spyware and malware that can evade the new anti-malware software.  It’s a VICIOUS cycle.

Well, now it looks like the cycle has been turned upside down.  In this case, an Authority (the good guys??!?) has been caught using secret hidden software to spy on Children (the bad guys!!?!??), and the Ethical Hacker community has caught them red-handed.  so what happens next?  Does the cycle loop back again and continue?

Ethical Hackers are security researchers who use techniques developed by the real bad guys (real hackers) to find weaknesses in the software we all use to protect ourselves from the bad guys (again, real hackers).

You know what this feels like to me?  This feels like history repeating itself.

The second amendment to the constitution of the United States of America protects the right of the public to “keep and bear arms”, which helps to keep the government in check.  Without this right, a corrupt government could enslave it’s people – just look at other countries.

So, are we going to someday need a new amendment that protects our right to examine the software installed on computers that come into our homes?  Will we need a “well regulated militia of ethical hackers” to watch over a government on the verge of corrupting?

We ALL need to keep an eye on this.

What do I need to backup?

For the longest time, I chose not to backup my computer because I thought it would be expensive.  Backup systems cost money, and I just didn’t want to spend money on it.  I figured if I was going to spend money on storage, I would just buy another hard drive and start sticking more of my stuff on it.

My Background

I used to work in the MIS department of the corporate office of a medium size company.  One  of my jobs was to switch out the backup tape for the file server every day, and carry it to the fire-proof safe for storage.  Every week, I would take a box of tapes to one of our other buildings for off-site storage.  The backup tapes contained Everything on the file server, and if the file server crashed, we could rebuild it from the backup tapes within a few hours.  The tape drive was expensive, the tapes were expensive, and the process of doing the backups was a daily chore that could not be forgotten.

In our home environments, this level of backup perfection may not be necessary.  The truth is that home computers have different backup needs than corporate offices.  Let’s take a look at the differences.

Business vs. Home Use

In business, the most important factor is that the business remains running.  Businesses cannot afford to have employees stop working because computers are down.  Customers won’t tolerate having to wait, so they leave.  In business, every minute that a computer is down costs money, and can cause irreparable damage to tbe business.

At home, if your computer goes down, you are inconvenienced.  You won’t be able to mess around on Facebook or watch a YouTube video or play a video game until you fix your computer.  You’re not going to loose any money, but it is less fun to fix your computer than it is to enjoy using it (for most people, anyway /wink)

Business owners need to know that if a computer goes down, they can get that computer fixed or replaced and back up and running as fast as possible.  they will spend whatever it takes to have the equipment, manpower, and processes in place to ensure this.  They will have extra hard drives and other parts on hand, in case a computer breaks.  They will hire people to ensure that the physical process of doing backups every day is getting done.  Some businesses even go so far as to have complete replacement systems fully built, tested, and standing by so that if a computer breaks, they can swap out an entire computer, restore a backup, and be back up and running as fast as possible.  They will even periodically hold “fire drills” where they deliberately pretend a machine fails, then replace it, just to test that the process itself is flawless.

At home, you don’t want to spend an hour or more of every day dealing with swapping out backup tapes, checking logs, and even pre-testing the backups to make sure they would work when needed.  You would be perfectly happy just knowing that if your computer breaks, that you COULD get your data back, if you HAD to, no matter how long it would take.  This is the prevailing philosophy of almost every home user I’ve ever spoken to who isn’t running a business out of their home.

So, what does that mean?

The lesson here is that Home and Business each have completely different needs for backup.  Business prioritizes the speed of recovery over all else.  Much time and money is spent BEFORE the failure to ensure that recovery takes as little time as possible.  Most home users are the opposite – They want to spend as little time as possible actually DOING the backups, and are willing to spend as much time as it takes to recover, AS LONG AS THEY KNOW THEY COULD.

Leo Laporte has said in his show that: for home use, you really only need to back up your documents, and you really don’t need to do anything more than just copy them to an external hard drive.  I agree with this, to a point… It depends on your ability and willingness to rebuild your system.  I would expect that most of MY readers could probably handle rebuilding a computer.

Seriously, what really needs to be backed up?

Your computer is made up of many different kinds of data.  Let’s take a look at them.

