Ever get the feeling you’re the odd one out? Evaluating other offices, do you ever get the feeling that they may be outpacing you in office automation?
Just yesterday, I became aware of a police jurisdiction whose level of automation was a peer-to-peer network of 286 MHz computers. Wow! One was heard to say, “what can you do using dinosaurs like that?” Laughingly, I overheard another comment, “they have enough power for their rotating screensaver”!
We’ve come a long way, baby! We have a spectrum of office automation populating law practices all across our state. The sophistication of the operation is driven by the demands made upon the office systems.
Just because something is new and shiny, doesn’t mean that you can justify its use in your office. Considering a new purchase, one needs to immediately determine, “how will this be used?” “How often will it be used?” “Who’s going to use it?” If you can get through those questions, will others take their place? “What’s the cost justification?” “Will we be more effective?” “Will we be more efficient?” After all, generally we are in a for-profit mode while practicing law. (Despite the urgings of some who practice because of the “love” of it, your families have a different view!)
Some practical advice: become educated and stay educated on technology that is constantly evolving and improving. Read, read, read. Ask questions. Consult with others. The Solo and Small Practice Conference and other ISBA forums offer ways to make evaluating judgments and to keep abreast of what others may be doing.
Look at it this way. This technology stuff needn’t be intimidating. Have fun with your tech learning. If used as the tools like they have been designed, technology harnessed can be the workhorse of decades to come.
Until recently, magnetic tape drives were the back-up media of choice due to their reliability, low cost for the amount of data stored and wide availability. When commercial hard drives were first introduced into the consumer level computer market the cost of such hard drives was expensive for the amount of data they were able to store. Any back-up media would need to be less expensive but still have the same or greater capacities than the hard drives to be backed up. The solution was magnetic tape which over the years could be found in various formats, but for the most part all shared common characteristics: Cartridges of some type were used and the tape was fed in a linear fashion across the spindles with the data being written sequentially to the tape. This allowed for a relatively inexpensive media to be used with high storage capacity. The downside to tape back-up is that 1) the tapes do wear out after a length of time; 2) in order to find a specific piece of data on the tape, the tape would be run through the drive until its index was found and then it would have to read through the entire tape again until that specific piece of information was located making it relatively slow; and 3) without proper maintenance tape drives are prone to fail. With the advent of less expensive hard drives and greater capacities, tape drive manufacturers increased the storage capabilities of their products; however, they have been unable to keep up with the rapid pace of modern hard drive size and decrease in costs. It now requires numerous tapes in order to back-up some of today’s very large hard drives: this means that tapes must be manually replaced or the user must purchase a very expensive tape auto loading system. Expensive solutions are not an option for the small office, so alternatives to the tape drive needed to be found.
The advent of the writable CD ROM at first appeared to be a back-up option to replace tape drives. However, due to the relatively small capacity of the CD ROM in comparison to modern hard drives, even a CD ROM is insufficient to provide back-up for many computer systems without using multiple discs. The writable DVD held out more promise as it has considerably more capacity than a writable CD ROM drive, but even the DVDs of today are insufficient to back-up large hard drives without the use of multiple discs. It is at this point that the rapidly decreasing costs of external hard drives along with their rapidly increasing storage capacity now makes external hard drives an ideal media to back-up the internal hard drives found in the Solo and Small Legal Office computers and networks.
However, recognizing that many offices may already have an investment in tape drives either analog or digital, the back-up software used should have the capability of working not only with traditional tape back-ups, but writable CDs and DVDs as well as external hard drives. The primary difference between back-up software packages is the method each uses to back-up data and programs.
Traditional back-up software takes a file level approach meaning that the software goes through and copies each file on the computer’s hard drive starting at the top level directory and working through the entire directory structure of the computer. File level back-up allows the software to make a copy of each file and also allows an end user to back-up only certain files or all files, as well as the type of backups that are made, i.e., a full back-up, incremental or differential back-up which will be discussed later. However, file level backups are slow as the backup system must read each individual file and copy it to the back-up media. The other back-up methodology employed by back-up software is what’s known as disk imaging. Disk imaging solutions copy an image of the entire hard drive without reading each individual file. Imaging programs compare to making a copy of the original using a photocopier. Disk imaging utilities have come into maturity in the last few years and have dropped not only in price but in complexity as well. One of the limitations of the disk imaging utilities was the inability to back-up anything other than the entire disc; but this is changing with the addition of file level back-up capabilities. This addition creates a hybrid program combining the best features of disk imaging and file level back-up solutions.
