In honor of World Backup Day: How to protect your data

Happy World Backup Day, an occasion dedicated to encouraging you to make sure all your digital data is kept safe and secure. If you’ve procrastinated on implementing a backup strategy for your PC, why not mark the occasion by making backup copies of all your documents, digital photos, music, videos, and other invaluable files? We’ll help you get started.

The main things to consider when shopping for a backup drive are capacity and connection options. If your computer has a 1TB hard drive bursting at its seams, don’t purchase a 500GB model for a back-up. I’d suggest a drive with at least twice the capacity of the volume you’re backing up. This will allow you to store copies of all of your data, and it will leave room for the new pictures, movies, and files you’ll continue to add to your computer.

In terms of connections, USB 3.0 is speedy, inexpensive, and pervasive. Even if your PC doesn’t support that newish standard, the USB 3.0 port on the back-up drive is backward compatible to the ubiquitous USB 2.0. Data transfers from a USB 2.0 PC will occur at pokey USB 2.0 speeds, but when you do upgrade your system, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the drive’s intrinsic performance. Thunderbolt is even faster, but that interface is relatively rare—at least on Windows PCs.

You might also consider moving up to a storage device that connects to your data network, instead of a USB or Thunderbolt port. A network-attached storage (NAS) box can support one or more client PCs, and some offer storage redundancy in the form of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). RAID 1 creates a mirror image of your backups, so that your data will be preserved if one of the drives fails. A RAID 5 array requires a minimum of three hard drives, but if any one of them fails, your data can be recovered from the remaining drives, and the array can be rebuilt after you replace that drive.

The downside to RAID 1 and RAID 5 is that the capacity equivalent to one drive is not available for storage. RAID 1 built from two 2TB drives, for instance, gives you 2TB of storage, not 4TB. RAID 5 built from three 2TB drives gives you 4TB of storage, not 6TB.

If you want to protect your data further, you might want to look at having a couple of backups that you rotate through, keeping one offsite. If your backup drive is attached to your PC during a fire or robbery, it may be of no help in retrieving your lost data.

If you’re ready to take that first step in protecting your valuable data, here’s a list of PCWorld’s favorite drives reviewed over the past 12 months.

Western Digital WD My Passport 2TB

Western Digital WD My Passport 2TB: You’d be hard pressed to find a better portable drive than the My Passport. It comes with a good software bundle, has plenty of capacity, and is a top-notch performer. (Read our full review of the Western Digital WD My Passport 2TB.)

Rocstor Lancer LX 500

Rocstor Lancer LX 500: With both USB 3.0 and FireWire interfaces, the Lancer LX works equally well on Windows PCs and Macs. It’s large but rugged, and a good, if not great performer. (Read our full review of the Rocstor Lancer LX 500.)

Lenovo ThinkPad USB3 Secure Drive

Lenovo ThinkPad USB3 Secure Drive: This secure hard drive’s high-flying USB 3.0 performance makes it a good choice for those who need to protect their backups. (Read our full review of the Lenovo ThinkPad USB3 Secure Drive.)

QNAP TS-269 Pro

QNAP TS-269 Pro: While it’s pricey, The QNAP’s excellent performance, copious software features, and state-of-the-art connectivity render this two-bay NAS box a good deal for small offices and work groups. (Read our full review of the QNAP TS-269 Pro.)

QNAP TS-879 Pro

QNAP TS-879 Pro: If you need to back up your important business data, the TS-879 Pro’s eight drive bays and lightning speed highlight this NAS. By far, it’s the fastest—and most expensive—box we’ve tested to date. (Read our full review of the QNAP TS-879 Pro.)

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Samsung Galaxy S4 vs. The World: Specs Compared

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Review: The Unfinished Swan will make you paint the world back in black

I went into The Unfinished Swan knowing absolutely nothing about it. That doesn’t happen very often these days, especially with a downloadable game as unique as The Unfinished Swan. It is unlike any other game I’ve played before; it doesn’t hold the players hand or instruct you what to do and where to explore, but rather trusts your instincts to lead you in the right direction. That’s a huge pressure to put on a player, but The Unfinished Swan does so with such grace and subtlety that I didn’t fully recognize what I'd done until the game was over.

The Unfinished Swan starts in a rather odd way. After you download it from the Playstation Network Store ($15), you load the game and all you see is a targeting reticle in the middle of a blank white screen. It seems odd until you press one of the triggers and fire a ball of black paint that splatters across a blank white object somewhere in this blank white virtual space, defining a portion of the world. Once I discovered this mechanic of exploration it wasn’t long before I was shooting as many paint balls as I could, trying to make the space more defined and more comfortable to me.

It was a weird and unfamiliar feeling to be walking through a space that I couldn’t fully see. Though in a world where gamers are often concerned about draw distances in games as much as the games themselves, it was somewhat refreshing to know that visual acuity didn't really matter.