Documents and Settings

First, the most important stuff to back up is obvious.  your documents are clearly the highest priority thing to back up.  Photos, home videos, audio recordings can never be replaced.  they represent a moment in time captured, and those moments can never be recreated if they are lost.  Your resume and other typed documents can be recreated, but the initial investment of your time and mental energy consumed to create those documents can never be replaced.  Even if you are willing to retype entire documents, you’ll never get them exactly the same as they were before.

Next you  have your settings and other customizations.  These are things like your wallpaper and the options you have selected in your programs to make them work the way you want them to.  These are things that CAN be recreated, if you wanted to spend the time to do it (and if you can remember them).

Most NEW computer systems are now storing your applications settings WITH your documents (thus the “Documents and Settings” folders seen in Windows XP).  This makes it easy to back up by hand because all you would have to do is just copy the entire Documents and Settings (or “Users”) folder to an external hard drive.

The best designed applications are made so that you could actually restore your documents and settings even before the application is reinstalled, and then install the application, and it will find and use the settings you had the first time without any extra effort.  Reinstalling an application SHOULD BE as easy as changing a spark plug.

Sadly, not all programs are properly designed to store their settings with your documents.  Even many brand new and current programs still store application data with the program files instead of with the documents.  This makes it much more tricky to backup those settings, and even MORE tricky to restore them from backup if you had to.

Music, Movies, and TV

Next you have your Music, Movies, and Recorded TV shows.  I mention these separately from home videos and audio recordings because odds are, you didn’t create them.  Your music probably comes from a CD, or was downloaded from a Music Store.  Movies were probably ripped from DVDs or Blu-Ray disks.  The point is that those are already backed up on their original disks.  You don’t need to back them up again. 

You MIGHT need to back up music downloaded from a Music Store, if said service does not  keep records of what you’ve purchased in case you need to download them again.  Honestly, when you buy music from a service like that, you really should burn those files to a CD or DVD IMMEDIATELY and put store those with the rest of your real CD’s and DVD’s.  You never know how long that service will be around.

Your recorded TV shows were probably recorded by a TiVo or Windows Media Center, so you probably don’t don’t have an original copy on a disk somewhere… However, most people watch TV shows, then delete them, so they also probably do not need to be backed up.  If you REALLY want to keep a permanent copy of a recorded TV show, you should burn it to disk, and store it with the rest of your CD’s and DVD’s.  Just remember – Once you delete it from your computer, it’s no longer “Backed Up” – the copy on your self is now your only copy.

Apps and the OS

Next you have your programs, or “Apps” (which seems to be the popular term these days).  You probably don’t create these, you probably buy them or get them from the web.  That makes them very easily replaceable, which also makes them much lower priority to back up.  If you know how to reinstall a program then you probably don’t really NEED to back them up.

You probably have a bookshelf or drawer full of install disks for the programs you’ve purchased.  Technically, these can be considered backups, since they contain what you need to get the program running again.  If you download programs from the web, you should still have the Setup program that you downloaded.  And even if you don’t chances are ESPECIALLY GOOD that you could find the setup program on the web again if you had to.  Personally, i keep a library of every setup program I download, just in case (my backups!)

Sadly, there are MANY people who have programs installed without having the install disks or setup programs available.  Maybe the programs were already installed when they got the computer, or maybe the disks just got lost (or stolen).  If this is the case, and the program is irreplacable, then you should find a way to back up the program.

Worse yet, simply copying a program to an external hard drive usually won’t work.  Commercial software programs are usually deliberately designed to be difficult, if not impossible to simply copy to another computer.  If you don’t have the original install disks for a program, you really should seriously consider doing a FULL SYSTEM BACKUP just to protect your investment in those difficult or impossible to replace programs.  (It doesn’t HAVE to be this way.  World of Warcraft, a massive and complex program, can be easily copied to another computer by literally just dragging the WoW folder to the other computer.  It works flawlessly on the new computer.)

Lastly, there’s the operating system such as Windows or Mac OS or Linux.  This is the platform upon which everything else is built.  It’s usually the very first thing you put onto a new hard drive as you build a new computer.  And again, you probably have the Install Disks for your OS (or a special recovery DVD for the whole computer) sitting on your bookshelf.  You really don’t need to back up the OS unless you just don’t want to rebuild your system.

