From The Naked PC issue #5.11...

Annual PC Maintenance

by T.J. Lee
May 23, 2002

Well, Spring has sprung here in the Northern Hemisphere and given as I just endured the first major electrical storm of the season I figured it was time to trot out the annual spring cleaning advice. It's time to do a little maintenance on your good old personal computer.

If it's not Spring in your corner of the world don't let it get you down. It's not the season that's important, what's important is that you do some serious clean up and maintenance on your computer periodically. With me the electrical storms of spring and summer get me motivated to start thinking about my UPS device... my first line of defense against electrical spikes and power outages. That in turns leads to thoughts of cleaning up my hard drive and getting my backups in order.

Most everyone has some kind of power protection on their valued electronic components be they computers, stereos, or 2000-inch televisions. These range from the lowly power strip to nifty uninterruptible power supply (UPS) devices from APC or Tripp Lite. Okay, if you've not replaced your power strip in the last 24 months it's time to buy a new one. UPS devices should be replaced every 3 to 4 years or whenever the warranty runs out.

The deuce you say? Replace your power strip surge protector? Trade in your good old dust covered UPS? I'm afraid so. First, before I hear from dozens of you about misleading terminology, I realize that the "uninterruptible" in UPS is a misnomer. Any affordable UPS on the market is not really a UPS at all, but rather a SPS or "standby power supply." With a true UPS the AC power coming from the wall is only used to charge the battery and the battery is what supplies power to the PC at all times. A SPS supplies power from the AC connection to the PC, although it is supposed to filter it so there is no line noise or power fluctuations. The SPS switches over to battery power when the AC connection goes dead. The split second during which this switchover is supposed to happen is one of those "if anything is going to go wrong it will go wrong now" kind of moments.

Anyway, the reason surge strips and UPS devices need to be periodically replaced is because the chemical technology used to protect against surges, metal-oxide varistors known as MOVs, wear out over time. As the MOVs shunt minor power surges they deteriorate. There's no way to tell how much life they have left at any given time so periodic replacement is the only practical way to ensure you're protected. UPS devices protect against surges using the same technology as the $10 power strips. Ugh! Okay, so why have you been able to get by with that old surge strip you bought at Egghead back in 1990? Cause most people don't encounter serious power spikes. Just keep in mind that not needing protection and not having protection are very different concepts.

Clean up the old UPS/surge strip by removing its thermal blanket of dust bunnies and if it's too long in the tooth retire it.

Next on the list is taking a critical look at your backup procedures. Do you know where your data is? Better have a current copy on backup media because it's not a matter of "if" your hard disk will one day fail, it's only a matter of "when."

I've tried lots of different backup methods over the years. CDs are a great backup medium but suffer from the fact that you can't squeeze more than 600 megabytes on a single disc and hard drives are measured by the gigabyte now a days. DVD burners are still a little too pricey for me so that leaves backing up to hard disk and tape.

Backups to hard disk, wherein you simply employ a batch file to copy the stuff from one hard disk to another hard disk (hopefully on a different computer) is not a bad way to go for instant recovery of specific data but it has one large failing. Lack of generational depth. If the data on your production hard drive gets hacked, corrupted, virus infected, etc., you may not be immediately aware of it and you can easily copy the junk to your backup hard disk thereby eliminating a viable backup copy for recovery once the problem is discovered.

Tape is still the backup medium of choice. Relatively cheap, it allows for you to create several generations of backups by simply rotating a number of tapes. Most of our smaller clients use an 8 tape scheme. The tapes are labeled as follows: Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri1, Fri2, Fri3, and EOM. You rotate the Mon through Thu tapes each week, and keep three generations of Friday tapes. Then an EOM tape that is usually kept off site. This allows for recovery to the last five business days, the last three Fridays or the end of the previous month.

Now, let's give some thought to all the junk that has accumulated on your hard disk. Like that Outlook .PST file that contains all the email and contact information you could not manage without but has swelled to over a quarter of a gigabyte. Sheesh. Time to seriously consider archiving some of those emails (especially those with attachments) and then running the Compact Now option in Outlook to try to recover some of the bloat.

Oh, and if you are running Exchange server make sure you have the proper connector installed for Exchange and whatever tape backup software you're running or you may find you're not backing up your Exchange database at all.

As long as we're cleaning up so we can get the amount of data to be backed up down to a manageable size this is a good time to walk though all your directory structures and delete or burn to CD any stuff you don't need crowding your hard disk.

Last but not least when was the last time you hauled your PC outside, pulled the cover off, and took a can of compressed air to your poor computer's dusty innards? Dust is good insulation and heat is your computer's enemy so lets get to that Spring cleaning!

You can reach T.J. Lee at:
mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com

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