This blog post is part of an occasional series focused on managing accounts at TechSoup.org. So far, we've discussed registration, qualification, and updating your account and forum profiles. Watch for more posts to come!

As mentioned in the first post in this series about Registration, joining TechSoup as an individual gives you access to the TechSoup forums and other useful community resources, as well as letting you register organizations and request product donations. In this post I'd like to talk about maintaining the individual user profile and taking advantage of some of those community resources!

The User Profile page contains the basic information such as name, email address, and login information. This can be edited through the My Account link and then click on Edit User Profile. The User Profile page also contains a link for your Forum Profile Page. For those individuals who are interested in engaging others in the nonprofit community to share stories, get feedback and suggestions, or look for technology solutions, the community forums are a great place to spend some quality time. You can ask questions about a specific technology, share advice on how you've set up your network, and answer questions from other nonprofit practitioners who need help with their technology.

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It's Backup Month! Throughout February, we'll be discussing tools, resources, and strategies to help you keep your data backed up and ready to restore. Check out our new resources from each week below and join in the discussion. Additionally, if you'd like to receive regular updates on low-cost, high impact tech for your nonprofit or library, sign up to receive our weekly By the Cup newsletter or monthly New Product Alert.

Week 4

• After the Crash: Minimize Your Downtime (TechSoup Talks! Webinar)
  Thursday, February 25, 11 a.m. Pacific
  
  Computers crash, viruses infect, and disasters happen. But they don't have to affect your ability to continue working if you're prepared. There are some key things you should know about your computer system and your applications, as well as things you should do with your data to ensure that you’re back up in a few hours instead of a few days.
  
  Kami Griffiths will interview Laura Richardson from Uptime Resources to help you understand what you can do to get your system ack up and running so your staff can continue to do their work. It will open your eyes to the risks you should be aware of and the things that can help prevent data lose. You'll also hear from Gregory Seeley, a TechSoup Global Customer Service Representative, who will give an overview of how you can retrieve the products requested through TechSoup's donation program.
  
  This webinar is appropriate for executive directors, IT staff, accidental techies, and anyone else who is responsible for maintaining your nonprofit or library's computers and data.
• A Few Good Tools for Online Data Backup (Learning Center)
  Backing up your data remotely is an excellent solution, especially when it's done as one part of a backup strategy that also includes regularly scheduled local backups. Idealware has compiled a list of online backup tools that might work for your nonprofit.
• Disaster Planning: Backup, Backup, Backup! (Archived TechSoup Talks! Webinar)
  In this archived TechSoup Talks! webinar, TechSoup's Becky Wiegand interviews Nutmeg Consulting's Chris Shipley and Sarai's Zac Mutrux about the different types of backup options including hardware, portable devices, and hosted services.
• Backing Up Your Mobile Devices (TechSoup Blog)
  Smartphones are certainly becoming more ubiquitious, and data sprawl is becoming rampant. Be sure your backup plan includes your phone and other mobile devices.
• Outlook Add-in: Personal Folders Backup (Free Download)
  If you are using Outlook but not Exchange server, all your Outlook information, including your contacts, calendar entries, and email, is stored in a personal folders file (.pst file). This add-in simplifies the oft-neglected backup of this file, by adding a menu item directly on your Outlook client, and can be set to remind you of your backup.
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Computers crash, viruses infect, and disasters happen. But they don't have to affect your ability to continue working if you're prepared. There are some key things you should know about your computer system and your applications — and things you should do with your data — to ensure that you're back up in a few hours instead of a few days.

On Thursday, February 25 at 11 a.m. Pacific time, Kami Griffiths will interview Laura Richardson from Uptime Resources during a free webinar to help you understand how you can get your system back up and running so your staff can continue to do their work as quickly as possible. The discussion will open your eyes to the risks you should be aware of and to the measures that can help prevent data loss.

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Perhaps it's not a coincidence that the September National Preparedness Month is followed by National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Organized by the National Cyber Security Alliance, it aims to educate users in the home, business, and school environments about healthy and secure computing habits.

As a follow-up to our earlier post on The Wall Street Journal's recent review of Windows 7, we'd also like to offer the following links to other relevant and interesting articles and reviews. You might be want to check them out if you're weighing whether or not to switch when it becomes available on October 22:

Have you checked out TechSoup's new Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit? We've updated and expanded our downloadable book, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, and hosted two webinars on disaster planning.

If you've used any of these resources, it's time to let us know what you thought and how we could improve. Please take three minutes to respond to our very short survey. This is your chance to tell us what you think of the toolkit and what resources we should add to it.

As a part of the disaster campaign, we've been blogging about disaster planning and recovery over the past few weeks:

• Free Webinars: National Preparedness Month: Did you know that September is National Preparedness Month? Agility Recovery Solutions, a disaster recovery specialist, together with FEMA, is hosting a series of weekly webinars this month.
• Pangea Foundation's Disaster Relief Communications Hub: ReliefPoint is "a real-time communications hub for national disaster relief coordination and information dissemination." Pangea Foundation developed the tool in response to the October 2007 wildfires that destroyed land and homes in and around San Diego.
• Mobile Phones and Disaster Planning: Cell phones and "smartphones" are easily the greatest additions to accessible emergency preparedness and disaster response. Actively helping staff and volunteers to program their phones will directly and immediately increase their personal as well as your organization's preparedness.
• Freestore Foodbank: Standardized Practices and Disaster Planning: Learn how one organization's overhaul of its tech infrastructure made it ready when a disaster came.
• Back That Mac Up: Isn't Time Machine enough? Maybe not. Learn how to back up your Mac computers and recover them quickly in the case of hard drive damage or failure.

