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Backups. What can you say: you've gotta' do 'em. If you're just archiving your personal stuff, it's pretty easy. Make a copy. Store it someplace else. Automate it so you don't forget. Got a small network? That's still doable, although a bit more complicated. A bigger network? Now that's not going to come without some pain. Let's try to keep the discomfort to a minimum.

Amanda is a free, open source, backup solution. It's not something you're going to use for just your personal stuff, since there's servers involved, but if you've got a bunch of machines to watch over, it may be worth a try. You install the server piece on a Linux box—it needs to use tar, awk, Samba, and Perl—and then a client app on each machine you want to back up. There's a client available for Windows, Mac (OS X), and all sorts of other Unix-like systems. It boasts an easy, well-documented setup process, and gives you the option of backing up to disk or tape, or even both at the same time. And since it uses tar and other native tools, if everything goes sideways, you can still restore without Amanda being available.

You can grab a copy of Amanda for free. They've also got paid versions available if you want to save your backups in the Cloud.

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If you spend your life on Twitter, it might be nice to have a record of your "Tweets". Unfortunately there's no built-in way to do that. Sure, your old posts are always there in your Profile page, but as well all know, sometimes Twitter can have, ummm, issues. The only totally safe way to keep track of what you've Tweeted is to save it yourself.

TwitterBackup is an aptly named application that allows you to do just that. Fire it up, give it your Twitter login credentials, and it will grab a copy of what you've done out there. It saves things off in an XML file on your local drive, so you can access it with any text editor. While it's doing its thing, it performs an "incremental backup", so it only adds newer Tweets to what you've already got backed up.

You can grab TwitterBackup for free. It's a Java application, so you should be able to run it on any system that has the appropriate Java runtime installed on it.

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Networks come in all sizes and shapes. It may be a simple file sharing convenience on your desktop between your main system and your laptop, or it may be an enterprise-wide behemoth covering half the planet. No matter which extreme you're closer to, you know that with networks come complications. You've got machines, connections, protocols, applications, data, and a zillion other considerations to keep track of, and even if you're making a conscious effort to stay on top of things, there's more than a break-even chance that you're going to fall behind.

Open-AudIT is a tool that you might be able to use to stay in control. You can enter information about your network into it manually, but it can also reach out and touch your machines (Windows and Linux) and collect information about your network automatically. The best thing about automatic, or course, is that you can't "forget" or get too busy to do what needs to be done. Schedule regular scans and you stay on top of things—and you may learn about other things happening on your network, like installation of unapproved software or unauthorized machines joining in.

You can run Open-AudIT on Windows and Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu) systems. If you go the server route, you'll also need Apache or IIS and a MySQL install.

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Everything in the world is connected. This is especially true with computer stuff. There are servers talking to servers, and desktop machines, smart phones, and all manner of other electronic goodies that talk to one another. The wonder of it all is that for the most part, they each understand what the other is saying. There is one notable exception, of course: the lowly text file.

Even though the text file is arguably the least-complicated kind of file out there, they are not all created equally. Even though these files are just text, no pictures, no formatting, no fancy stuff, there are differences between text files, depending on where a given file was created. Those differences all come with the end-of-line character–the way that your computer knows that one line has ended and the next one begins.

In the Unix world, the end of a line in a text file is indicated by the LineFeed character (0×0A), in the world of the Mac (at least through OS 9) it's the Carriage Return character (0×0D), and in DOS and Windows, it's the combination of the two (0×0D and 0×0A). While some apps are tolerant of these differences, others aren't nearly so well behaved. Create some web server configuration file on your Mac and upload it to your Unix web server, and you'll see what a mess things can be.

The solution? It could be something as simple as Flip, a little utility app that you can download. It's just a console app–no fancy GUI here–that allows you to convert files from one format to another. You can use it on single files, or on a whole bunch of them. A command line argument tells it which flavor you want your resulting files to be.

Flip is available in versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows machines.

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If you've ever had a roommate—or a partner, spouse, kids—who came into your bedroom at oh-dark-thirty in the morning and turned the overhead light on, you know what a pain in the neck—and the eyes—that can be. Your eyes are all used to the dark and all of a sudden, blam!, they've got to deal with regular light. You can run into the same problem with your computer as well.

When you use your computer during the day, you may have the brightness on the display turned up so that you can see the screen with all the ambient light around you. At night, though, the room lights may not be so bright, so you don't need your screen to be lit up like noonday either. And first thing in the morning when you're all squinty-eyed, you definitely don't need to be jolted like in the turn-the-light-on scenario outlined above.

F.lux is a tool that may come in handy here. Based on your location, it does a little calculation and makes its best guess as to when sunrise and sunset ought to hit for you, and dims your display appropriately after dark. You can choose from several different settings, with nighttime color temperatures ranging from 2700K up through 5000K, as opposed to normal daylight operation at 6500K. While it dims the lights automatically, you can disable it for an hour at a time, just in case you need things to stay extra bright.