I found myself painting a basic path on the ground when entering a new area before spinning in a circle, firing paint in all directions hoping to hit a wall of some kind and understand where I was. It was disconcerting, not immediately knowing if I was in a room or outside in a garden; playing The Unfinished Swan makes you acutely aware of how dependent humans are on a sense of place. Locational awareness is often overlooked in games since you can immediately see and understand the virtual space you're exploring; when that sense is taken away, things become disconcertingly foreign.

The blank canvas worlds of The Unfinished Swan become a huge mystery, one that I felt compelled to unearth. It was almost as if I was actually painting these environments from scratch, though they existed invisibly all along and I was only making them visible the the eye. The Unfinished Swan is fantastic because it inspires feelings of both creation and exploration, allowing you to form worlds from nothing and then explore them at your leisure. It felt almost as if I was playing two roles simultaneously, the scientist opening up parts of the maze for the lab rat to explore.

As I progressed through the areas, the story began to unfold, bringing new mechanics with it that were just as simple and relatable as the last. After the first area (which is all stark black and white) shadows are drawn in grey, making it easier to pick out details of the invisible world before you lay paint to canvas. These highlights lessen the thrill of discovery, but they don't kill it entirely.

A later area introduced the use of vines to navigate the world, trading your paint for water to grow the vines. Even though you aren’t directly controlling the vines, they grow wherever you spray water and thus you have the illusion of control over life (despite the vines being pre-programmed on a pretty set path). It's a little depressing that you don't have complete control over this surreal blank canvas of a virtual world, but the illusion of complete control is something that The Unfinished Swan sells perfectly.

There’s balloons scattered throughout the world, but I couldn’t really figure out why. They’re still an interesting collectable that challenges you to explore the world more than you might otherwise, so they’re worth going for when you see them. There’s a few dozen in each chapter too, so you’ll have to go off the beaten path to find them all.

I experienced The Unfinished Swan using a DualShock, but you can play through the entire game using the PlayStation Move, which is a nice option to have if you’re looking for a more immersive experience. The Unfinished Swan isn’t a long game by any means, either; I think my total playthrough clocked in at less two hours, and that's perfect. If it was any longer, it might not have resonated with me as much as I did. 

It may be short and a bit surreal, but The Unfinished Swan is one of the most enjoyable games that I’ve played all year. I didn’t need to think about anything technical or worry about solving any puzzles, I could just play and soak in all the beauty of a strange new world. It's the sort of game you can come back to again and again every few years, and I recommend it to anyone with a PlayStation 3.

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Tablet World Series Game 3: Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7-inch vs. Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, Voting Ends 10/26 at 8:00 a.m.

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Pit Yourself Against International Racers in Need for Speed World

Need For Speed World (free) is a massively-multiplayer online racing game first released in 2010 by Electronic Arts. As befitting the long-running Need For Speed franchise, Need For Speed World features beautiful graphics, dozens of cars, and copious amounts of action.

Race against players from around the globe in Need for Speed World.You can race against other players from all over the world, participate in single-player events where you dodge the cops in crazy urban car chases, gain in rank, and buy new vehicles. Need For Speed World lets you buy in-game SpeedBoost for real-world money, and then use the SpeedBoost to buy cars and other items, but you don't have to buy SpeedBoost to have fun and level up.

You will need to log into the Need For Speed servers every time you start the game, and the game does not offer to remember your password, which can be annoying at times. Nevertheless, the game is very popular; the vendor even threw it an anniversary party earlier this year.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can play this Web-based software.

—Erez Zukerman

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Immerse Yourself In the Beautiful, Quirky World of Botanicula With This Windows 7 Theme

If you're new to the indie game Botanicula, then this free Windows 7 themepack will serve as a visually splendid introduction to it. And if you've already played it…well, is that any reason to deprive yourself of the delightful visuals and quirky sounds that are such a big part of the game's charm? PCWorld has put together the Botanicula Windows 7 Theme to bring the distinctive feel of Botanicula to your desktop.

In a subaquatic realm, the friends come across a giant crab.Botanicula comes to you from Amanita Design, the same folks who created Machinarium--although there's little family resemblance. This game is set in a colorful world of nature rather than a brown and beige steampunk universe. The story involves a team of five insectoid friends who travel through the branches of a tree--their homeland--to save it from energy-sucking parasitic enemies.

The wallpapers in this themepack give you a good feel for the game's eclectic spaces and inhabitants, from the ethereally beautiful domains of the enemy, to escapades on the moon and on glowing pastel branches, to encounters with giant tortoises and crabs, and worms hidden in vibrant green sprouts.

Fans will also appreciate the funny, original sound-scheme, which is a mélange of real voices saying "aaah," "hmmm," "heeheee," "hurrah"” and "mweemwawawawa" (whatever that one translates to).