Photo: Random McRandomhead, CC license

Earlier this year, we hosted the first Microsoft-TechSoup Show Your Impact Story Contest and I wandted to take a moment to highlight one of the winners. Elliot blogged about another one of the winners last week. As you may have noticed, we've been writing tooklits and guides, conducting webinars, and blogging about different ways to plan and prepare for disasters and emergencies over the past couple of weeks.

This is, in part, because September is National Preparedness Month. It's also in part because it's around this time of year that the news is full of warnings about hurricanes and wildfires and we want to do our part to make sure that nonprofits and libaries have resources especially for them.

Despite the fear that talking about a major natural disaster might evoke, the resources we've been developing and sharing are really intended to help ensure that your organization can be resilient and flexible — able to adapt to any situation quickly, whether it's an emergency or an opportunity.

One such resource, is a project of the Pangea Foundation, one of the winners of that contest I mentioned earlier. They developed something called ReliefPoint, "a real-time communications hub for national disaster relief coordination and information dissemination." They initially created it in response to the October 2007 wildfires that destroyed land and homes in and around San Diego.

Initially, the region relied on all-centers in order to communicate that status of the fires to various agencies, news affiliates, and community members, but they found it to still take too long to get the information turned around. As an alternative, Pangea created (in 3 days) a hub that provided:

Ana-Marie Jones is the Executive Director of CARD - Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters, a nonprofit located in Alameda County, California. Created by local community agencies after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, CARD trains and supports nonprofits and their special needs clients in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery activities. CARD has been a TechSoup partner for developing The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, a new 77-page manual for nonprofits to prevent and recover from any disaster.

Cell phones and "smartphones" are easily the greatest additions to accessible emergency preparedness and disaster response. Virtually any nonprofit can dramatically increase its level of emergency preparedness and planning efficiency by embracing cell phone technology. Since many employees, volunteers and consumers already carry cell phones, this approach doesn't necessarily require buying anything new. If the phones are already familiar to the user, little time will be needed to  teach new technology, and the tech support systems for cell phones is readily accessible — in stores, via phone, and online. Remember that even if the reception and signal fail, the programmed information is still available!

Among the most useful ways to embrace the cell phone solution is to dedicate a few minutes at staff meetings and gatherings to help program phones. Have people pull them out and enter these numbers and information immediately. Some of the most basic things to program include:

If you haven't already, check out TechSoup's new Disaster Planning and Recovery Toolkit. In addition to our free book, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery, you'll also find webinars, articles, and links to other information around the Internet. We think that this toolkit can be a great resource for organizations in times of health as well as those facing disasters.

A point that we emphasize throughout the book is that disaster planning isn't just a matter of being ready for a natural disaster. It's about rethinking the way your organization works and adopting technologies and procedures that emphasize flexibility and adaptability throughout your organization. An organization that's ready for a disaster is also ready for a new opportunity to expand its impact when a need arises.

I can't think of a story that better illustrates this concept than that of the Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, one of the winners of our Microsoft Show Your Impact contest.

Freestore Foodbank serves over 7000 individuals a month in the greater Cincinnati area, and those numbers double in November and December. Before undergoing a major overhaul of their tech infrastructure, the Foodbank’s multiple branches had a lot of trouble communicating and working together, both internally and externally. In making major infrastructural improvements and standardizing practices across all of their branches, the Foodbank was able to serve the community more swiftly; what's more, when one branch was struck by a natural disaster, the Foodbank was ready for it.

This post is mainly for Mac users. If you're not a Mac user, many of the points here will still apply to you, but some of them won't. You might prefer this video of a dog eating Potato Olés.

If you haven't already, check out our new guide, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery. This book represents several months' worth of research and numerous people's expertise, and we think it'll be a helpful resource for nonprofits and public libraries.

Working on the book got me thinking about my own backup strategies for my home computer. About two years ago, my old iBook G4 started to get slow and it seemed that the hard drive was probably on its way out. I was still covered by AppleCare at the time, so I bought an external MyBook drive and downloaded SuperDuper, in hopes that I'd still be under warranty when the internal drive inevitably died. No such luck.

Like most backup programs, SuperDuper gives you the choice of whether to back up only your own personal data (your home folder) or your entire drive, including the operating system and applications. To back up the entire drive, select "Backup - all files." (This is often referred to as a mirror image.) The benefit of this sort of backup is that if you need to, you can boot the computer from it. That's a huge plus for a lot of reasons: if something happens to your internal drive, you can still boot from the external drive. If you need to send the computer to the shop, you can boot from your backup drive on a separate Mac and keep working as usual.