Using Dropbox to share Word Templates

So. Dropbox is my favourite file sharing tool. One of the things I use it for, and you can too, is to share Microsoft Word Templates. On Mac this is relatively easy and you can use the following instructions.

I have a file in my dropbox called masters and within that a file named Microsoft Templates or though you can name it whatever you want. So if you want to share your masters folders across multiple accounts, follow the instructions below (for Microsoft Office for Mac 2008):

1. Open up Word and then select preferences:

2. Then select File Locations:

3. Then select Workgroup Templates (this allows you to separate personal local templates and word templates you want to share):

And once you’ve selected the folder in your dropbox you can begin centralising your word templates! Excellent.

Flood Recovery

Well, over the weekend one of my clients offices was flooded by a burst pipe from the apartment above. As I took the call on a surprisingly nice Sunday morning (no snow!) I thought that she couldn’t have imagined for a worse start to the new year.

I have spent the last few days assessing the damage over the telephone with her. At the moment we don’t know if the Macs survived the power surge that knocked out the mains electricity, after all surge protection only goes so far. What she hasn’t had to worry about, however, is her data.

About two weeks before Christmas I finally persuaded her to take out a 50gb account with Dropbox. So if the computers are toast, we can setup new ones, link them to her Dropbox and be up and ready to go in no time. She has also been using Google Apps Standard for the past year or so, so her email is safe, as are her calendars and contacts.

Whilst we wait for permission to move the computers from the insurers to a place where we can see if they work I have been able to email her essential documents, as and when she has needed them straight to her Google company email account on her Blackberry.

So all in all what could have been a disaster six weeks earlier, has been an unsurprising inconvenience but in the end not a disaster. Phew.

Thanks go to Dropbox and Google for making this possible!

Bye Bye CDs / DVDs

So it’s the week before the New Year and like most of you out there I am considering my resolutions and doing some general spring cleaning. Now for geeks (and particularly those of an OCD bent) this normally includes a spring clean of various computer systems. And this year my focus has been on my CDs and DVDs.

Over the years I’ve built up a large collection of CDs and DVDs to which I’ve burnt backups of my systems, old client systems and the like. In fact I have a four stories high CD holder that my grandmother bought stuffed to the brim and overflowing to an artful stack carefully balanced on top.

I also have a much more artful and pleasing desktop CD holder from Eva Solo that perches by my iMac and gives me access to those essential daily CDs and DVDs. (Did I seriously just write that? Honestly I can’t remember when I last used a CD or a DVD… Snow Leopard installation perhaps?) Anyway if you fancy one for yourself you can buy it from Amazon here.

Unfortunately although I’ve always taken basic care of my CDs I’ve never been one of those people who is insistent about always putting them immediately back in the case (or paper slip rather, I’ve way to many for actual cases) and over time they’ve become scratched and generally worn down as this rather imperfect medium for storing information tends to get. (Did anyone seriously think they’d last a decade? I’m struggling with ones five years old).

Anyway as I started to transfer the CDs to my collection of HDs it quickly became apparent that I was going to have to give them a little more tender loving care than I thought. Now I can just about hear the sigh of some you reading who always take perfect care of their CDs and DVDs, but in my defence it’s perhaps because I stopped buying CDs when I got my iPod or because I never really got into DVDs beyond a service like LoveFilm but I never thought about how damaging a few scratches could be.

So demanding an easy, quick solution, using just what I might have around the house, I remembered an old geek tale that you could repair damaged CDs with banana skins. Surely it couldn’t be true… but what the hell, I had some bananas, was a tad hungry so it seemed the way to go. But before embarking without instructions I did a quick google and returned these instructions. So rummaged through the kitchen and came up with a not too brown looking banana (it is the holidays), some window cleaner, some kitchen roll and a handy duster.

So all good to go, I picked a CD that had been giving me some difficulty. One file was repeatedly refusing to copy across (the kind of frustration I was looking to remedy). Not reading the instructions right the first time I had eaten the banana (seriously was I gonna waste it on some CDs) so I had to just use the skin. And after a couple of rub downs, followed by some squirts of window cleaner, the CD was looking better, and low behold when I inserted it into the drive it copied the file.

