How to get CrashPlan to back up to a network drive (NAS)

CrashPlan is a great backup program that has many great features. I won’t go into detail describing them all but I will point out that the one major missing feature is the ability to backup to a network drive (also called Network Attached Storage, or a NAS). After reading through many forum posts and seeing that CrashPlan has no work around for this I was able to piece together a solution.

IMPORTANT: This process involves running CrashPlan as another user and may mess up the integrate of your existing backups on the CrashPlan servers! I have not tested this solution with CrashPlan Central and I take not responsible to fouled up backups! Please read all of the following instructions before starting.

Update: You can follow the directions over at How-To Geek for how to easily make symlinks on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

1: Install Crash Plan

Download and install CrashPlan from their website. Once CrashPlan is installed and you make (or log into) a CrashPlan account you should see this screen:

Now you can close CrashPlan

2: Create a link to your NAS

Now you need to make a symlink on your computer the backup folder on your NAS. To do this first use Windows Explorer to navigate to the back up folder on your NAS. Then right click on the address bar and select “Copy Address as Text”

Now open a command prompt as an administrator and type in this command:

mklink /d “local\directory” “\\server\share”

So for me to make a symlink at the root of my C drive called NAS to the backup folder on my NAS I would have to type this: mklink /d “C:\NAS” “\\HP-NAS\Backups\”

Once the symlink is made you can type “exit” to close the command prompt.

3: Make a CrashPlan user account

Now go the the User Accounts panel in the control panel and click on “Manage another account”. Click on “Create a new account and and then create an account called CrashPlan (the name doesn’t make, you can make it what ever you want) and set the account type to “Administrator”. It has to be an administrator account because otherwise you will net be able to backup files within your user folder.

Click on the “Create Account” button and give the new CrashPlan account a password.

Next you need to click on the Start Orb and then on the little arrow next to the shutdown button and click on “Switch user”.

Next you log into the new CrashPlan account and then once the desktop is up you can log right back out and into your normal account.

4. Make the CrashPlan service run as the CrashPlan user

Now click on the Start Orb and type in “Services” and then click on the result that is called Services. Find the “CrashPlan Backup Service” and double click on it to bring up its properties dialog box. Click on the Log on tab and select the radio next to “This Account”. Now type in the user name and password for the CrashPlan Windows account you just made.

Now click on Apply then go back to the “General” tab and click the “Stop” button and once the service has topped click on the “Start” button. Exit out of the Service window and open up CrashPlan

5. Add Folders and Backup!

In the main CrashPlan Window click on the “Folder” button in the '"Backup Destinations” box. Now click on the “Select” button and select the symlink you made in step 2.

Once you add the symlink click on the “Start Back” button and it should look like this:

Now click on the “Backup” tab on the upper left of the program and click on the “Change” button in the “Files to Back Up” box. Now select the folders you want to back up and then click OK.

If all goes well then CrashPlan should back up with out a hitch.

I have tested the back up and restore and everything worked fine. You can now take advantage of the free 30-day CrashPlan Central online back up.

If this work around for getting CrashPlan to backup to a NAS has worked for you then please let us know by leaving a comment, no log in required! Or you can email us at CaseyTech@GMX.com !

Dragon Naturally Speaking Transcribe Error: “You must enter a filename to read from.”

Recently I helped a friend setup Dragon Naturally Speaking on their computer so they could transcribe lectures and sermons that they’ve given. According to the Dragon Naturally Speaking website and Youtube, transcribing with Dragon was as simple as training the program and then telling it which .wav or .mp3 you wanted to have transcribed.

So I installed and setup Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.1 for my friend, I helped him train the program so it would understand his voice and then we tried to transcribe a recording he had made. I clicked on the ‘Transcribe’ button on the Dragon toolbar, navigated to the audio file to transcribe and then clicked on the second ‘Transcribe’ button. To my and my friends dismay we were greeted with an odd error message that simple stated: “You must enter a filename to read from.”

I played the .wav file and it worked fine so I tried to transcribe the file again and was greeted with the same unhelpful error message. After many hours of help file reading, converting audio files, YouTubeing, and Googleing (which showed only one unhelpful related result when searching the error message) I realized the cause of the problem. There was a semi-colon in the file name on the file to be transcribed. I removed the semi-colon from the file name, click ‘Transcribe’, navigated to the file, then clicked ‘Transcribe’ again and it worked!