F.lux is a free download. It's available for Windows (XP and Vista), Mac (OS X 10.4), and Linux.

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Back in the day there were web browsers. You used them to visit sites and, umm, browse the web. Then came Firefox. Sure, you can still use it to look at web pages, but with the advent of Add-ons, now you can do all kinds of extra stuff, from analyzing the structure of web pages to setting-up to-do lists, and more.

FireFTP is a full-blown FTP client that comes as a Firefox Add-on. Once you go through the install process, you've got a fully functioning FTP tool to use for file transfers to- and from your system. It supports both plain vanilla FTP transfers, as well as encrypted SFTP uploads and downloads. Even though the browser and Add-on are platform independent, you will need to go through some extra machinations to get SFTP to work on your Mac or Linux system. It's got enough options to let you customize its behavior in ways that make the most sense to how you work, including saving login info, default directories, and such.

FireFTP is a free download. Since it's a Firefox Add-on, you'll need the Firefox web browser (version 3 or later) to use it.

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It's a big world out there. If you want to share your work, whether ideas, images, or what-have-you, with everybody else, you've got to move it from your desktop onto the appropriate server. Whether it's a web page, a file archive, or some more exotic location, nobody will appreciate your brilliance until they see your stuff.

AnyClient is a platform-independent file transfer tool. Written in Java, you can use it for bare-bones FTP exchanges, encrypted SFTP transfers, or even for WebDAV sessions. You can choose to download it and install it on your local machine, or run it via a Java applet through your web browser, with no installation required. Either way, you can save your connection information in a site profile, allowing you to easily connect to your servers again and again.

AnyClient is a free application. You'll need to have an appropriate version of the Java runtime installed on your system.

Download AnyClient

The best backup in the world is no good if it gets ruined. Whether you're backing up from one volume to another on your desktop machine, or even burning backups to optical media and the dropping them into your desk drawer, you still aren't as protected as you might want to be. After all, your machine could crash catastrophically, taking your original data and backups with it; your home or office could experience fire, flood, storm, or worse, taking your backups out at the same time. To be extra sure, it makes sense to store backups offsite.

While it might be tempting to say you'll just stick a CD in your bank safe deposit box, realistically how often do you think you're going to do that? You need a tool that's going to make sure that you run your backups, and that they're stored in a safe place. CrashPlan can take care of that.

In its most basic form, CrashPlan works automatically in the background to take care of business. It watches your disk activity, and once a day it saves your changes and creates a backup. It will then automatically send that backup to a machine you've specified, whether it's another one of your computers, a friend's machine, or some other location. A paid upgrade lets you backup to CrashPlan's servers, but that's not required for basic service.

CrashPlan is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems.

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If you're looking for the best of both worlds, you may have a dual-boot system. Fire your computer up, and then decide whether you're going to run Windows, or if today's more of a Linux day. Now you've got the support and application availability of a Windows system, with the flexibility of a UNIX-like box. While this is exciting stuff, you know you're bound to have issues now and then. Like when you're running Windows but really need something that lives on the Linux side.

Ext2 IFS For Windows is a tool that lets you access your Linux files while you're booted up in Windows. As the name would suggest, you can access your Linux ext2 filesystem from Windows. This is real access, too—it supports both read- and write for your files. And if you're a more advanced Linux user and have an ext3 filesystem, that's fine too. You access it in the same way, you just don't get the journaling support that comes with ext3. Your Linux volumes get Windows-style drive letters, and every application on your system can access your data directly.

Ext2 IFS For Windows is, as you might expect, a Windows application. It will run under WinNT, Win2k, and later.

Download Ext2 IFS For Windows

Disk cloning tools are a handy way to make a complete—and we do mean complete—backup of any system. Not just data, not just apps, you're grabbing everything on that disk, from boot sectors on up. This makes for a thorough backup, but might also be helpful in case of total catastrophic system meltdown—recreate your HDD exactly as it was. That could be handy!

Clonezilla is a free disk cloning tool. It works like Norton Ghost, but doesn't cost like it, since it's absolutely free. It supports just about every filesystem under the sun—FAT and NTFS for Windows, ext2 and ext3 for Linux and the like, and HFS+ for Mac users. It can even do a sector-by-sector copy for filesystems it doesn't understand. You can use it on just about any system that runs on i386 architecture, so most of your needs should be covered (sorry, not your PowerPC Mac).

Clonezilla runs as a Live CD, so even if you have only one partition or volume, you're not going to run into any "you can't image the boot volume" problems. Nice.

Clonezilla is a free download. They've also got a multicast version that will let you image a whole room full of computers at once, if you're so inclined.

Download Clonezilla