WizGidget

Oops, last week’s article was supposed to publish this week. We’ll continue the Auction topic this week and save the last Backup article for next week.

There is inherent risk in buying something at an auction, so I want the price to justify the risk. This week I’ll provide some pointers and hints for Ebay, the most popular online auction, that should help you greatly increase your odds of getting a good deal.

First of all is avoiding the feeding frenzy. I do this by deciding ahead of time what I think an item is worth, and what my maximum bid will be. Call me Mr. Spock if you like, but I rigidly stick to my maximum. If the item sells higher than my maximum bid by one cent, well too bad. My maximum bid is based on factors such as what the item would go for new, stated condition, seller ratings, etc. I generally am not interested in paying more than half of the new price, because I’m a. getting a used item, and b. probably can’t get a refund, even if the seller states they’ll do refunds. I look at the stated condition for the item; I might bid higher for an item that is “like new” than one that isn’t.

The seller’s rating is a bit tricky, because it’s a function of their total number of feedback, and the “percentage positive”. Someone who has a feedback rating of 100 could have a feedback ratio of 97% just by tripping over 3 jerks. You just have to look at the negative feedback they received to see who’s being the problem. I’ll sometimes look at the feedback of the bidder who left the negative feedback — if they leave a lot of negative feedback, I figure they’re the problem, not the seller. A seller that has a feedback number over 1000 should have a 99% or better feedback. Beware sellers with feedback less than 25, it may be a seller that opens a new account whenever he gets a negative feedback.

Probably the biggest trick in bidding on Ebay is avoiding a bidding frenzy with another bidder. The solution is built into the way Ebay works. Unlike regular auctions Ebay doesn’t go on until people quit bidding, rather it has a preset time limit. Also, whenever you bid, the price doesn’t go to what you bid, but rather an amount just above the previous bidder’s bid depending on the current price. So, if you keep bidding against someone, it just keeps jacking the price up. The trick is to wait to bid until the last 5 seconds or so, and bid your maximum amount. That doesn’t give another bidder time to bid against you. If you get it, great! If you didn’t, it wasn’t worth the price.

There are tools available to do the “last second” bidding automatically — it’s called “sniping.” I personally use Gixen.com. You set your maximum bid in, and it does the bid for you. It has a concept of a “bid group” you can use to bid on several similar items to improve your chances of getting one. The first one you win closes the group so that you don’t end up with 5 items when you only wanted one.

A few weeks ago we took a look at the “Auction” site Quibids, which really isn’t an auction but rather a way to get people to gamble on getting a reduced price on an online retail purchase.  It doesn’t cost anything to lose in a real auction, while Quibids costs to bid, which is why I say it isn’t an auction.

The real genius in the Quibids thing is that they’ve managed to tap into the emotional feeding frenzy of an auction for the purpose of regular retail sales.  If you’ve ever attended a real auction, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  I’ll use as an example an asset liquidation auction I attended (in 2001 I think) for a dot-bomb where I’d worked (it was fun while it lasted).  They had office equipment, laptops and other computers, up to some network gear that would have cost $50 thousand or more new.  I couldn’t believe what people were bidding on some of the equipment; clearly either they had totally lost their minds in the feeding frenzy of the auction, or they were totally clueless about what the stuff they were buying was worth.  Or both.  I vote for both.  For instance, one guy bought a laptop with a shattered display for over a thousand dollars.

Pretty much everything that was worth anything less than $25,000 went for what I’d call retail prices — you could have bought the same model new for the same price (or less!) — and gotten something new with a warranty rather than a pig-in-a-poke.  There were a few of the high-dollar items like that network gear that went cheap — if I’d had $50 thousand to invest I could probably have doubled my money on those items.

I suppose the people who indulge in the auction frenzy get their jollies from the exitement of the moment. Maybe it’s a bit like gambling.  I can just see it now: Auction Bidder’s Anonymous for those who can’t control their urge to bid ever higher.  So maybe the thousands spent on junk are really just spent on “entertainment”: a thrill, cheap or otherwise.  Personally if I want a thrill I’ll go ride a roller coaster or drive I-35.

There’s a couple things I keep in mind when participating in an auction.  Number one is that the item is generally used.   Even Ebay auctions that list items as new, may in fact be “gently used.”  Secondly, it isn’t going to have a warranty.  Anything bought online isn’t going to be as easy to deal with issues as something bought at a local retailer.  If an online purchase is Dead On Arrival, I’m going to have a couple hours on the phone plus a minimum of a week or two waiting to get issues resolved.  Also, there are some online retailers that are impossible to work with after the sale.  So, the online price has to be low enough to justify the potential hassle if the transaction goes bad.  And, if it’s an auction, it has to be low enough to justify the fact that it’s used and may not be “as described.”

Next week we’ll continue this thread with some tips on wise online purchase techniques whether retail or Ebay.

Having an external drive that runs automatic backups every night will help because you’ll have two copies of every file. What that doesn’t protect you from is events that would destroy both of your copies at the same time. I can think of a couple fairly common events that could destroy both copies of the data. It could be lightning that zaps both the computer and the external drive. It could also be theft — if the drive is connected to the computer, a burglar would be likely to grab them both.

The solution is to have more than one external drive, and switch them out occasionally. How often you switch them is dependent on how much data you can afford to lose. If you can’t lose more than a day’s work, then daily switch-out would be needed. Probably every other day or once a week would work for most folks. The trick would be to keep the “off” disk in a place separate from the computer, safe from impact, static electricity, and theft. A folder in a file cabinet might be a good place, or a pouch in a loose-leaf folder in your bookshelf might be good places to put the drive. Something that would help with switching out the drive occasionally would be a dock for the drive. Seagate has docks for some of their drives. They even have a two-drive dock that will connect to the network, so that the files can be accessible by any computer in your home connected to the same network. There may be other manufacturers that have similar solutions.

Once you’ve bought your backup drive, connected it and installed the software that comes with it, you’ll need to set up your backups. I mentioned last week that some drives come with a “disaster recovery” tool that will completely recover your data onto a new disk if necessary. My Maxtor drive has it, while the Seagate drive doesn’t. While I recommend having and using the “Disaster Recovery” or “SafetyDrill” backups, that type of backup makes a copy of all of the data on your disk, which will tend to be very time-consuming, and really only handling restoring the entire disk. Let’s face it, if it becomes an inconvenience you’re likely to be less than diligent about your backups.

So, in addition to that, you need a backup solution that will provide incremental backups, and most of the external drives have something like this. Incremental backups will only backup the files that have changed since the last backup, which greatly reduces the time to backup as well as the disk space needed on the external drive. You’ll need to take a full backup occasionally, like once a month, or every two weeks. The rest can be incrementals. Also you don’t generally need daily backups of your entire disk drive. If you’ve already taken the “Disaster Recovery” backup, then most people could get away with just running the backups on “C:\Documents and Settings”

Next week we’ll take a look at some common backup errors and gotchas.