If you are getting the “You must enter a filename to read from.” Error message, then try removing any characters and symbols from the filename and try again. I have only received the error when filenames have a semi-colon ( ; ) in them, but other symbols and characters may trigger the error.

If you have any questions or comments on Dragon Naturally Speaking, then leave us a comment below! Our comment thread is open so no login or email address is required! You can also send us an email at CaseyTech@GMX.com !

Download Marble Mouse Scroll Wheel Here!

Marble Mouse Scroll Wheel is a small program for the Logitech Marble Mouse that emulates a scroll wheel. This program is normally hosted at http://simans.net/marble/ but that web site is down and I have seen many people on the Logitech forums requesting it so I figured I could act as a download mirror for the program.

You can download Marble Mouse Scroll Wheel from my SkyDrive.

If you have never used Marble Mouse Scroll Wheel before and would like to learn more about it, then you can read the programs description from Google’s cache here.

Note: This is not my software and  I am not an official mirror for it. I am only distributing it because the original site is down and it seems to be abandoned by it’s owner. If you are the original author of Marble Mouse Scroll Wheel and would like this mirror taken down then please contact me at Casey-Tech@GMX.com .

4 Steps To A Faster Netbook or Laptop Hard Drive!

When it come to data throughput, the hard drive in your computer is probably the slowest component in your computer. Most laptops have a 5400 RPM and some netbook hard drives are only 4800 RPM; the slower the RPM of the drive, the slower the drive can read and write data. The only way to fix this is to get a faster hard drive which is not an option for most people, or to have your hard drive reading less data when it tries to read and write data. The less data your hard drive has to read in order to do something, the faster it can do it. Normally to do this you would have to do use a utility like WinZip or Peazip and compress your files, but this is a hassle and makes you files harder to access.

All modern versions of Windows feature hard drive compression and unlike utilities like Winzip or Peazip, this compression is completely transparent to the user. Now, if you Google ‘NTFS compression’ you will see lots of results with people debating on how effective compression is and whether or not it it can make a difference in a computer’s speed. Well here's the truth: if your hard drive is the bottle neck in your computer (if your hard drive light is almost always on), then compression will speed things up. If your processer is the bottle neck on your system (if taskmanager shows your processer at 100% most of the time) , then compression won’t help.

The idea behind using compression to speed up your computer is simple when you look at it like this: The speed of your hard drive is measured in milliseconds, and the speed of your processer is measured in nanoseconds, which are smaller than milliseconds. By compressing your drive you can shrink the size of the data on it (say from 50mb to 15mb) which will speed up the time it takes to read the data. So to read 50mb of compressed data, your hard drive only sends 15mb of data to the processer, which then decompresses the data back to 50mb. The speed difference is really noticeable on slow hard drives.

There are 4 simple steps to speeding up your netbook or laptop hard drive.

1. Run CCleaner. This will remove junk files (internet history, temp files, etc) from your computer and will speed up the next step.

2. Compress your files. Click on the Start Orb on your taskbar, then Computer and then double click on your C: drive. Next select all of the folders EXCEPT for the Windows folder. Right click on the selection and select properties. On the General tab click the Advanced button. Check the box next to ‘Compress contents to save disk space’ then click Ok. Back in the properties window click on ‘Apply’ and then in the new window select to apply changes to subfolders and files then click OK.

After a few minutes you should get a warning saying that the attributes could not be applied to a file, just click ignore all. The compression process will take a while to complete.

3. Add Anti-virus exclusion. Any anti-virus software with resident protection will scan each file as it is read or written to the disk. This is good for catching viruses, but bad for performance. As you compressed you hard drive in step 2, your antivirus software should have been scanning each file for viruses at the same time meaning that if it didn’t see any popup warnings about infected files, then you should be virus free. I would recommend adding your ‘Program Files’ folder to the exclusion list of your anti-virus program. This will speed up the launch of your programs, especially executable heavy programs like GIMP, Photoshop and any video editing software.

4. Defragment. This last step is crucial. After you first compress your hard drive you will have a ton of fragmented files. You can easily get rid of the fragments by searching for ‘defragment’ in your start menu and then running the built in Windows defragmenter tool. If you’d like a nicer tool for removing fragments, I recommend using Defraggler. It is free and has a lot of handy features.

That’s it! Hopefully after doing these four simple steps you will notice that your slow hard drive isn’t as slow as it was. If you have any tips for speeding up your hard drive, then email us at CaseyTech@GMX.com with ‘Speed Up Hard Drive’ as the subject. Or you could leave us a comment below!

