A variety this time – a tip from Arthur, a short (1 minute 43 seconds) video that you might find interesting if you use Google Chrome and why I’ve been locked in the dining room, not the attic.
A tip from Arthur about backing up
Last time I mentioned about how important it is to back up anything that’s important to you. And I mentioned a few ways you could do it (using blank CDs, a portable hard drive or a flash drive).
There are a few other ways you can do it, too, and reader Arthur told me about he backs things up – it’s a clever system.
Arthur has several Gmail email addresses set up. They’re free email addresses that you can access over a webpage, run by Google.
You might choose to have one called [email protected], one called [email protected] and one called [email protected] (though probably only if you’re called Bob).
Then, when you have some photos you want to back up, you simply email it as an attachment to your [email protected] email address. It’ll get to the email address and just sit there in the inbox… and if you ever need it get it from there you can log in to your email account, find the email and download the attachments.
Even if you end up with lots of emails in that email account, you can find the one you want because Gmail has a pretty good search facility, so you can type in “Christmas at Bristol” or whatever and find the email you’re after.
It has one other big advantage over backing up to a flash drive or whatever, too. It’s not kept at your house. Backing up should ideally be somewhere other your house, just in case you have a fire or something that destroys your PC and your backup. It’s not very likely and hopefully it won’t happen to you, but the point of backing up is to be safe, even against unlikely things!
But if the worst happened, you could log in to Gmail and get your photos and other files back from a friends PC or from a new one you’ve bought.
You don’t have to have more than one Gmail account for it – you could just have [email protected] for everything. But having several makes it a bit easier to find everything.
It’s a clever system – worth knowing about in case it seems like the best idea for you.
Thanks for the tip Arthur!
A little trick in Google Chrome
Not long ago, I was writing about various problems in Google Chrome. So it seems fair to mention a nifty little feature of it this time.
It’s something I find useful – and you might too.
If you often search a particular website (for example, I’m often searching Wikipedia for all sorts of things), you can just type in www.wikipedia.org and press enter, wait for the page to load, then type in what you’re searching for.
But instead, you can type in wikipedia.org (or even just start typing it in, if you’ve used it before), then press the tab key on the keyboard (just above the caps lock key). It’ll say “Search wikipedia” and you can type in what you want to search for, without waiting for the web page to appear first, or having to click in the search box on the web page.
It’s slightly difficult to explain, so in case that didn’t make sense, here’s a short video of it in practice.
Windows 8 and why Tim’s been locked in the dining room…
By the way, I’ve been busy over the last month updated “Tame Your PC in Six Easy Lessons” – locked away in the dining room until I got it finished (I normally record videos in the attic room at home, but it’s warmer in the dining room).
It’s a set of videos I recorded a while ago – and they’ve been very popular. But they didn’t properly cover Windows 8 and 8.1 (so whenever someone rang up to order them, Laura and Louize had to ask to check they didn’t have Windows 8 or 8.1).
So I’ve spent a good while completely updating them for the newer versions of Windows. They still cover the old versions as well (there are separate videos on each disk, so you tell it to play the Windows 8 version or Windows 7 version or whichever is right for you).
In fact while I was at it, I updated a couple of the older versions, too.
From Monday, the new version will be available – I’ll send you more information then. If you’ve already got the older version of the videos and you don’t have Windows 8 or 8.1, then you can ignore Monday’s email (or pass it on to a friend!) but otherwise, it’s worth a read!
(Oh, and yes, the bonus disc is fully updated, too)