However…

In an ironic twist of fate, even though the OS and Programs are the lowest priority things to back up, IF you should have to reinstall the OS, odds are you will have to reinstall all of your programs, and restore backups of all of your settings and documents as well.  Software design can still use a few improvements, methinks…

If your skill level is lower, and you don’t feel comfortable with the idea of reinstalling your OS and programs on a new hard drive if your old one dies, there are always ways around dealing with that.  For example: Best Buy’s Geek Squad, while expensive, is always an option for having someone else reinstall your OS and applications.  Just remember that even Geek Squad can’t recreate your irreplaceable photos and documents out of thin air if you never backed them up.

What if I STILL want to backup everything?

There ARE options available for home users to make a COMPLETE backup of your computer that require as LITTLE effort from you as possible, if you’re willing to spend some money on it.  Software to automate the process is available for free, as long as you provide the storage space.  Windows has always included a backup program and the one included in Windows 7 is fantastic.  If you give it a large enough external hard drive, you can literally set it and forget it until something breaks. 

If you have multiple Windows based computers in your home you should seriously consider a Windows Home Server machine.  WHS is designed so that it only keeps one backup copy of each identical file from each machine, which is VERY EFFICIENT compared to backing up each machine individually.  WHS does FULL SYSTEM BACKUPS of EVERY machine in the home, EVERY night.  Restoring a computer after a COMPLETE hard drive crash (i.e. go buy a new empty hard drive) is stupid easy – you just boot off an included CD, and it does the restore in a few hours automatically.  It just doesn’t get any better than this.

Coming Soon: – What are my options?

What IS a backup? What does it mean to backup?

These may seem like the simplest questions, but really they are quite complex, and even heavily debated by some.  Let’s explore…

What is a backup?

The dictionary says this: “a copy or duplicate version, esp. of a file, program, or entire computer system, retained for use in the event that the originalis in some way rendered unusable.”

The key words there are “copy or duplicate”.  A backup is a second copy of something.  If you have a backup of something, that means that you have the original usable thing, and a second identical copy of that same thing that you can pull out in case the first one is lost, destroyed, stolen, burned up, or whatever.

There are many people who believe that a backup is anything that is not stored directly on your computer.  For example, they think that if you save your digital photos onto an external hard drive, you can then delete the original digital photos from your hard drive, because they are now “backed up”.  The actual word for this concept is Archive.

If you make a copy of a thing on an external hard drive, and then delete the original thing, then you still only have one copy of the thing.  If anything were to happen to that one copy, you will loose the thing.  External hard drives tend to be fairly reliable, but they still have the same weaknesses as any other hard drive, and are even more likely to be accidently dropped or smashed than a typical computer cabinet.

Many experts agree that any given thing is not sufficiently backed up until there are Three copies of the thing – one that you use, the nearby backup that’s immediately handy, and another third copy that’s stored far away from the original in case the original AND it’s backup are destroyed in some kind of fire or other natural disaster that can take out a whole building.  It depends entirely on how important the thing is.

What does it mean to back up?

To “back up” means to create a backup copy of something, and store it safely, separate from the original.

If you have a file on a disk, it is not enough to simply make another copy of the file on the same disk.  What if the disk fails?  Typically, it is good enough to copy a file to a different disk, even if that disk is in the same computer.  Then again, what if the whole computer were to be destroyed?  External hard drives make a good place to store backup copies of files.  They are physically separate from the computer itself, and can be detached and stored seperately, such as in a closet or desk-drawer.

What about Multiple Backups?

Making a backup can be as simple as just copying a file from one hard drive to another.  This is usually fine for things like digital photos, since those pretty much never change once they are taken…

However, if the file is something that gets changed frequently, it may be valuable to create many backups of the file, captured at different points in time.  If you are working on typing a document, you may want to make a backup of it on Monday, then work on it more, then make Another backup of it on Tuesday, etc.  This way, if you discover that you made a major mistake while working on the file on Tuesday, you can go back and retrieve the backup you created on Monday and continue from there.

What is a backup set?

