The epson printers have gone up and down in the printer wars over the years. Through most of the 1980s they were the printer to get but they lost their massive lead with the move to inkjet and laser printers after that when HP took the baton from them. That’s changing now though with Epson rapidly staging a come-back over the last year or two.

Back in the 1980s HP needed to provide compatibility with Epson, now it’s the other way around. Will we see that switch round once more in the next few years?

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These days there are lots of document scanning services which take all the nasty business of scanning off you if you’ve a high enough volume needing dealt with. That’s how many companies operate when they want to get rid of their heap of paper files.

Boy does it get shot of a boring job!

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So, I’ve decided to approach the problem from several different angles.

Step one was changing all the email redirects that I use to go to my bulk mail mailbox which has the strictest junk mail filtering enabled. That thinned out the junk mail considerably  but there’s still quite a lot.

Step two was setting up a brand new mailbox. I’m now in the process of changing the redirects one per day to this mailbox. So far, the mail has remained reasonable but that’s because I’m starting off with the email addresses that were largely personal; when I get to those that were advertised in some way I’ll have to work through the legit ones and change them to something else.

Step three has been in progress for a while alongside the above and consists of deleting the redirects that I don’t really use. Unfortunately, one of these has the problem that it collects a lot of valid email and it also collects an awful lot of junk mail so I’ll need to wade through it all sometime and notify the legit people.

Bit of a hassle but I suppose that trying to stick to the same email for over 10 years was asking a bit too much when initially email addresses were much more visible on the Internet.

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The first thing to start with is directory submission which is getting cheaper by the day with a number of free options available too. This is one area where price and return have very little relationship between them basically because you can submit to lots of free directories easily and those directories can improve their own ranking over time. Thus there’s usually little point in paying lots of cash for “quality” directories.

Worth doing and you can get multiple submissions done for you at next to no cost ($30 for 1000+ directories is easily doable).

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That list of problems meant that there was no easy fix, particularly as over the years he’s lost all the software CDs and licences so it’s not possible to simply reinstall everything. Fortunately there’s another solution…. Ubuntu.

To avoid data loss, step one is always to take a backup of as much as possible. I say “as much as possible” rather than “everything” because it’s rarely possible to backup every file on a Windows system and on an old Windows system there are generally quite a lot of files that don’t get backed up. Next up is to make some space for Ubuntu which means defragmenting the drive in Windows. Ideally the defragmenting would be done outside of Windows but with an old computer that’s not always possible (anyone got a floppy disk to do this?). In practice, it’s better to boot up in Ubuntu and do the backup from there as that let’s you get the most complete backup. The defrag can take ages on an old computer and there’s the problem that Microsoft’s defragmenter doesn’t always shift all the files down so you won’t have as much spare space as you expect in most instances; run it a couple of times and it usually gets a little better.

Installing Ubuntu at this point is a breeze. It’ll let you take the maximum size of partition and will copy over all the files, favourites, etc. for you so you’re right at home when you’ve finished the install. Well, except that everything runs a whole lot faster.

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These days, it’s a lot simpler and there are lots of online printers who’ll handle things like postcard printing for you. Generally speaking it is things like postcards that stymie home printers as they just can’t handle card thick enough for postcards. Photos are generally fine these days (though expensive on home printers) but if you’d like a really large enlargement or something on canvas then you’ll generally need to do this via an online outfit as few home printers can handle odd papers or really large ones.

And none of this is anything like as expensive as it used to be. A high quality poster sized print is under £20 these days.

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Thus if you want to get something slightly out of the ordinary it’s often the electronics retailers that stock it. You’d need to get a very large computer shop to find a barcode scanner these days I suspect. That’s more obviously (in an odd kind of way) an electronics produce but sometimes it can be very difficult to track down what would formerlly have been very much a computer component like a graphics pad. Well, you can get the little toy models but I found it quite an ordeal to track down a sensibly sized one a year ago.

So if you’re looking something that little bit out of the ordinary for your computer don’t neglect the electronics shops.

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How many of us even think about backing up our information though? After all, the disc is sure to fail at some time and thus take with it a fairly large chunk of our lives in many cases. Would you really not mind losing all those photos stored on your computer?

The snag is though that backup is a hassle to do and difficult to keep as a habit over the longer term. However, online backup is now quite a viable option for those hooked up to high speed Internet. You still have to set it up and it will take an age to run the first time, but once that initial bulk work is done it’s very much an automatic thing that you can basically forget about until the day that you need it. You can even get it free for smaller amounts of data and these days “small” is actually quite a lot of information.

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Those with long careers in the computer industry may recall the likes of the PDP8 of the late 1970s which sported a 2MB (yes two megabyte) hard disk some fourteen inches across and costing something like £10,000. These days even if you buy the cheapest flash drive you’ll be taking in terms of gigabytes and a price of under a tenner.

However, despite all that improvement in portability and capacity people are, if anything, less careful about safeguarding their information. One wonders just how many people have lost all their digital photos already simply because they didn’t bother to update the storage media?

Although you can obviously reuse the digital storage from, say, your camera it’s now so cheap that you may as well keep the original on the card after you copy it onto your computer and thus create a backup with no effort at all.

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One of the ways to avoid the hassle element of backup is to do it online. That’s only recently become a truly practical activity with the increase in line speeds just about everywhere and when you add to that the rapidly decreasing cost of storage there are even free online backup services these days so there’s no excuse.

Obviously you’ll get less storage space and facilities on the free services but that “less” might well be enough for the essential files that you have.

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