For one you should always have a backup of your important files. Whether is be to a jumpdrive, portable hard drive, extra internal hard drive, or offsite. Personally, I have a backup run weekly of my documents and pictures and save that to an extra internal hard drive and I try to burn my pics to dvd after they build up and put them in a safe deposit box at my bank. The only problem with burning dvd’s is it’s not automatic, and lets face it if its not automatic your going to slip up. The reason to have an offsite backup is in case of natural disasters, fire, tornado, earthquake, anything that could ruin your computer.

Cucku offers offsite backup through peers in skype. Chances are you have someone you trust with extra room on their hard drive, and if they don’t buy them some extra space it only a one time fee instead of monthly with some online storage services. Your files are encrypted so you don’t have to worry about your friend seeing those pics you took of your wife in the shower while she wasn’t looking.

The only draw back to this program is the first download is slow and will take awhile. But after that it only syncs the changes that have been made. You can set it to backup daily or weekly and the program runs in the background and doesn’t seem to hinder your bandwidth at all. You can also setup multiple offsite backups with different contacts in skype. The software is very user friendly and either party can pause or stop the transfer.

Check out Cucku – Social backup here

There are plenty of different products out there some are an entire suite that monitor everything and some are on an individual basis. Again these may not be the best security features out there, but they are free and they can help get the job done.

Windows Live Oncare – Family Safety
With Family Safety, you can control the people your children communicate with, the websites they can view, and the search results they are shown. Contact list settings can help you make instant messaging safer in Windows Live Messenger and e-mail safer in Hotmail. Also you can block all sites except kid-friendly sites and those you specify or, you can allow all sites except specific categories and sites you block. You can also get activity reports to keep tabs on the sites your children visit.

Glubble
Glubble is a free parental control suite Firefox addon. It aims to help extend the appeal and adoption of Firefox to families of elementary school age children. The Glubble add-on for Firefox enables families to provide a protected, fun and educational web surfing experience for kids by enabling their family circle to link up via Firefox to decide what they can see online.

ProCon Latte
ProCon, another Firefox addon, is a content filter for the browser. It can filter any kind of material (pornography, gambling, hacking, cracking, etc…), it can also block all traffic, making sure that only desired websites (set in the Whitelist) can be accessed, and includes a profanity filter. ProCon also has password protection in order to keep others from changing the settings.

IMSafer
IMSafer lets you know when your children may be in dangerous situations online, and shows you how they represent themselves in their online profiles. IMSafer Basic is free and available to any parent who wants it. Basic will support up to one monitored IM account, IMSafer Plus allows for monitoring of an unlimited number of IM accounts and support for MySpace and Meebo. IMSafer automatically detects and starts monitoring any account it finds. You don’t have to do anything. IMSafer currently supports Microsoft (all versions), AOL (both AIM and ICQ), Yahoo! (all versions), MySpace and Meebo.

Now for those who want to take a more techy advanced roll in their children’s online safety. I found how to control the time a user can log in and there is also a program called Keylogger that records every keystroke a user makes.

Time Restriction
go to Start – > Run -> type CMD
now to select the user type net user (you will need to know the password of the account to set this up)

ok, you can see the user you want a time restriction on now so here is what we type
net user [account name] [Password] /times:DAYRANGE,TIME;

DAYRANGE codes: M,T,W,Th,F,Sa,Su
Time: use 24hr time

EXAMPLE: net user Paul janurary123 /time:Su-Sa,3-16;M-F,17-21;
to reset use /time:all

Keylogger
KeyLogger silently records all keystrokes typed including emails, word documents, excel documents, windows password, chat room activity, voice recording, instant messages, web addresses, and web searching.

Well I have came across Irfanview and just fell in love with it! It opens super fast, saves in 11 formats, cuts/crops, has a drawing toolbar, and batch converts. Did I mention it opens super fast! Oh and best of all its freeware. Its so light, after installing you can move the program files folder to you jump drive under portable apps and use it on any computer from your jump drive. So if you find yourself waiting for PS to load or heaven forbid using MS Paint for screen shots you should try out Irfanview.

Click here to download

They’re very simple to install you just download, unzip, and place in C:\Program Files\Picasa2\web\templates. Restart Picasa and they are now available to be used. Creating the web albums are just as easy, select the photos you want, go to Folder -> Export as HTML Page…, select the size you want to use (I usually use 640px), the title of the page, and the output destination. Then choose your template and finish!

Paul van Roekel’s Templates
Cool Fullscreen
Tiltviewer
Moonslide Reflections
ImageFlow
PicLens
3D Carousel
Page Flip
Photo Stack
JW Image Rotator
Polaroid Gallery
Jet Photo
Stopdesign
Lightbox
Photoplayer
Thickbox
XFade
Simple Scroller
Highslide

Off to the internet I went searching for a better method of updating my library. I ran across a free program called the iTunes Library Updater (iTLU) and as of this writing and me using iTunes version 7 it is still working flawlessly. I have setup a custom profile inside of iTLU with the rules I want it to use when updating my library as well as telling the program where my iTunes library XML file and my music files are located. After a quick setup I was able to have it update my library in a matter of minutes and I didn’t have to worry about remembering which new albums I have added.

This method worked great for awhile, until I would forget to run the process so I did a little more digging to see how I could automate the process and basically take the human (me in this case) out of the equation. The genius who released iTLU also released a GUI free version of the software. What this does is allows you to use the built in Windows Scheduled Tasks program to run iTLU at a specified time which you can then setup to be a recurring task such as daily or weekly.

I opened up the user manual for iTLU and read through the steps and explanations of what switches I needed to use in order to process my library using the same settings I did with the GUI. But wait, I then noticed that since I had saved all of my settings from the GUI in a iTLU profile I didn’t have to do anything with the switches. All I needed to do is tell it where to find my profile file and it would automatically load in the saved settings. Awesome!

So now every 3 days this process kicks off somewhere between kissing the wife good night and that stupid alarm waking me up for work in the morning. The best part is I no longer get the “did you add that album to iTunes yet?” questions like I did before.

You probably already have these applications or similar ones installed on your computer so why would you want them on your portable device? Well, in my case I do freelance work and wanted a way to have my business e-mail and projects with me on whatever computer I happened to be using at the time. Using portable apps I’m able to keep my e-mail and business contacts stored right on my jump drive. I don’t have to go through the hassle of loading up a webmail application or installing software on a computer to access my mail. I just plug in and I’m ready to go.

For those of you with a stricter corporate IT department this could be your way around their restrictions. It’s not going to open up a website or anything they have blocked but it could give you the ability to login to your favorite instant messaging software or bring your Firefox browser to work with you already pre-loaded with your favorite add-ons and plugins. Obviously you do this at your own risk.

Still in college, don’t have your own computer and the labs don’t have the software you need to finish that project? Rather than trying to get something installed on the lab computers you can check out the PortableApps website and download the open source equivalent of what you need. The best part of this entire process is it’s all 100% free! Who doesn’t like free?

We’d love to hear how you have been able to use PortableApps to make your daily life a little easier, just leave us a comment.