Laziness or the Family Man

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Recently, I was at a friend’s house, visiting.  As I was looking around his house, I noticed that my friend, who is married and has children, kept his house spare of any expensive or precarious objects.  As we were getting ready to watch a movie, he went over to a cabinet, that was closed and locked, selected a DVD from a collection that was close to the top of the shelf and carefully opened the package.

I wasn’t use to this level of carefulness, but I guess when you have a house filled with children who have fingers that are covered in peanut butter and enjoy throwing dvds onto the ground under other toys, you need to be careful with your video discs.

It reminded me of something I started to do last winter as a way to allow myself to be lazier than I normally am.  It irritates me that, in order to watch one of my dvds, I need to get up, take the disc over to my player and put it in.  Then, if I am watching a television series with multiple discs, this routine repeats itself several times.  I wanted something simple.

Enter: Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD.

For 79 euros ($110), AnyDVD HD allows you to copy your movie discs to your computer as an image file.  Basically, it is a singular file that has all of the information of the DVD.  When selected, this file, in conjunction with Slysoft’s Virtual CloneDrive, tricks your computer into thinking that the disc is in the drive and plays the movie for you. 

In other words, I have made it so that, with other applications, I can watch any movie I own, on my computer just by clicking on the file from my bed; no disc, dvd covers, or getting up required.

How does this apply to my friend?  Using this program, you could make backup copies of your movies so that, if Toy Story 3 ever gets scratched or destroyed before a long car ride, you can burn a quick copy with a blank dvd and you don’t have to fork over another 20 dollars to avoid the screaming banshee in the back seat.  For a parent, I can’t imagine a more wonderful, technological security blanket. 

Now there are stipulations.  I only use this to make copies of films that I already own.  And I do NOT make copies of films I own, then turn around and SELL.  That is illegal.  Well, to be strictly technical, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DOES imply that this is illegal, but if I own the movie, I feel that I should be able to do what I want with it as long as I am only using one copy at a time.

For the next couple posts, I am going to be talking about some of the cool tricks and tips that you should know if you want to start backing up your media and DVDs, so keep posted.

And remember to email me any questions you may have and follow my technology twitter feed.

STORAGE

These days, with so much digital information (pictures, music, budget and bank information) lying around on our computers, and the risk of those computers to somehow stop working, it becomes necessary to make back-ups of the information. There are many options that you have, both physical and virtual.

When most people think of physical back up, they think of CDs or DVDs. Well, HOW VERY EARLY 2000s OF YOU! These days, it is very inexpensive to purchase flash drives or external hard drives to keep back-ups of all your information.

First things first: having your information in two places does NOT mean it is backed up. Your information is only backed up if you have it stored in a place that is not USED every day. If I have my music on my music player AND my computer, it is not backed up. I am actively using both devices and neither are protected from accidental deletion. One of your storage devices must be disconnected and STORED for it to be considered ‘backed-up.’

The first choice you have is a flash drive. Flash drives are the size of a package of gum and contain no moveable parts on the inside of the device, meaning they can be dropped, or shaken with no damage to the information they contain. They are very convenient, as they can be plugged into your USB port, filled with files, unplugged and stored. They are very easy to carry around and work on any computer. They ARE small and, if storing for a long time, may get lost; so they must be kept track of. Also, they are usually small storage sizes (4 to 8 gigabyte, or GB) with the high end (and costly) being 32 GB. For more large scale storage, we are going to have to focus on external hard drives.

External hard drives are just like the hard drives that are in your computer, except they are able to be transported and carried easily outside the computer. They connect by USB or firewire (Apple’s version of faster USB) and usually require an external power supply. These devices are usually higher capacity (320-500 GB are normal) and can store as much as 2 tb (1tb is 1000 GB). The problems with these are that they are larger (about the size of a book) and have moveable parts inside of them that, if dropped or shaken, can stop working. I’ve had this happen to me, and there is nothing as soul-crushing as realizing that all your music is gone because they hard drive stopped working. But that was because I was continuously using the device and not using it for storage.

In addition to CDs and DVDs, these are the two main options for physical storage of your valuable documents and files. Next, we’ll talk about ways of storing your information virtually, online, so that you can access it from anywhere with an internet connection.