Whether your an occasional at home computer user or someone who relies heavily on your computer for business there’s no denying how important it is to back up your vital files regularly. All it takes is a computer virus or a power failure and your data could be lost forever.

While there are many back up programs that you could use I think you might agree that Backup Platinum has quite a few useful features.

Backup Platinum allows you to back up your data to pretty much any type of storage medium meaning you could store your valuable backup data on another computer, a network, an external drive, an FTP server or even a CD or DVD.

Not only that, you can set up regular backups using the program wizard in order to define what is backed up, where it’s backup from, how to back up your data and when those backups should take place.

If you chose to backup your data onto a CD or DVD you can use a rewritable disk. The program can be set up so that any data on the disk is erased prior transferring new backup data. This means that you could set the Backup Platinum program to create a new backup each night and only the latest backup would be on your rewritable CD or DVD.

Backups can be kept small and secure thanks to the programs 128-bit encryption with Blowfish and multichoice ZIP. Also, if you happen to have a lot of data to backup the backup can be split into several parts which would make it easer to transfer your finished backup data elsewhere if needed.

One thing that I like about this program is that it creates detailed logs of all operations and if something goes wrong with your backup you can easily restore with a simple click of a button.

Backup Platinum has been specifically designed to work on Windows operating systems.

If you’d like to try Backup Platinum you can download a limited 30 day trial version. Then if you like the programs features you can purchase the license for a full copy.

I spend time on a variety of blogging and webmaster related forums and quite often, when someone switches from a free blogging platform such as blogger to hosting their own website they are confused by … well, a lot of things since everything is new to them, but FTP seems to one major source of confusion.

If you are new to using an FTP program in order to upload files to your server I would suggest that you use the free program FileZilla. While it’s true that some hosting programs have created a simplified version of FTP that is very easy to use directly from your hosting account (I believe) most do not provide this service and you must use external FTP programs to move large files.

You might be asking yourself “why would you need an FTP program in the first place?” Well, if you are a blogger you might want to find new themes or plugins to use on your blog. Most themes and plugins have a number of files packaged together in a folder. While it’s true that you could upload the zipped file into your Wordpress -> Content -> themes or Plugin folder on your server using the c-panel File manage it is often much faster and easier to use an external FTP program.

As I said I would recommend download the easy to use FileZilla as your FTP progam.

Go to the site and click on “Download FileZilla Client - all programs” button.
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I’m having site problems yet again.

This is really starting to tick me off.

At about 9:30 pm last night the index.php file on my main blog domain Feverishthoughts.com was accessed repeatedly. I received a note from Hostgator shortly after this happened telling me about the problem and also saying that they’d shut down access to that directory.

At least this time round it’s a little better than when I was with Lunarpages. They’ve actually been able to tell me specifically what time the problem occurred and which domain was affected. They also only shut down that domain rather than my whole account. So at least I’ve got two blogs and two websites still functioning.

At this point - 3:30 a.m. I’ve been going back and forth with support. I think we’ve exchanged email three times now. The last one stated that they’d let me back into my directory to add the wp-cache plugin to my site and then monitor my directory after that.

The thing is that I’m already using wp-cache. So I just wrote back to them and told them that. I also told them that all my plugins and blogs are up to date.

Hopefully they’ll activate my directory again and monitor it as they said.

I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if the domain was under some kind of attack or if I just had too many visitors all at once. I really don’t know. I suspect a bot attack of some kind as I’ve been getting hit with a lot more spam across all my blogs lately and bad behavior and akismet just aren’t cutting it.

I know that I certainly don’t need to be having site troubles this weekend! It’s a long weekend and I’ve got a family reunion going on with my brothers and sisters. I won’t be home much and when I am home I’ll probably have guests so if my main blog domain isn’t back up soon and or if it runs into trouble over the next four days I just won’t be able to deal with it. Which sucks.

I keep flirting with the issue of possibly having to move my sites to VPS. Hostgator doesn’t offer VPS. They have Semi-dedicated which is still part of their shared account service and then they have dedicated servers. Their semi-dedicated package offers just about everything I have with my current account but I believe it has much higher CPU resource limits. That’s something I have to check on. Semi-dedicated costs $74.95 per month. Big jump from what I’m paying now.

So again. If anyone has any advice for me or can suggest a hosting company that offers VPS, hopefully at a reasonable price I’d appreciate it. I want to deal with this issue before my sites end up being totally shut down like they were in July with that other webhost I was using.

BTW 4 a.m. my feverishthoughts.com domain is back up and running. Fingers crossed that it behaves now.

Dell recently irritated a number of their customers who’d been waiting for the new Dell XPS M1330 notebook to ship. The shipments problem seems to be over, but Dell may need a period of recovery after this disaster.

Customers have been posting hundreds of messages on Dells Direct2Dell blog. Those post are not just upset over the delay, they feel that they’ve been mislead.

Dells blog is supposed to be a tool to communicate with customers, potential new clients and the media, but the blog has recently become an outlet for the multitude of complaints that have been pouring in over the XPS M1330 notebook.

The notebook was announced in late June and was expected to have delivery dates of up to four to six weeks for some customers. This is a much longer shipping time than had been anticipated.

Clients have been visiting the blog to post their complaints over customer service, and miscommunication during ordering.

Dell’s made a mission to move forward yet this product delay is a step backwards judging by the publics displeasure over shipping delays.

What do you think of this situation? Should they have delayed their announcement that the product was ready for sale if it really wasn’t? Did they under estimate the demand for this high end laptop?

Are you one of the impatient buyers?

If you’ve always wonder just how a computer virus works and or spreads you should take a look at this video.

Not surprisingly, computer virus work in a similar manner to that of human virus in that it just takes one virus to infect something and it spreads from there.

Check out this video from “How things Work”:

As the video says, if you don’t have anti-virus protection on your computer you are just asking for a big problem. I use Norton Anti-virus because it comes free with my ISP, but there are some very good free antivirus programs out there such as AVG.