Future-proof archiving

I thought your article on archiving (PCW, January 2008) was very interesting. It gave a lot of useful information about how to get content into digital form and organise it as well as some information on physical storage mediums. However there are some really important points which weren't touched on at all.

Choose the file formats you use carefully, When you or your children want to view the content years from now, will the software and the machine to run it on be available? My own advice would be to choose file types that are simple and non-proprietary, like BMP for images, WAV for sound and TXT for text.

So that it's likely there will always be a reader available, if you don't do this you will have to keep an eye on what's going on in the IT world and reformat the data every so often, not a trivial act when we are likely to be talking about multiple gigabytes or even terabytes of data.

The same thing should be considered when choosing which piece of software to use to organise the data. If you have to migrate your data, the task is made much easier the database within the product is capable of being exported in a simple form - CSV being the most commonly accepted format.

Database corruption or loss is a real possibility over retention times the length of a person's life or beyond. Images and other items should be capable of being stored externally to the software so that the database contains only links, not embedded files.

If you choose to use a physical medium for your backups, such as DVD, beware the same obsolescence problems. One manufacturer of "archive grade" DVDs that I checked did not quote any figures for lifetime of media that I could find, even for this flagship product.

My own advice would be to use online services and let the data migration be their problem, not yours. As always use two services, not based in the same town as each other or as you.

Roland Bavington

Security issues

In spite of the recent furore about Data Protection (or actually non-protection), I am still staggered by the number of individuals and companies who make no attempt to encrypt vital data on their computers. Have none of these people ever considered the possibility that their computer might be stolen or need to be repaired?

This was forcefully demonstrated both to a friend of mine who repairs home computers and his client, a home-working solicitor. Having decided that the best solution would be to back-up the data, reformat the hard drive and reload the software, it was only when he suggested that he should take it back to his workshop that the solicitor realised the full implications of data protection.

In the end he had to spend the whole day at the office, mainly sitting reading his newspaper while waiting for Windows and the other software to load and update, being watched all the time by the solicitor in order to ensure that he didn't read or copy any of the confidential files. Not a cheap exercise, particularly if one cost is the solicitor's wasted time!

Surely the encryption of vital confidential data is just as important as regular backups, and I am surprised as to how little reference is made to the subject in computer magazines. Could it be, as has been suggested elsewhere, that the Government tacitly discourages encryption by individuals as this could hamper criminal investigations?

Personally I use Truecrypt, which claims to be acceptable to the United States Department of Defense for documents up to secret level. Once an encrypted folder has been set up, any file saved to that folder is automatically encrypted and decrypted "on the fly" and it is virtually transparent to the user.

I'm sure there are other, equally good, or possibly better programs available - perhaps it is time for PCW to have a look at the subject and encourage their readers to be more security conscious.

Brian J. Edwards

Nas restoration

On the subject of the failed NAS enclosure (PCW January 2007, Letters), I am a Linux user and my system allows me to look into the guts of small Nas drives.

In general terms they have two partitions, a small 100MB or so primary ext2 partition, which contains the embedded Linux OS and a major storage partition. Normally the larger partition is able to be formatted to ext2 or ext3, ReiserFS, Fat32 or even NTFS - Fat32, while not as good as NTFS, is transparent to most other operating systems.

I would suggest to the owner of the failed drives that rather than going to the trouble of installing a Linux distro, he should use a Linux Live CD - the prime choices being Knoppix (the KDE desktop looks pretty much like Windows) or Puppy (the file manager looks a bit odd but is understandable). Either will allow copying to a USB key and Knoppix also offers CD writing with a pretty simple interface.

QT Parted (partition manager on Knoppix) will tell you what format has been used on the drive and, if you use it via the command line in Konsole by typing 'sudo qtparted', will allow formatting of the partitions - be careful!

James Baldwin

Photo GPS

Geotagging of Photos (PCW November 2007, Hands On) is very useful, particularly for anyone traveling. It also makes life easier for anyone who uses photos to record the condition of equipment during surveys or who collect photographic evidence.

However, one concern is the use of a separate GPS unit which would need to be checked regularly during photo shoots to ensure it is functioning correctly (GPS is locked on, batteries ok, memory not full etc.).

Anyone on an extended field trip may find the requirement to download both the photographs and GPS track information regularly, and then run a separate program to merge the position data into the photo information file a limitation.

In my search for a reliable and easy to use geotagging system I came across the Geopic II from Customidea (www.customidea.com), at the recent Nikon Show.

It's easy to use, overcomes the above limitations and fits on the camera hot shoe and connects directly to the camera via the 10-pin accessory socket.  The principle advantage of this unit is its ease of use since it records the position data directly in the photo information file at the instant the photo is taken.

Peter Bryon

Vista's performance

It’s not surprising that Vista take-up has been poor (PCW February 2008, Editorial) – its cost-performance benefit is truly awful. I was interested in Vista, and built a PC for its evaluation knowing that it would be hungry - Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU, 1GB (later 2GB) 1,333GHz FSB memory and an Asus P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe motherboard.

The performance is comparatively poor with Vista Business Edition, even after tweaking. It takes around one and a half minutes to start, even with Superfetch turned of. I seem to spend a lot of time downloading so-called important updates (at least 4GB so far).

How can a product be so buggy and avoid the interest of Trading Standards? Comparison of performance between identical applications on an AMD 3000+ with 512MB memory shows little or no improvement, especially on processor-intensive applications such as AGI Satellite Toolkit (STK), or Mathcad with fairly complex recursive algorithms for evaluation. It may be great for games – I would not know or care.

I recently bought a laptop for a relative (2GHz dual core CPU, 1GB memory, Vista Home Premium) and this takes around a minute to start (again with Superfetch turned off), but this is before a significant number of applications have been installed.  It runs the flashy Aero interface adequately, but for what?
I also have a Sony T2XP laptop, 1.2GHz processor, 1GB memory, running XP SP2. This takes around 25 seconds to start from hibernation (90 seconds from cold), does all I want in word processing, Mathcad and STK, and goes to sleep quickly without spending minutes updating its dodgy operating system; ideal for working 'on the road'.

The configuration (in terms of installed applications) is almost identical to the Vista evaluation machine. People (and companies) are right to be cautious about paying out good money for 'more is actually less' in terms of performance where simple functionality is concerned.

Vista may be more secure, and fine if permanently powered up to allow it to update in the silent hours, but aren’t we supposed to be saving the planet by switching off our computers when not in use? Vista seems to have been devised for a different era, for a leisured society with time to waste (or possibly to wait), and with deep pockets to buy what is apparently unnecessary hardware.

Peter Swallow

Missing issue?

Have I missed an issue?

PCW December 2007 informs me there will be an article on wireless print servers next month. But the Letters page in the January 2008 issue then refers to the Editor's Choice (the D-Link DP-310) in the previous issue.

As January follows December, did you sneak an issue in I missed?

Ann Edwards