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Hipster Review: A Fun Way to Take Images and Share Them With the World

If you took a picture on your smartphone but nobody sees it, did you really take it? Hipster lets you solve that particular philosophical dilemma by offering a simple way to customize an image into a funky digital postcard and upload it for the world to marvel at.

To get started with Hipster, you'll need a picture that you want to customize. You can either take a new picture--using whichever camera app you have installed--or you can choose a picture from your gallery. Once you have an image to work with, you pick a look: Hipster contains a long list of preset styles, each with its own color effect and frame. Each preset has space for a caption which, by default, contains your location. You can easily edit the caption, and your text will carry through all of the presets as you pick and choose the one that's right for you.

Despite its variety of styles, image customization in Hipster ends up feeling limited. You can't mix and match frames or styles, and you can't control how the text looks on an image.

On the plus side, Hipster's community is fun and active. Both the app and the Hipster.com website contain a gallery where you can view and comment on other people's public photos. Several of the photographs I came across in the gallery looked quite beautiful, and you can spend a fair amount of time browsing the works of other Hipster savants. From the Hipster app, you can comment on images, follow other users, or "like" photographs--the same basic things you can do on the Hipster website.

Hipster may not rival other image processing apps for power and flexibility, but its vibrant community makes it a fun choice for sharing photos, and for looking at beautiful, spontaneous pictures from all over the world.

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The Android Booth at Mobile World Congress: Google’s Green Wonderland

February 29th, 2012 by Sarah Silbert, LAPTOP Staff Writer  This week, Google's Android area has, as always, been one of the busiest destinations at Mobile World Congress. With app demos, free treats and green robots galore, it's certainly a nice change of pace from plain-white booth after plain-white booth in the Barcelona Fira Montjuic's eight halls.

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Texas Instruments Unleashes Dual-Core OMAP 5 Power at Mobile World Congress

Texas Instruments held a mighty small press conference for what it described as rather groundbreaking developments. From a mini-stage at the TI Booth, manager of wireless business Greg Delagi explained the advantages of the company’s OMAP 5 processor. Among the benefits: 4x the graphics performance of the competition, and the ability to lower power consumption 10 times over.

There was also plenty of talk of just what makes up the long-awaited OMAP 5, but what do technical explanations matter when there’s a booth full of hardware demoing this processor’s power? Delagi was quick to nip in the bud the notion that quad-core is better, telling us that more cores doesn’t mean more power. To prove it, he showed how much faster the OMAP 5 processed HTML5 pages than a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU: 95 seconds for the OMAP 5 versus 200-plus for the A9.

And Texas Instruments has new design wins, to boot. Texas Instruments is partnering with Harman to bring the OMAP 5 to vehicle command centers, and the company iRobot will use TI’s processor for its next generation of robotic products “for vision and analytics.”

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Gaming Grannies: ‘World of Warcraft’ Boosts Cognitive Abilities

Games and Brains

The study included 39 people between the ages of 60 and 77. At the start, participants took a series of tests, measuring their vocabulary, spatial skills, memory and ability to focus. They were retested two weeks later.

The 20 people assigned to play the game attended a training session, where the rules of “World of Warcraft” were explained. They were told to play the game for about an hour a day at home.

After two weeks, those who played the game saw more improvement in their ability to control their attention compared with those who hadn’t played the game.

The researchers also found that among participants who played the game, those who had scored the lowest at the study’s start on the attention test and spatial abilities test improved the most.

“The people who needed it most — those who performed the worst on the initial testing — saw the most improvement,” said Jason Allaire, an associate professor of psychology at NC State who also worked on the study.

The game brought no improvement in participants’ memory skills, according to the study.

Does it Matter When You Start Playing?

With aging, people’s abilities to control their attention and learn new information decline, according to the study. While there’s evidence that cognitive activities can improve thinking skills, researchers have debated who might benefit most, with some suspecting that younger adults — say, those in later middle age — would benefit more than the elderly.

But the new study found that not to be the case: there was no relationship between participants’ ages and their improvement on the tests after playing the game.

“This is contrary to expectations of greater change in younger participants due to an increased capacity for neural plasticity,” the researchers wrote. However, they noted the age range of participants in their study may have been too limited to see an effect.

The researchers said that their study was limited in that participants could not be randomly assigned to either the game-playing group or the control group, because only people with a computer and home Internet connection could be in the game-playing group. But they also noted the two groups did not differ in their average baseline test scores.

Pass it on: Playing the online, role-playing game “World of Warcraft” might help sharpen older adults’ thinking skills.

