Next, I started keeping only articles I thought were worth keeping and keeping a database/spreadsheet of the articles on my old Palm IIIe.  It was a system that worked quite good for about two years.  I would file the articles in a binder alphabetically and by number (using stick on tabs) and then in the database I’d include keywords and short blurbs from the articles with the article information.  To find articles around a subject I just had to do a search and then I could locate the article in my “article binder”.

Then disaster struck when my Palm PDA died and the backups I had made were all corrupt.  So… I lost my index and the value of my article file plunged.  By then I had discovered WordPress and thought I’d try to keep a private repository of articles online.  Here’s where things got really ridiculous time-wise because I decided that I’d type in (yes, manually type) the articles that I thought were worth keeping.  Needless to say, the backlog of articles I had to enter piled up fairly quickly.  This was mitigated a little bit when I discovered that in many cases I could find the articles online and just copy and paste but there were still a lot of steps involved.  The advantage of this route, of course, is that finding information greatly improved.  This disadvantage was the incredible time investment involved in keeping up with my reading.

Let me just take an aside for a moment.  Why was/am I doing all this?  The main reason is I wanted a way to find and access things I’m reading when I remember them and also be able to properly attribute what I remember.  There have been many times over the years I’ve been in ministry where I’ve been doing some leadership teaching, or preparing a message, or writing an article and I remember something I read in a magazine that would apply and I’ve been able to locate that and use it.  Sure, as the years went by, the internet became a VERY valuable resource for illustrations, quotes, and ideas but to this day, nothing beats  a cultivated, filtered stash of personally reviewed material.

About a year ago I discovered Evernote and all I can say is it is a gift from heaven.  Evernote, has made keeping track of the articles I read (especially print articles) SOOO easy and way less time consuming than any of the other systems I’ve used in the past.  Here’s the new steps for filing articles:

1. Mark articles/quotes I want to keep in things I read using post-it tabs
2. Scan and email articles to my custom Evernote email address (I get my Admin Assistant to do that now but even when I did it, it didn’t take long).  I’m fortunate that I can email right from the photocopier at work.  If I didn’t have that ability I would just scan into a folder that you can setup Evernote to automatically read from whenever something is saved to it.
3. That’s It!

Here’s why it works so well.  Evernote is a note capturing utility that you can use to keep track of material from all kinds of resources.  You can manually type notes in, drop files into it, add pictures, drop in screenshots, clip whole websites etc.  One of the cool ways of getting stuff into Evernote is via a custom email address linked to your Evernote account.  Anything you send to that email address gets added to a note.  Now, you can title and tag each note but it’s not even necessary because here’s where the power of Evernote kicks in – text recognition in images.  Yes, that’s right!  When you add pictures/images to your Evernote database all the text is recognized and indexed.  When you do a search for a term or phrase, all the images/text matching the search criteria will be returned!  My only criticism?  I WISH Evernote was around years ago!  Oh, and one more thing – everything you add to your Evernote account can be accessed either on your local machine or via the internet because all your notes are synced to the “cloud”.  So now, even if I don’t have my own computer I can look up the articles I’ve saved AND I can also rest easy knowing there is a built-in backup of all my notes.

{disclaimer: I was NOT paid anything to write about Evernote.  Yes, they are that good.}

In my opinion, what makes or breaks a company (or any organization for that matter) is customer support. Probably more than ever – word of mouth matters – if you have crappy front line customer support it doesn’t matter how stellar the rest of your business is – your business/organization will suffer.

So, here’s my list of what customer support should be:

1. Don’t keep me waiting.
Whatever way you offer support, long delays mean I get unhappy. Don’t have an answer for the question I’ve asked – write, “we don’t have an answer yet but we’re looking into it” but DON’T say/write nothing. In today’s world more than ever, time = currency. I’m not just paying money for your product/service but I’m also paying time because there was a problem. You better balance out that time in coming up with a solution!

2. Assume I’m smarter than you (even though I’m probably not).
Nothing is more irritating than condescending and “know-it-all” customer support. Sure, there are always a whole host of “dumb” people that get in contact with you and I’ve had my share of dumb moments – but I’ll stick around with a company that makes me feel smarter than I am (and is patient with me when I’m not).

3. Remember I’m paying your paycheck.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things my contribution is probably about .005% BUT the power of word of mouth means that a big chunk of your future paychecks could depend on what I tell others about my experience with you – don’t forget you represent your company.

4. If you don’t know the answer, tell me, then find someone who does.
Don’t pretend you know what I’m talking about if you don’t. Get me to someone who does.

5. Keep your word.
Trust broken is gone. The sad thing is, most people don’t remember what went right but what went wrong. Especially when what went wrong involved being lied to. Know your companies guarantees and stick to them – I don’t care what your internal policy says – if you don’t have the authority to keep the guarantee then hurry up and get me to someone who does.

6. Communicate clearly.
If I don’t understand what you’re saying because you can’t talk my language then I’ll end up getting frustrated (and you probably will too).

