By Jin Nan Goto

Licensing is a very complicated aspect of today’s technology.  When you buy software at the store you are not actually buying the software, but rather the license to use the software.  Because of that; the licenses, product keys, and registration codes are actually more important than the physical disks.  But, too often, people are much better at protecting the physical CDs and DVDs than the licenses, and this causes problems if the software key is lost.

Multiple copies is essential when backing up anything. When you buy software from a store you generally get a physical label that contains the key or the license.  For example the product key for windows is often placed on a label on the underside of you laptop or on the back of the computer.  This is the only copy most people have of their product keys.  But what happens if you lose the CD case containing the label with the product key.  Even if you still kept the original CD you wouldn’t be able to reinstall it without either buying  the software again in order to obtain a new license or obtaining an illegitimate cracked version of the software.

For cases like this you should take the time to document all your product keys and what computers are using them and record it somewhere separate from the Original CD  so that if you lose the CD you won’t lose your product key along with it.  Large companies often use special software to keep track of all this license information, but you can use a simple  text file or spreadsheet to store this information. Another idea is that you can use your digital camera to take a picture of the label and archive the image. Also, if you are concerned about keeping this data secure, you can easily encrypt it using free tools such as truecrypt.

Ensuring that you have redundant copies kept separate from your computer will protect you from catastrophic situations. Storing a copy of the data online is a very good solution. Then you won’t have to worry about losing your data if your laptop is stolen or if you have a hardware failure.  Sending a copy of the text file or spreadsheet, containing your license information, to your webmail account (not to your POP mail as this is also stored on your computer) is all you really need to do in order to save a copy on the internet. I use a web service called Evernote to store my license information.  While Evernote is a online notetaking service it is very flexible and is useful because it lets you upload notes by email. I can also archive the various web accounts that I’m subscribed to by forwarding them to my Evernote account.

By Jin Nan Goto

Everyone will agree that backing up your data is incredibly important.  Except people often don’t realize how important it is until they lose a file that they need. SyncToy2.0 is a free utility from Microsoft that will Sync two folders and it is useful for backing up your data.

Backing up to an external hard drive can be tedious and requires a lot of planning and thinking.  SyncToy does a great job in automating the process.  In SyncToy you will specify “folder pairs” and when you run SyncToy it will copy all changes from one folder to the other.  You can get SyncToy 2.0 here.

The first step is to create the folder pairs in SyncToy.  This is so SyncToy knows which folders need to be synchronized.  This step is fairly straightforward as you simply browse for the folders.  I select my “documents” folder and a corresponding “documents” folder on my 150 GB Western Digital External hard drive.

Then you need to chose how you want to copy files between the two folders.

• Synchronize:  The copying works in both directions.  All new files, changes, deletions on one folder is copied over to the other and vice-versa.
• Echo:  The copying only works in one direction.  New files, changes, deletions, and renames are moved from the first folder to the second.  However changes, new files, and deletions are not copied from the second folder to the first.
• Contribute:  Works in a similar way as Echo, but deletions are not copied over from one folder to another.

SyncToy 2.0 External Link

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&DisplayLang=en