Full back-up versus incremental back-up versus differential back-up
In years past when space was at a premium on the back-up media, different back-up strategies were created. Incremental backups were backups that only backed up the files that had changed from the last full or incremental back-up. For example, a full back-up is run on Monday and then an incremental back-up is run on Tuesday and Wednesday: the Tuesday incremental back-up only backs up those files that have been changed or added since the full back-up on Monday. The incremental back-up on Wednesday only copied those files that were changed or added since the incremental back-up on Tuesday. Incremental back-ups results in smaller back-up sets, but also result in the need to have all incremental back-ups to fully restore a system since every incremental back-up done after the last full back-up would be needed. The answer to the limitations of an incremental back-up was called a differential back-up.
A differential back-up backs up all information from the time of the last full back-up through the date of the differential backup. For example, if a full back-up was run on Monday and a differential back-up was run on each day of the week, each differential back-up would copy any added or changed information from the last full backup; unlike an incremental which only backs up information from the back-up cycle immediately before the incremental back-up was completed. This allowed for easier restoration of data since you only use the last back-up and the most recent differential back-up. However, both of these methodologies have their own inherent problems including the fact that you can end up with deleted files, files in multiple locations if you’ve moved a file after it was created and have a differential from the date the file itself was created.
Ideally any modern back-up solution would resolve this issue. A new backup method was created called Progressive Incremental. IBM employs this in their Tivoli software which can run $20,000 or more, so obviously this is not an option for the Solo and Small Legal Office. However, EMC, maker of Retrospect software, also employs Progressive Incremental back-ups in products that range in price from approximately $100 up to several thousand dollars. The Progressive Incremental backup includes not only the files in a differential format but also includes a SnapShot which is a listing of the files and folders residing on the computer at the time the backup was made. Think of the SnapShot as a shopping list that is used when restoring the data and programs to the computer: the SnapShot goes in and only selects the files for that date and time. Retrospect is the only product. While this technology is desired, for the Solo and Small Office, Retrospect is the only affordable product that includes this feature; in reality, while it is nice, it isn’t absolutely necessary.
Disaster recovery
Whether a software program uses file level back-up or disk imaging isn’t as important as whether or not the program selected provides for disaster recovery which is also known as “Bare Metal Restore”. According to Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) Bare Metal Restore is defined as:
Bare Metal Restore is a technique in the field of data recovery and restoration where the backed up data is available in a form which allows one to restore a system from “Bare Metal,” i.e., without any requirements as to previously installed software or operating system.
While many people only back-up their Word processing, accounting or time and billing data, this is not what I recommend as it requires significant time and effort to place a computer back into operating condition in the event of a catastrophic loss or failure. Without the ability for disaster recovery, a user must locate all of the programs or their recovery disks that came with the computer. They must find all other software disks that they installed as well as the serial numbers for the programs. Finally, any updates must be downloaded from the internet again and customized settings restored. Using a disaster recovery backup set, the user not only recovers all data, but the operating system, all programs, updates and customization through the last backup. The focus should be on getting the system back in operation as soon as possible. This is known as Recovery Time Objective which is the amount of time that passes before the system is once again available.
The selection process
There are various commercially available software packages for both file level and disk imaging that are affordable for the Solo and Small Office. While there are numerous free ware and share ware programs available, many of these require a level of sophistication beyond that of a user with little or no technology background or they lack support and track record of success.
Backup Software includes:
• EMC Retrospect Professional
• Roxio’s Backup MyPC
• Novastor NovaBackup
• NTI Backup Now
• Acronis TrueImage
• Norton Ghost
All of these products provide for some type of disaster recovery capability. All of them are commercially available and have an established track record of performance and customer service. I tested each of these back-up programs. Of the software tested, I selected one program from each category that I recommended.
For file level backup software, Restrospect Professional from EMC offers the widest selection of features, speed and ease of disaster recovery. The help system provided appropriate assistance when required and Wizards were available to help walk through the backup and restoration process.
For disk imaging software, Acronis True Image provides not only disk imaging capabilities but file level back-up as well. Its ability to create incremental and differential backups, as well as the ability to start working in Windows while continuing the recovery process I believe, puts it ahead of its competitors. There is no doubt that the disc imaging products are significantly faster in backing up similar amounts of data than their file level backup competitors. Backing up approximately 27-1/2 GB of data took four hours using Restrospect Version 7 and approximately two hours using Acronis True Image Version 9. The restoration process is similarly quicker with a disk imaging product rather than a file level utility as the disk imaging product simply recreates the disk image itself without writing each file.
