The IT Guys Blog

It always amazes me when I see some of the “old school IT Guys” rocking their CD Wallets with software that totals their life savings. I guess nobody told them that CD’s get stolen, break, and don’t last long. I’ll cover this before somebody e-mails me about it. CD-R’s have an average rated life of 75 years and if you leave your CD’s in a warm place or in sunlight that shrinks their life dramatically. 75 years seems great but if you’re and IT Guy, you actually USE your CD’s. Realistically plan on your CD’s lasting no more than a year and sometimes less, because they get scratched and left in computers by accident before you ship them out to other offices. CD’s are temporary storage in my eyes. You should always have copies of your CD’s on a file server or at least an external hard drive.

The IT Guy’s Solution

Required Products:

1. USB Memory Stick - Get one that’s at least 2GB so you can save software on it temporarily if you chose to. Preferably get an IronKey, which is a hardware encrypted flash drive available in 1GB,2GB, and 4GB. I own the 4GB one and it’ll run you about $150. You can definitely get a cheaper flash drive but the IronKey’s are tamper resistant; you type the password wrong too many times and it hardware wipes your stick. They also offer a password recovery service, feature firefox and ironkey software so you can surf anonymously.
2. Set up a share on a server that is backed up. At least do this on an external hard drive and back that up to tape or something off-site.
3. The Fun Part.. Backup all your CD’s, anything you may need again. Make sure you use a tool that writes a true ISO file and not some proprietary mumbo-jumbo. Magic ISO is a good choice. For the love of god don’t use your CD burner software. CD Burner software is notorious for changing formats and being a huge pain when you need to re-burn these puppies.

Put it all together:

• Link your My Documents to the IronKey or external flash drive. Keep in mind if you don’t have an encrypted flash drive don’t put anything on it that you wouldn’t mind hitting the front page of the NY Times, because if it is stolen it just might. Right Click on My Documents and change the target to the drive letter of your new flash drive. This way when you save documents you’ll be saving them to the flash drive automatically. This is good practice because employees tend to forget that anything on office computers is property of the company. You don’t want them seeing your updated resume or that fantasy football roster. It just looks bad.
• Save all the CD images you created to the file share and make sure it’s being backed up. Make sure this backup is stored off-site. When in doubt picture this, you come in tomorrow and the building is on fire and the bottom floor is flooded. Would you be concerned about your data?
• Put all your tools on your flash drive. Most tools IT Guys use are pretty small. I keep spyware tools like Spybot S&D and Adaware, also a quick antivirus, product key finder like magic jelly bean, and a ssh client (Putty). Make sure to include all Visio’s, or whatever you are using to document the network topology, on your new flash drive. This can save you headaches when you aren’t in the office and something comes up. Don’t forget to keep a copy of all company policies and procedures.
• Next, add any programs you frequently install that will fit on your flash drive and make sure to leave at least 20% free space. You will often use your memory stick to copy user profiles from an old computer to a new one.
• Lastly, backup the memory stick with an encrypted backup on a computer in a safe place. You could also keep this backup on your company servers, but since you’ll likely be keeping some personal data on the memory stick I recommend a home PC and a service like Carbonite.