Instead of a tax rebate this tax season, US Citizens should beware of a sinister scam that may arrive in their inboxes. An email currently being circulated by spammers to look like it’s from the IRS has been observed by Symantec. This spam email which seems to bear the logo of the US treasury department explains that a tax refund is due to the recipient. It encourages the recipient to click upon a URL link to access the refund online. The URL opens a webpage which asks the user if they want to want to “Get Tax Refund on your Visa or Mastercard”. The recipient is then asked to enter their Social Security number, valid Visa or Mastercard number, name, address and many more personal details. The recipient is “helpfully” advised that “a refund can be delayed for a number of reasons”. This allows the spammer enough time to use the personal information collected as they see fit.
Be suspicious of any email that is not from someone in your contact list. 78.5% of all Email is Spam.
Also be sure you not only have anti-virus software, but also a anti-spyware program running on your computer. Most 2008 Anti-Virus programs provide protection against both gremlins.
Imagine a Wi-Fi base station, of the sort that turns your home into a wireless hot spot, with a huge hard drive inside (and, mercifully, no power brick--just a slender power cable). The Time Machine automatic backup feature of the latest Mac OS X version backs up your Macs onto the Time Capsule, automatically, constantly, completely and wirelessly. And in my book, automatic, constant, complete backups are the only kind that really count.
The beautiful thing about this arrangement is that it backs up your laptops automatically and completely, too--without your having to hook them up to anything. Any time the laptop is open and turned on, like when you're using it, the Time Capsule backup is quietly doing its thing. An animated icon on your menu bar--a tiny clock whose hands move backward--lets you know when Time Machine is doing its thing.
And what is that thing, exactly? As I wrote in my original Leopard review: "Time Machine keeps multiple backups of everything--programs, settings, files, photos, even the operating system itself--on a second hard drive…Time Machine updates its mirror of your main drive every hour, although you can also trigger updates on demand. At day's end, Time Machine replaces those hourly backups with a single daily backup; at the end of the month, those are replaced by a single month-end backup. (Apple assumes that it won't take you a whole month to notice that your hard drive had crashed.)
"If disaster strikes--sunspots, clueless spouse, overtired self--you enter Time Machine's recovery mode. The sleek, modern-looking Leopard desktop falls away like a curtain, revealing, startlingly, a deep-space starfield. The window that once contained your files remains floating before you, with dozens of iterations of itself, like file cards, receding into the background. You can now scroll backward through time until the window looks as it did before the unfortunate event. (You can also use the Search box to find missing files.) When you find the files you want and click Restore, the regular desktop slides back up into view. The recovered icons are back in their original window."
The Time Capsule is another machine in Apple's recent family of round-cornered, squat white square boxes, like the Apple TV, the Mac Mini and the AirPort Extreme wireless base station. Only an intermittent fan whir tells you that there's a hard drive in there, too. It comes in 500 and 1,000-gigabyte models for $300 and $500. It's got Ethernet jacks on the back, meaning that it's also a regular router for wired gadgets on your network.
It also acts as a regular network-attached hard drive, serving as a central data bucket for both Macs and Windows PCs on your network. (The Time Machine auto-backup feature isn't available for Windows, of course, although some regular Windows backup programs can use the Time Capsule as a regular external drive.) Oh, and you can attach a USB printer to it. Presto: all of your computers can share that one printer.
Despite my initial enthusiasm, I ran into some headaches early on. (Judging by the buyer reviews on Apple's own Web site, this isn't unusual.) I kept getting a wacky error message that said, "This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 70.3 GB but only 927.0 GB are available."
Um, hello? Run those numbers by me again?
Meanwhile, during the first couple days of Time Capsuleness at our house, my wife's laptop experienced a weird refusal to wake from sleep about three times.
Both of these problems went away by themselves.
Apple advises that the very first backup can take a very long time, as in overnight. Using an Ethernet cable (rather than the wireless feature) cuts the time dramatically, and so does putting the laptop as close as possible to the Time Capsule if you're going wireless.
Now, both of our machines are completely, automatically, silently backed up all the time. Whenever I need a little reassurance that all is well with the world, I click that little backward-clock icon in the menu bar to read those reassuring words: "Last Backup: Today, 8:30 pm."
You can't imagine how satisfying it is to know that if your hard drive dies, you will lose no more than one hour of work. Even if you've made a mess of some document, and want to rewind to an earlier, better draft, you can dip back into the past to retrieve it.
There are, of course, other network-attached hard drives, many with more features (like a media server, print server, RAID options, if you even know what those are). But none seem to have the Time Capsule's combo of capacity and wirelessness. This is a classic case of Apple's insistence on simplicity taking its own version of the network hard drive into a higher realm. Setting it up was very simple, and using it is beyond simple--you just ignore it.
Go on, gods of drive failure--do your worst. I'll be ready.