Restrospect Professional was the only product to provide a printed disaster recovery checklist that can be stored with the disaster recovery set and allowed a user to back-up all data and information to an external hard drive or other back-up media type and create a disaster recovery CD or DVD to be used in conjunction with any backup set. Acronis True Image Version 9 had the most user friendly and easy to use interface of any of the products evaluated. At this point I should disclose that I have worked with and sold both Acronis True Image and Restropect Professional in the past; however, I’m also able to sell all the other products reviewed and do not believe that this impacted on my evaluation of the products as I currently use Norton Ghost and Backup MyPC on some of my own systems.
Favorites is a feature of the newsletter that highlights those programs, utilities, gizmos, gadgets, etc., that we love. Sure, we could probably live without these, but who would want to. If you have a favorite you want to tell others about, contact Bryan Sims at bsims@trwlawyers.com. This installment of Favorites discusses two features of Adobe Acrobat 7 and the CaseMap 6 Bates Stamping plug in for Adobe Acrobat.
Typewriter Tool
Adobe Acrobat 7 (the actual program, not the reader) contains a great new feature called the Typewriter tool. One of the frustrating things of working with Acrobat at times was that the person who created a Acrobat form may have forgotten to place a form field in a particular location where you needed to enter information. Alternatively you may have had a PDF form that needs completed and it had no form fields at all.
The typewriter tool solves this problem by allowing you to type anywhere you click within a PDF. Further, you can change the font size that you are typing in. Also, you can move the text box around to place it exactly where you want. The typewriter tool is easily enabled by selecting Tools > Typewriter from the menu or by clicking on the toolbar icon that looks like a typewriter.
I use PDF documents and Acrobat regularly in my practice. The additional tasks that I can easily accomplish by using the typewriter tool, by themselves, justify the cost for me to upgrade from Acrobat 6 to 7. If you frequently use Acrobat in your practice, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you upgrade to version 7, just to get this tool.
Enable Comments in Acrobat Reader
Acrobat has a fairly robust method of allowing people to comment on PDF documents. This allows you to exchange documents with clients, co-counsel, opposing counsel, etc., in a method that allows them to comment on a document without having the ability to modify it or to have access to your word processing metadata.
The one problem with this feature has been that a person could only enter comments if they had a full version of Acrobat. If the reviewer had only a copy of Acrobat Reader, he could not do any commenting. This problem raised by this is that there are large numbers of people who have only Reader. This certainly limited the efficacy of any attempt at collaboration or review using Acrobat, especially with clients. With the new feature in Acrobat 7, however, one can now easily enable anyone to make comments on a document.
In addition to being able to enable comments in Acrobat Reader, Acrobat 7 also allows you to enable the typewriter tool in Adobe Reader. Thus, you can also create documents that allow your readers who have only Acrobat Reader to also gain access to the Typewriter Tool.
Please note that, to enable either comments or the typewriter tool, you must be using the Professional, not the Standard version, of Acrobat 7. Further, to access the advanced features described here, you must update your version of Acrobat to at least version 7.0.5. Finally, to access these enabled tools in Acrobat Reader, the user must be using Acrobat Reader 7.0.5, or later.
CaseMap 6 Bates Stamp Plug In
Recently CaseSoft (now owned by Lexis-Nexis) released version 6 of their popular program CaseMap. CaseMap is a program designed to help you organize and analyze the facts, cast of characters, and issues involved in your case. One great feature of the program is that it allows you to link particular documents to specific facts. This makes it extremely easy to find supporting and relevant documents.
In the past you had to manually import each document into CaseMap and manually identify the document by its Bates Stamp. CaseMap 6, however, contains an optional Bates Stamp plug in that integrates with Acrobat. This Bates Stamper allows you great control over the naming convention of the stamp, as well as the stamp location. Additionally, the stamper will also allow you to put a white background behind the stamp to ensure that you are able to read the number easily. Further, the program remembers what documents have been stamped and how many have been stamped.
If you use the CaseMap Bates Stamps, you can bulk import your documents into CaseMap. In so doing, the program automatically reads the stamps, identifies the starting and ending numbers of the stamps for each document, and automatically enters that information in your CaseMap database. This is a great time saving feature. Additionally, by simplifying the process CaseSoft has increased the likelihood that its users will regularly use the program with all of their cases.
I have used other stamping plug ins in the past. The new CaseMap plug in, even without the integration, is superior to other similar plug ins that I have used before. When this fact is combined with the tight integration between the plug in and CaseMap, there is no question but that this plug in is a favorite of mine and a great reason to upgrade to CaseMap 6.
Further information about Adobe Acrobat 7 can be found at <http://tinyurl.com/uu9e>. Further information about CaseMap 6 and its Bates Stamping plug in can be found at <http://tinyurl.com/p2hmb>.