A backup set is a collection of multiple backups of multiple documents over time.  When talking about a collection of multiple documents where some of the documents will be changed or updated over time, but other documents will remain unchanged, it may be more efficient to create a backup set.  This involves making a single “Master Backup” of all of the files in the collection, and then later making additional backups of only the files that have been changed up to that point in time.  This partial backup may be called “Differential” or “Incremental”, and when combined with the Master Backup, can be used to recover all of the files in the collection to the point as they all were after some of them were changed.

Using backup sets to maintain a backup time-line of a group of documents if much more efficient than making multiple copies of the entire set of documents.

Most computer Backup software packages offer the ability to create and maintain backup sets.  It’s usually fairly easy to work with backup sets using one of these programs, but it will still be more complex than simply making a copy of everything you want to protect on an external hard drive, and then sticking that hard drive in a safe place.

What about RAID?  Can I just use a RAID to back up?

What is RAID?

R.A.I.D., which stands for “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives”, is a technology that spreads data across multiple physical hard drives in a way that preserves the data even if any one of the hard drives in the group fails.

RAID IS NOT BACKUP

RAID technology does NOT protect against:

• Accidently deleting data such as when you accidently delete a file from within a program so that it can’t be pulled out of a recycle bin, or if you accidently save a new document over an old one that you didn’t want to loose
• Deliberate or Malicious vandalism of the data such as an angry child or (soon-to-be-ex) spouse who deletes important documents
• File corruption such as when a program crashes in the middle of updating a document
• File corruption or deletion such as when a virus gets on your system and starts to delete your data

RAID technology protects data against hard drive failure.  RAID is all about Availability, not Data Protection.  If you are running a business, and you can’t afford to have your computers stop working because your employees and customers would have to wait for a hard drive to be replaced, and then wait for data to be restored from a backup tape, then you would be able to benefit from using RAID to keep your system going even if a hard drive fails because the data would still be usable by those who need to use it, even while you or your IT staff works to replace the broken hard drive.

While RAID itself is NOT a backup strategy, it is perfectly acceptable to STORE your backup data ON a RAID system – As long as there’s still another copy somewhere else.  Think of RAID as “Live Storage”.  It’s really no different than having an external hard drive that is REALLY REALLY REALLY reliable.  The Drobo, for example, is a good looking device for saving your backup copies of a document to.  You can trust that the backups will be safe if a hard drive fails.  Just remember that it does not protect against accidental data deletion, corruption, or vandalism, so you still need another copy of your data to protect against those things.

Up next: What do I need to backup?

Backup Backup Backup

For the longest time, I was one of those guys who never backed up anything. 

I always said “If my hard drive crashes, I’ll just rebuild everything”.

And I did.  I’ve rebuilt my machines many times.  It’s always a pain, but I kinda enjoy doing it.  I guess I feel like it’s a chance to tinker all over again.

Every time I got a new hard drive, I looked at it as new raw storage space.  500g drive?  Yeah baby, I can collect 500g more stuff!  I figured everything I had, if I REALLY needed to, I could just download it all over again.  I never really considered what would happen if I lost a really BIG hard drive, and had to re-collect music and movies and stuff…

But lately, I’ve been collecting more and more stuff that I can’t replace.  I have digital photos of my kids.  I have videos of them roller skating.  I have photos of my son playing soccer, and my daughter in gymnastics.  I have the first chat logs from when my wife and I first met online…

And it’s starting to hit me that this stuff really is valuable to me, and if I were to loose it forever, I would be heartbroken.  I don’t want to loose the irreplaceable stuff.

I have a 2bay sata NAS that had 2 500g drives in it.  Not to long ago, I bought two new 1tb drives to replace the 500g drives.  It wasn’t until I had two 500g drives laying on my desk that I realized that I now had the opportunity to start doing backups of mine and my wife’s computers.  What the hell, I’ve got these big drives laying here doing nothing, so what the hell, I’ll tinker with some backups.

Thus started my campaign to backup all my stuff.

But what does it really MEAN to backup your stuff?  What do you need to backup?  Just photos and media?  Everything?  Do I really need to spend the space to backup a computer that’s only really used to browse the web?  There really are lots of things to consider when you start to think about building a backup strategy.

In the next few blog posts, I plan to explore some of the options and ideas behind backing stuff up in your home computers.

Next: What IS backup Anyway?