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Mobile World Congress 2012 Preview: Quad-Core Phones, Intel Medfield Devices, More

During the week of February 27th, the technology industry will gather in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, phone and tablet makers’ annual answer to CES. In the halls of Fira Palace, leading handset makers including Nokia, Sony, Samsung,  HTC, and LG will be showcasing their latest wares, some of which won’t appear in North America for several months. At last year’s show, we had the opportunity to preview the Samsung Galaxy S II, which didn’t appear on our shores until the fall, and the HTC Flyer, which didn’t arrive until summer.

Here are some of the trends we expect to see at this year’s Mobile World Congress:

Quad-Core Tegra 3 Phones: We were disappointed not to see any Tegra 3-powered handsets at CES, but we’d be shocked if nobody unveils one at Mobile World Congress. We’ve already heard that LG could be unveiling a quad-core phone called the LG X3 at its Feburary 26th press event and that HTC may announce the rumored One X phone that day too.More Tegra 3 Tablets: At the moment, ASUS’s Eee Pad Transformer Prime is the only tablet powered by Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 CPU. We expect at least one other tablet-maker to show off a quad-core slate at the show. ASUS is rumored to release a lower-end version of the Transformer called the Transformer Pad TF300T, that has Tegra 3 with a 1280 x 752 resolution screen. Intel Medfield Comes to the U.S.: Intel made a splash at CES when it showed off both the Lenovo K800, the first phone powered by Intel’s Medfield platform, and the Lenovo IdeaTab K2110, an Android tablet with Medfield. Neither of these devices is expected to come to the U.S. and Lenovo doesn’t even sell phones here. However, we expect to see some larger handset makers start demoing Medfield devices at the show. Though Motorola told us it has no major announcements at the show, Slashgear recently reported that the company could be unveiling a Medfield-powered Droid in Barcelona.Wireless Display Demos:  At CES, Texas Instruments showed off its OMAP 4 processor’s ability to stream videos and games wirelessly to a second display while Intel announced that its Medfield platform would support the same Wireless Display (WiDi) standard we’ve seen on Core i5 and higher notebooks for a couple of years now. We expect to see actual mobile devices, not just white box units, that stream wirelessly on a number of platforms. Perhaps, we’ll even see Nvidia or Qualcomm show off this ability.HTC Sense 4.0: HTC’s Sense UI is due for an upgrade and many observers expect Sense Version 4.0 to make an appearance at Mobile World Congress. Slashgear reports that the new Sense will have a homescreen that functions in landscape mode, an improved browser with reader and page saving modes, and built-in Dropbox support.   Windows 8 Tablets: With the consumer preview of Windows 8 due out on the third day of the show, we expect to see a slew of Windows 8 slates appear on the show floor either right after the event or right before. Most of these slates will probably be running Windows 8 for ARM so we’ll get a closer look at that version of the upcoming OS.Augmented Reality Everywhere: Augmented reality apps were a big theme at CES and an even bigger one at this year’s Toy Fair. We’ll undoubtedly see some interested AR software and appcessories, particularly for Android. Even the Mobile World Congress show itself is getting into the act, providing an augmented reality app overlays icons on top of buildings and exhibits throughout the convention center.Higher-than-HD Screens: With Apple’s iPad 3 expected to launch with a 2048 x 1536 screen, the resolution race is on. At CES, we saw a couple of tablets — the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF700T and an unnamed Acer slate  with 1920 x 1200 displays. Expect to see more 1920 x 1200 or higher Android tablets unveiled at Mobile World Congress, along with a host of handsets sporting 1280 x 720 resolutions.Pen Proliferation: At last year’s Mobile World Congress, we saw the first Android tablet with an active stylus in the HTC Flyer. Since then, Samsung has brought pen support to phones with the Galaxy Note. Expect at least one other pen-based device from a major manufacturer to bow at this year’s show, perhaps the rumored Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet from Samsung.Even if we’re wrong about even half of these predictions, Mobile World Congress 2012 promises to be one of the most exciting mobile trade shows yet. Stay tuned for our full coverage of the show.

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How to Turn Off Google’s Search, Plus Your World Personal Search Results

Google’s newest feature, Search plus Your World, personalizes Google searches even further based on your Google+ account. When you enter a search query, Google will find results (or recommendations) based on who you follow on Google+ and what they’ve liked, suggested or searched for before. This can be an extremely useful feature, but sometimes you just want clean search results.

Here are some simple, step-by-step instructions on how to disable personal search results.

Enter a search term.Click the toggle button on the right hand side of your results page (the button with a globe) that says ‘hide personal results.’
 To get it back, simply click the button to the left of it that says ‘show personal results.’Select search settings from the gear icon in the top right corner of the results screen.
 Select  ’Do not use personal results’ under the Personal Results header.

Even before Search Plus your World, though, Google was personalizing your search results based on your query habits so that sites you click more often show up higher for you. Google supplies rather difficult and aggravating instructions on how to turn this feature off, but by simply typing ‘&pws=0' at the end of your search query, that particular search won’t give any personalized results.

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