I was now on a mission and five hours later (did I mention I had a lot of CDs  / DVDs – 158 if you want to know) and some 22.4 Gb of data transferred I was all done. Now I just have to find a sensible way to dispose of my CDs rather than sending them to landfill. Any ideas would be welcomed in the comments.

Oh and for those of you wanting to know if it’s sensible to push all of your backups on to some local HDs can I point you to my earlier post on dropbox where most of my files have now been backed up to. Great system.

Never rely on one backup solution

So continuing my posts on my virus stricken computer drama, see the earlier posts “Poking a hornets nest” and “Dropboxing my way out of a crisis” I had decided after the crisis with iSure (which we had been paying £8.30 a month for the privilege of using and had replaced with a free 2gb dropbox account) to see if we could place the accounts files in the dropbox.

Unfortunately it became clear after a day or so that this solution would not work. As the accounts files (Quickbooks Pro if you need to know) were accessed from two different computers very quickly duplicates started to appear. So it was off hunting for another solution. Fortunately I had one up my belt. I’d been using Mozy since it first went into beta on the Mac and I thought it’d be ideal for this.

So again taking advantage of another free package, some 2gb before you need to pay, I installed it on the accounts computer and went back to sharing the file over the company network. So dropbox might have failed in my enterprise to handle these particular files (I suspected it might, but c’est la vie) but Mozy came through for me and provided a quick and easy solution to my problem.

In most of my personal dealings I use Mozy’s free service to backup the libraries of my MBP, whilst using dropbox to manage my files (I have a lot of files so I am using the 50gb account for that) as a type of replacement NAS as my one of my good friends @tsmarsh termed it. And I have to say it’s worked well for me so far and helped me out of a few sticky situations, so I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking for a peace of mind.

The benefit to these services when used free is that you can recommend them to your friends and family and get a little extra space each time someone takes up your referral, meaning it can satisfy a great deal of your needs without you having to spend a dime. All in all using this solution for my client has led them to a saving of £99.60, which in a recession the pennies truly count.

Dropboxing my way out of a crisis

So in my previous posting “Poking a hornets nest” I had to deal with a dead XP box at a clients. Fortunately for me I had moved the company files over to dropbox a couple of weeks prior. So when this computer went down I knew not only did I have copies of their files independently on two other computers I had a copy too.

After a comprehensive check of the other PC in the office I established that the virus had not spread, I have to say I did have some concerns that dropbox might make such a spread easier, but fortunately for the moment virus writers haven’t seemed to cottoned on to this method of transferring viruses! Phew. But I think that this is something they had perhaps better consider as a potential risk in the future.

One of the reasons I spent so much time in attempting to restore this PC rather than wiping and starting again was the accounts files for the company were stored on it and we had been using a service provided to the company for the last couple of years by Barclays Bank called iSure, though Barclays had sold them an unlimited account, it’s primary purpose was to backup the accounts files.

Not only was there limited documentation in their business subscription pack telling you what to do when a disaster, like the one we were experiencing, happened, an hour or two worth of phone calls to their support line (where I had to give limited security information (it would be very easy to fake)) I managed to log onto their site and find the files we needed.

Unfortunately although the computer was left on 24/7 so that backups could run twice daily and it had gone down on a Friday morning, the most recent copy of the accounts they had was from the three days earlier. So to save having the work done that week have to be repeated, as well as the lost days, I had to recover the data from the hard drive that had been affected.

If we had been relying on this to backup the company’s main set of files, some 30,000 files or so they would all have had to have been checked for validity. And though files might not be changed on a daily basis we would have needed to check just to be sure. Though I had to rescue the account files, with the others once my re-install was complete I just added the new computer and hey presto the files downloaded. Genius.

Dropbox for Cooking

Stumbled across this great use of dropbox’s new iPhone App courtesy of Kevin Purdy at lifehacker earlier today: as a kitchen aid to help you follow your recipes whilst preparing that culinary masterpiece.

