Chapter 6: Surveillance

Overview

Wherever You Go, There You Are!

I had a little dreidel. I made it out of clay. And when it's dry and ready, with my dreidel I will play.

”Children's Folk Song (Jewish)

When I switched on my computer last Tuesday, I was welcomed by the black screen of death, an error message that read, "Operating System Not Found." I don't know whether this has ever happened to you, but I'll tell you that it can make a grown man cry! Yes, I had an old backup, but I couldn't recall how recent. That's not a good sign. So for two long days and nights I worried about the state and fate of my data. Five completed chapters of this book, all of my diligent research, my Outlook address book with thousands of contacts, and every damn file on my 30-gig hard drive might be hosed into unrecoverable digital purgatory!

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending: I recovered my data. After two motherboard replacements by an onsite computer repair specialist, as well as three new hard drives , Dell upgraded my (un)trusty old laptop with a refurbished top-of-the-line model. Few companies stand behind their products like Dell or exhibit such integrity! I did lose a few weeks over the episode, but I got a much better laptop for my trouble.

After transferring all of my data to my new Dell Inspiron 8100 notebook and running Windows Update, the first thing I did was search for a utility that would mirror and back up my work in the event of another catastrophic computer crash. Ghostfiles, a freeware utility by lowrieWeb, wasn't hard to find. The program replicates any changes made to a file in one directory to a duplicate file in a second directory. Each character is mirrored by this nifty little app as I type. The final Part of this book, "Zone Defense," contains a section on backup strategies, including how to work with programs like Ghostfiles. You'll find a link to download Ghostfiles and other useful utilities on the Invasion of Privacy homepage at http://www.mjweber.com/iop/privacy.htm.

Figure 6.1: Ghostfiles window