The Smorgasbord

Don’t lost valuable documents, mp3′s, and digital photos use a “Buffalo Drivestation” to backup your valuable data.

This post of part of The Smorgasbord Tech Reviews series!

When I wrote my “Network Storage Review“, one of the first things in that article was the “Buffalo Drivestation”. I was thinking about the Drivestation this week because I had a family member who had a hard drive crash and lost all of her family photos and mp3′s she’d purchased, in addition to saved tax returns, and many other valuable documents.

I think sometimes people forget what kinds of “digital treasures” are stored on your PC or laptop, and what kind of chaos could ensue if it suddenly disappeared tomorrow. The Drivestation came to mind because it comes in so many different sizes (from 320GB to many Terabytes), and because it’s so easy to use. Just plug it in, push the button, and you’re backed up! They make models big enough for most small to medium sized businesses, and the versions with “RAID” have 2 hard drives inside for dual mirroring. That means if one hard drive fails, there’s another as a backup. The disks are even encrypted, so if anyone takes the unit, they can’t access any of your data.

It’s like insurance for your computer in a way. You have insurance for your car and home don’t you? If you have an accident or a fire your insurance company will replace what you have lost. Not only is there no insurance for your computer, but the personal documents and data you lose there likely can’t be replaced at all. If you have pics of your daughter’s wedding on your computer’s hard drive, for example, if they were lost no amount of money could compensate you for that.

I recommended the Buffalo Drivestation to my family member that lost her data, and I recommend it to you because of it’s ease of use, multiple connections (firewire and USB), and because it works with both Macs and PC’s. The price is reasonable for the value you get, and even your Grandma or the most tech-clueless office manager or secretary could set one up.

You can nearly always find Drivestations on eBay, or Amazon (below).

[nms:buffalo drivestation,8,0,0,smorgas.drivestation]

To backup and burn an Xbox game to a blank DVD, (DVD-R, DVD+R, or DVD RW, etc.), you need to make an image archive or ISO file to burn. In my first attempt to make an DVD image ISO archive for XBMC (Xbox Media Center), I used a program called Qwix and I don’t think it could have been any easier for me. There are many other good ISO creation programs but I found Qwix to be the easiest. Here is how you make an ISO of any game using Qwix.

Necessary Software

Winrar
Qwix
DVD Burning Software (should come with your dvd burner)
DVD-R/RW or DVD+R/RW
DVD Burner

1. Once you have copied your game to your xbox using are other tutorial, open it up in your FTP client and make a new folder of whatever the game is called, then on the right side of the interface and drag it to the folder you created on the left side
2. Next, Get a copy of Qwix…you can download Qwix 1.01 here http://www.xbox-scene.com/tools/tools.php?page=isotools
3. So you downloaded Qwix and now have a .rar file of Qwix. Use your .rar extractor(Winrar in my case) to extract the file.
4. Now double click Qwix again to open it in Winrar. There should be four files…open Qwix_FAQ.html and read through this thoroughly.
5. Then open Qwix.exe. Once Qwix loads, go to Create ISO (it’s on the left side of the screen).
6. Next, choose local folder as your source and click the box with three dots all the way to the right to browse through the folders and find the folder that you made of your game files earlier.
7. Once you find your game folder (the one with your files in it), hit OK. You will be back to the original Qwix screen.
8. Now click the Create ISO button. Choose your game folder to create it as an .iso file.
9. Once created as an ISO folder, you can now use Nero, or any other burning software, to burn it as an image to a CD-RW or DVD-R and then load it into your XBox.
10. Go to your burning software and click burn iso.
11. Then find the place that you saved your iso to open it and then click burn.
12. Depending on how big the game was you will probolly need a DVD burner

There you go you burned an xbox game! Look for our next tutorial on upgrading your hard drive in your Xbox to a much bigger one! Also, for more information on how to use the other great features of Qwix or to get answers to FAQ’s about Qwix, check out PuddWakkr’s great guide to Qwix http://home.neo.rr.com/avalaunch/qwixmain.html

originally posted: 2006-08-03 00:34:41 -0400