It sounds like a great idea (I’m sure my friend @tsmarsh will love it). Great combo; after all your iPhone is eminantly suited to the kitchen: it’s touchscreen might have a little trouble with flour covered hands, but it is wipeable and it’s more flexible than using a dedicated app.

Read the full article here.

Dropbox Gallore

I can’t help but love dropbox.

A couple of years ago whilst working for a property developer based in London, with offices in Brighton and Manchester I was instructed to bring a unified file system in place for the three separate offices, at minimal cost. This proved to be a difficult task. In the end I ordered three external hard drives and on a Friday after close of business I copied all of the core data from the London office onto the one of those drives.

First thing Saturday morning I got on a train and headed to the Brighton office  where I copied and merged the data from the two drives and spent an inordinate amount of time organising the files into the new filing system we were going to be simultaneously deploying. I then installed a great little piece of software I had found based on rysnc and configured it’s syncing capability over an ssh connection to the London office.

I plugged in the hard-drive, ordered a courier and sent off the hard-drive destined for the Manchester office and headed back to the train station and to the London office. I configured the London office and plugged in their hard drive. I then set the system up and configured the first sync between the two systems and left for the day as it required a great deal of time to go through the first sync.

Come Monday morning I was on the phone to the Manchester office, which had to refrain from using files for the day and began their sync. All in all the process took the better part of three days and required me to travel between two offices. As well as plenty of overtime, which I suppose was good for me, but was a great deal of unnecessary hassle.

The system itself was also very resource intensive, requiring the three computers that managed the service to be left on at night and spend sometimes hours at a time syncing the files. It also always lagged 24 hours behind the data system that monitored the creation of files. It was however a significant improvement over the duplication between the offices and cut down on the faxing and emailing of files back and forth.

At the time I dreamed of a solution like dropbox. It would have handled the synchronisation of three separate file locations without blinking and in real time, not with a 24 hour delay. The idea of having a copy in the cloud is also ideal, not only are backups taken care of, as well as permanent records of what has been deleted (after all who hasn’t deleted a file on a computer and then realised they needed it? try managing that replicated by a dozen or even half a dozen)

I’ve also found it incredibly useful adding in new computers, they’re up and running in minutes and download in the background. I eagerly await the ability to sync over wifi and then I can really start to centralise downloads of large software updates etc between computers. Or add it remotely from home and have it become available at multiple peoples computers for installation at the end of the day. Dreamy.

That’s all without touching on wonders such as 1password synchronisation, which has made flipping between my MBP and iMac at home as easy as pie. I am constantly stumbling across other innovative uses on a regular basis. I know for some the level of such data replication seems crazy, but hey space is cheap.

Trusting the cloud with confidential data also seems worrisome but as I tell my small clients if someone actively wanted to steal your data they so easily could. WAP cracks in what less than 60 seconds, WEP too now and most of them have offices where it wouldn’t be impossibly hard for someone to wander in and stick in a usb stick and steal their data. As a small business owner its simply not possible to protect against everything.

Dropbox is developing fast and I can’t wait to see what the future will bring for it. It is sure to make my life and the lives of my clients more easy.

Share the dropbox love and if you haven’t already signed up for an account do so now: www.getdropbox.com

PS For more info about what you can do with dropbox checkout this lifehacker article.

Catering to a Business Switcher

So I’m starting the rather insidious process of introducing a Mac to one of the businesses I consult for, why would that be insidious I hear you ask? well once you introduce one shiny new Mac in my experience it’s not long before more follow… after all when compared to the horrid beige (or slightly nicer black) desktops most firms seem to have it is unsurprising that a measure of jealousy starts to creep into the lucky recipients colleagues mind and before long they’re all clambering to have a nice shiny Mac (after all they usually (and correctly) argue, “It looks so much easier to use!”).