7. Don’t wait for me to ask for reimbursement.
If you’ve screwed up, it cost me. Don’t think I’ll just forget it. It may cost you a little bit to reimburse me in some way but it’ll end up costing you a lot if I take my business elsewhere (and potential customers as well). If I have to ask for reimbursement, I’ll still remember the problem – if you offer it to me I’ll remember your solution.

8. I’m not always right, but it’s your job to make sure I think I am.
Your attitude when responding to communication from me matters. Don’t tell me not to add any more entries to a ticket I opened (especially when I go to live chat to find answers because there’s no response to the ticket…).

9. Like your job.

If you don’t like your job – I don’t want to know it. And bosses/owners – your customer support people are your evangelists. Make sure they like their job. If they don’t, I won’t like your company.

And finally,

10. Assume this is your company’s last chance…
…to make it worth my while to stick with you. Always remember that in today’s worlds there are options. You can either make it difficult for me to leave (because I like you too much) or difficult to stay (because you don’t like me enough).

Why backups?

Quite simply – as any computer guru will tell you (or someone who’s learned the hard way!) – hard drive failure is not an if, but a when.? No matter how well a hard drive is manufactured it is still mechanical and subject to wear and tear.? Eventually it will fail.? Backing up your data is just plain smart if you don’t want to lose any of your hard work. It is something that is even more necessary in this age of digital media – who really wants to lose their years of photo memories, or that cache of mp3′s they’ve been gradually amassing?? If you don’t have a backup system – there’s really no time to waste and it should be the first thing on your to-do list in the immediate future.

The ideal backup solution – what does it look like?

Backups are one of those necessary things – like eating vegetables.? Everyone knows that we should eat a certain amount of vegetables every day, but most of us really don’t want to take the time or the effort to get that healthy helping of greens.? Heck, some of us don’t even like them!

The ideal backup solution is one that fills the following criteria:

• It’s reliable – Put simply.? If your data doesn’t restore from the backup when you need it then the backup is worthless.? A backup should be something you can count on when the unthinkable happens.
• It’s redundant – No backup can ever be 100% reliable. That’s why a good back-up solution should have multiple copies should one fail.? Redundancy can mean different locations for the backup, different sets of backups, or different media copies.? The ideal solution will have all of those.
• It’s automatic – Ideally, once you set up what you want backed up you shouldn’t have to think about it.? Kind of like breathing – how many of us really think about pumping our lungs full of oxygen? It just happens.? Backups should be like that too!
• It’s current – If the most recent back-up you have is 2 months old when you go to restore after a computer melt-down – you might have a case of heeby-jeebies.? Heeby = “whew, I’m glad I’ve got a backup” – jeebie = “darn, it doesn’t have that 20 page proposal I put together last week…”.? An ideal backup solution will be real-time – when you save a file, it’s archived.
• It’s cheap – not in quality of course.? By cheap I simply mean that the ideal backup solution shouldn’t cost an arm and a let to run.
• It’s simple – If the backup solution takes a degree in computer science to run then it isn’t “ideal”.? Sure, there are lots of “geek power” solutions out there that fit many of the other criteria I’ve listed above (such as using subversion, backing up to a home server etc.) but I want to have something that wouldn’t take me a couple weeks to learn how to set up or need constant “tweaking” to keep running.

Methods that work but are a pain in floppy…

While I’ve long been an advocate for frequent backups – I haven’t always practiced what I’ve preached.? The main reason has been that for the most part – doing backups required time that I didn’t really have much of and more often, effort that I didn’t want to expend.? So I still did backups, but just not as frequently as I would have liked.? In the past I’ve used:

• Floppy Disks (3.5″) + WinZip – way back when a big hard drive was around 750mb!
• Zip Drives (250mb by Iomega) + Proprietary software – a nice upgrade but still time consuming.
• A second hard drive + winzip/mirrored files – Definitely faster, but I still wasn’t comfortable with the potential for dual hard-drive failure (both hard-drives in the same case…I know, my worries were probably unfounded but I still saw it as a temp solution)
• 1Gb USB Memory Stick + Allway Sync between Home and Office comp – This backup solution was probably the most redundant and reliable system I had going to date and definitely the one I had the most up-to-date backups for. This also had the added advantage of having a copy of my files on me at all times with the USB Key.? However, this was only useful when it was just docs and small-files I was backing up.? When I started going digital with my photos and music/sermon recordings, this backup solution just wouldn’t cut it.
• DVD-RW plus? various backup software – The advantage here was size.? DVD’s could hold a whole lot of files.? However, I was back to the “disk-swapping” thing and I just didn’t like the time it took to set up a DVD burn session.? I also couldn’t settle on any Backup software for DVD’s that I liked.