Fixed! Google Gears: Failed to load required resources Failed to enable local store

Today I was playing around with Gmail’s offline mode and testing out Thunderbird 3 to see which I preferred for offline mail access when I temporarily disabled the offline mode. Once I decided on Gmail’s offline mode for mail access, I tried to re-enable it and was greeted with this message: “Failed to load required resources Failed to enable local store”. This means that enabling offline mode failed and I wouldn’t be able to use it for accessing my mail. After some Googling I found that this was a very common problem and often occurs when disabling and enabling offline mode. I couldn’t find a real fix for the problem, but here is what I did to fix it on my computer.

1: Make sure offline mode is disabled for your Gmail account. To do this, open your  Gmail account using the “Offline Mail” shortcut that was made when you first enabled the offline mode. Next for to settings, offline mode and click on disable.

2: Next remove Google Gears access to Gmail by clicking on the wrench button on the right of the Google Chrome interface and then select options. Click on the “Under the hood” tab and scroll down to the Web Content section. Click the “Change Gears Settings” button. Now click the blue remove button next to all of the Gmail addresses. Click Apply and close out the options menu and then exit Chrome.

3: Delete your Google Gears profile. It should be located in “C:\Users\(User Name)\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data”. If you can’t delete the Google Gears folder then open Taskmanager and make sure that all instances of Chrome have been closed. If you are still having problems then you may want to install Unlocker and use it to delete the folder. If you can’t find the Google Gears profile, then you may want to install the Everything Search Engine and then search for it.

4: After the Google Gears profile is delete, run Ccleaner with all of its options for Google Chrome checked. You can leave the “Saved Form Information” box unchecked.

5: Now open Chrome, log into Gmail and enable offline access.

Hopefully the above steps have helped you solve the “Failed to load required resources Failed to enable local store” error message in Gmail. If it didn’t but you found another way to fix this problem, then please let us know in the comments.

3 Easy Ways to Easily Remove Inaudible High Pitched Noise from Audio

I recently heard of someone with a very unique audio problem. An audio engineer had recorded some live music directly to his computer and used an old CRT monitor to monitor the recording. Everything came out fine, but when he played the recordings back for review, his children said that there was a high pitched whine in the song that he couldn’t hear. Now instead of having a perfectly crafted song ready for sale, the engineer had to figure out a way to get rid of noise that he couldn’t even hear.

The inability to hear high frequency noises is called presbycusis. It is occurs naturally in adult 30 years and older and it means that you can’t hear anything in the 14 to17 kilohertz range. This isn’t a problem for most people because dialog and common sound are far below this range. Children, however, can here these frequencies very clearly and can be harm by them if heard in excess or at loud volumes.

Fortunately, most audio programs have handy tools to help combat this called a spectral frequency view. This view gives you a visual representation of the sound you are editing so you can edit with your eyes and not your ears. This makes removing what you can’t hear a snap!

In your favorite audio editing program open up the file that has the noise you want removed, then switch to the spectral view. You have to consult the program’s help file to find out how to do this.

Above is a the linear spectral view in Adobe Audition. As you can see, there is a bright horizontal line at the top half of the left and right channel. That line represents the high pitched sound that young people can hear but adults can’t. To remove the sound, use the marquee tool (the square made form dashed lines on the main tool bar, or just press M ) Then select the horizontal line in the spectral view.

 

Once you have selected the high pitched noise, you can use floating amplitude dial above the selection to turn the volume down to 0db, or you could just press the delete key on your keyboard.

 

After Audition finishes saving the undo data and redrawing the spectral view, your file should have a blank horizontal line in the top half of each channel.

To prevent getting inaudible high pitched noise in your audio files you may want to do some of the following:

• Always use grounded equipment and outlets. This will prevent some noise from being recorded.
• Use power stripes that have RF filters. These will also prevent some noise from being recorded. The faint dark horizontal line in the above spectral pictures is from the noise that the power strips I use blocked. You can buy some nice but cheap Belkin surge protected and RF filtered power strips at Google’s Product Search.
• Use LCD monitors instead of CRT monitors. In my experience, LCD monitors don’t interfere with and type on computer based recording.
• Use cables that have ferrite beads (the round cylinders that most USB and laptop power cord have at the ends). If you don’t have cables wit ferrite beads built in, you can buy ones that clip on to cables from The Shack, or from many on-line retailers.