So I thought I’d share with you the process I go through when configuring a new Mac, what programs I add to make sure that their transition is quick and easy and they gain the maximum benefit from switching. I’ll also be giving a shout out, for my first time, to some of the best shareware, open source and small developer maintained software that I use on a daily basis that is so helpful to me and many other Mac users round the world; feel the love developers! As well as posing some questions about what are the best methods and approaches for going about the task.

I’m going to stretch this over a number of posts, but we’ll start with the setup process, so:

I’m working with a new 13″ Macbook Pro. We bought it online yesterday morning and it had arrived by lunchtime today (which impressed everyone in the office) I opted for a refurbished model, as it was 16% cheaper than a perfectly new model and effectively the same. It’s going to be used by Glyn, the youngest member of staff who is currently sharing a desktop in my client’s show room with an older colleague. I’d normally start by letting him open and unpack the box, but he was out at lunch when I arrived so I got straight to the unpacking and getting ready for his arrival.

When introducing a new computer, especially when someone is switching from PC to Mac I always start by allowing them to run the initial setup process, it’s always good to let the new user experience the speed and straightforwardness of getting a Mac up and running from scratch, their genuine surprise at how quickly they are up and running is always a source of encouragement and help in getting them to engage with the new machine and I find can help make the transition from Windows to Mac much easier.

So 15 minutes later we are up, connected to the office network and begin our configuration. First things first I tutor them on the importance of keeping the machine up-to-date, something people who run PCs rarely do as much as they should, by introducing them to the apple button in the menu bar and getting them to run their first Software Update.

10 minutes later we and we are running 10.6.1 and have installed all of the available updates. I’m amused by Glyn’s surprise at how smooth this process is and especially by the reboot time after the installation, which is down to seconds (he normally goes and makes coffee whilst his old desktop boots up in the morning! LOL – I guess he’ll just have to carry his new MBP with him from now on!)

Whilst we were downloading the updates I walked Glyn through program switching and the strange notion for most PC users, especially those with older systems, that you can actually run lots of programs simultaneously without having to wait an inordinately long time  for the system to respond. I am not helped at this point by my own MBP slowing to a crawl by the fact that I am running a dozen programs and have 120 or so sites open in Safari, which adds a frustrating 2 min delay to me finding their computer passwords so I can connect the new MBP to the windows printers available on their network.

This does however cause Glyn much amusement as he normally has to go and find the piece of paper with such passwords written on, rather than relying on a technological solution to the problem. Anyway whilst we wait for my MBP we switch on sharing to allow me to place the printer drivers we will need into his public folder. I am disappointed to say that the new method of not installing all printer drivers by Snow Tabby means I have to resort to running installers, including activating rosetta, which is an unnecessary pain.

Anyway five minutes later we have the Windows shared Epson setup and have printed a test page successfully, although we did have to resort to using the Gutenberg printer driver for their Epson Stylus SX200 as the Epson drivers don’t work (fortunately I installed the printers on my MBP earlier in the week to test and had identified this problem). The HP3600 is a little more problematic. It doesn’t automatically detect the driver, even after installing it from disk (as expected) and we have to manually select the printer, as well as running Software Update to make sure that we actually have the right version from Apple.

This process only takes ten minutes however, and whilst we were waiting for these things we installed the stella Dropbox, which installs in a few seconds and lets me run through the drag and drop process of installing apps and warn of the dangers of running programs from a disk image, Glyn handles the transition like and pro and I’m not seeing glazed eyes, so I think that the message will stick. Phew.

Now on to Mail. It’s simple and quick to add Glyn’s Google Apps account via imap and in less than a couple of minutes it’s downloading all of his email and now he’s pretty much ready to go. Although there is lots more software to install, all of which I’ll come to in other posts, he can email, print, and courtesy of Dropbox he has all of the files he needs access to. Textedit will keep him going with word docs for the rest of the day, as he finds his way about the system and I go head upstairs to move the remainder of the companies folders across to dropbox and recreate their locations with symbolic links, whilst he has a play.

Now that the most essential basic programs are installed, or configured I’ll be taking the new MBP home with me at the end of the day to install the rest of the programs he’ll need to become the savvy Mac user I know I’ll be proud of. Catch you later.