Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      2006 at a Glance
      Last month, I pontificated that 2006 was a plateau year in computer technology history. Still, I found plenty of good programs to review. Some turned out to be absolute keepers, while others broke down, became outdated, or otherwise annoyed me.
     
      The great ...
      It's always good to start with an upper, so let us now praise Adobe Acrobat. How did lawyers and human beings work without Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF)? Since 1993, when Adobe published its PDF specifications and released Acrobat and Acrobat Reader, we have been able to share and distribute documents quickly and securely. Over the years, Acrobat developers have paid particular attention to lawyers' requests: They've equipped the new Acrobat (version 8) with a redaction tool, Bates numbering, improved metadata removal, PDF packages, and eEnvelopes. However, Martin Dean, president of Essential Publishers, puts the typewriter function toward the top of his ten-best list of new Acrobat features (even though it first came out in a version 7 upgrade). Typewriter is such an obviously useful tool that it slipped past me when it first appeared: Open a PDF form for, say, a fee agreement, hit the Typewriter toolbar button, and fill in the blanks in the form?you're actually adding data onto the PDF image. It's as if you rolled the printed-out form into your old IBM Selectric and typed the answers onto the same sheet of paper.
      Dean also favors Acrobat's new eEnvelope function. An eEnvelope takes any files (made by Acrobat or not) and wraps them all together in an evanescent container that can't be opened unless the recipient has the password. This means you don't need to encrypt or password protect each separate document inside. Usually when you open a file or message sent to your email account, part or all of it stays on the office server. The problem is that, under California case law, your employer may own the email messages you get on the office computer. But what if you download the unopened eEnvelope onto, say, a USB thumb drive, which immediately goes back into your pocket? Nothing sensitive resides on the workplace server. Therefore your boss can't read your communications. Dean suggests this technique might be convenient if, say, the eEnvelope came from the employment lawyer you just consulted about getting paid late.
     
      The good and the almost good
      Good old Acrobat is still on my computers after all these years. On the other hand, the backup utility NTI Shadow 3 ("Reviews," August; www.ntius.com) barely lasted the summer. I used it continuously (and happily) through several months of testing and beyond; it backed up each file every time I saved it, and it kept copies of the previous 20 iterations so I could revert to last Wednesday's version should I botch this week's attempts at perfection. Also, Shadow saved all those backups in their native file format: When I opened a backed up .doc file, for example, it opened in Microsoft Word as an ordinary .doc file. This meant that if a tsunami buried my office, I could still open my backed-up Word docs on another computer. (You have regularly sent copies of your backups somewhere safe?which leaves out all of California?haven't you?)
      After a while one of our testers started complaining that Shadow was difficult to troubleshoot because sometimes its error messages got truncated by the edges of the dialog box, and there was no way to resize the box. He was right, but I thought he was just a bit too fussy. However, with all the hard disks coming and going, that installation of Shadow got more and more confused, and it started to irritate me too. The only thing we could figure out to fix this was to delete the old profiles (directions for backups) and make new ones, but that gets old. Worst of all, Shadow translated its hatred of people whose names begin with S into action by chewing up all 20 of my backup versions. When I found my backups again, they were corrupted and useless. But I firmly believe that Shadow's problems?except for the ineffectual error messages?were caused by the nut behind the wheel. If I didn't swap out hard drives and sound boards every few days, Shadow would probably still be running quietly in the background.
      Conveniently, someone reminded me of Centered System's Second Copy, which I had favorably reviewed a few years ago. Its new interface is very XP-like, hence simple to use. So far, I've set up only four profiles (or sets of instructions for each particular backup); an hourly one for all of my daily work files; a weekly one for my personal photos; an every-midnight one for my Outlook .pst files, which must be closed first; and a daily one for my Documents folder. But you don't have to know anything about Second Copy's workings, if you prefer. When you open the settings dialog box, you'll see it's tabbed. Just keep hitting the Next button, and Second Copy will set itself up automatically. In the settings tabs, I told it to save the previous 20 backed up versions of every file in my daily work folders. Best of all, I can also set up backup profiles to use FTP (file transfer protocol) to send certain files and folders to my backup site in my cousin's Chicago office. Whenever he gets the urge, my cousin transfers the current backup to DVDs, so I'll have a mailable copy of my off-site backup of my backed up files?should I need it ($29.95, www.secondcopy.com).
      Since we haven't run Shadow or Second Copy through real tests, I'm not recommending one over the other. Each has its strengths. Right now, I'm relying on Second Copy and its FTP functions. Who knows what will distract me next?
     

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