With the advent of broadband and the Web 2.0 revolution more and more options started appearing on the internet scene that began to approach the ideal backup solution. One setup that I tried was pretty complicated, but it worked – for a while.? I used Hamachi (by LogMeIn.com – which is a VPN [Virtual Private Network] system) to hook my home computer into my church office network.? I shared the folders for the network that I wanted to sync between my office computer and home computer and then using Allway Sync and the Windows Task Scheduler system I configured the two computers to sync files between each other so that there was a mirror copy of all the files I wanted archived between the two of them. This worked well for a while but then the connection speed using Hamachi wasn’t fast enough and I started getting sync failures far too often. This backup solution failed the reliability test, the simplicity test, and the real-time archiving test.

It’s here!

Then along came the news of Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Solution) and a neat little free program called S3 Backup that plug-ins with your Amazon S3 account to make backing up to the Amazon servers easy.? I’m not going to get into the mechanics or the step-by-step method of setting this up (maybe I’ll write that in a future article), but suffice it to say that after the initial looong upload of the files I wanted to archive this has proved to be fairly painless.? Amazon does charge for storage on their servers but thankfully, the cost is minimal and definitely worth it.

Thanks to the redundant, and reliable architecture of Amazon’s server farm I am definitely sleeping easier at night knowing that there is a safe copy of all the files I want to be archived.? I was finally working with something that was the closest to the ideal backup solution that I had come across yet.? There was only point it was off on and that was real-time archiving.

Then, there was another difficulty I ran into.? What about my home computer?? Along the way I? realized that I was not only looking for a backup solution but also a sync solution.? I wanted a way to keep my working files mirrored between my office and home computer (pictures and music as well). Of course, I’ve been using Logmein for a while and although it is really easy to use this service to access another computer from a different location and work with programs and files on it – it’s still kind of slow and you don’t want to have to do things in a hurry.? So, if I could have more painless way (similar to the criteria for the ideal backup solution) of syncing files between my computers I would be quite pleased.

Enter in Microsoft’s FolderShare.? I can’t even remember how I came across this online service other than I was googleing something and read about it in some tech-support forum.? Put simply FolderShare allows you to set up multiple computers to sync folders and files with each other.? Here’s a point form list of some features that I found very useful:

• You setup different “libraries”.? A library is simply a way of saying, “these are the files I want to sync on this computer with the files on this computer”.? The libraries are remarkably easy to set up and you can have multiple computer’s sync with the same library.
• You can set up the sync to be real-time.? That means that when? you save a file on one computer it gets propagated through all the computers that are part of the same library.? You wouldn’t believe the time-savings this gives you!? This also has the added bonus of being a great backup solution which partnered with my Amazon S3 backup method closes the gap on creating a real-time backup solution!
• You can access (download) any of the files in the libraries you’ve set up, from any computer hooked into the internet.
• It’s free! I don’t know if Microsoft will ever start charging for this service – but if they do and the cost is reasonable it will definitely be something I’d pay for.

Of course, there are many other features with FolderShare, but what I listed above are the predominant reasons why I use it.

In summary:

With the combination of Amazon S3, S3 Backup, and FolderShare I now finally have managed to put together what I believe to be the ideal backup system:

• It’s reliable – The writeup Amazon has about their service is quite informative about the reliability of their service.? I’m reasonably confident that S3 Backup works as promised as well (which is crucial since it uses an encryption to make the file storage more secure).? However, the fact that I also mirror my files between my home and office computer ensures that I’ve got a fairly reliable backup solution in place.? I’ve been using this system for just over a month now with no problems to date.? Of course, the real test will be when I actually need to restore a backup!
• It’s redundant – Two backup methods + three archive locations (home computer, office computer, Amazon servers) = great redundancy!? If one location fails I’ve got two others to fall back on.
• It’s automatic – I don’t even think about my backups anymore! Groovy…
• It’s current – S3 Backup automatically uploads any modified/new files to Amazon’s servers once every 24 hours.? But the real beauty of this system is that with FolderShare up and running I always have near real-time copy of my files on two locations.
• It’s cheap – The only thing I pay for using this system right now is for data transfer to, and storage on, the Amazon servers.? But the cost is minimal.? How minimal?? Well after my initial transfer of 32gb (reading, writing, setting up buckets, deleting) and a monthly storage fee for just under 13gb of data I have accumulated the grand total of $8.50 for the month.? Future months will be cheaper because I won’t be incurring the data transfer charges ($6.55 for the month- which is more this month because of the initial transfer).? Pocket change for peace of mind!
• It’s simple – All in all I’d say between the two methods I spent a total of about 3 hours setting them up.? The most time-consuming part of the process was restructuring my folder structure on both computers to overcome the 10,000 file limit per library using FolderShare and also making sure that the mirror’d copy of my office files wouldn’t take out the remaining space on my home computer’s main hard-drive (which it did on the first go at it lol).? But all-in-all things were pretty easy to set up.? Of course, the novice user will have a bit of difficulty understanding how to use Amazon S3 but most computer users should be able to get by ok.

So there you have it.? The ideal backup system that works….and a great sync solution to go with it!? (hint: If I get enough requesst for a step-by-step guide on how to set this up, I may just bump it up nearer to the top of my to-do list )