Restoring SQL Express Databases

When I set up my latest computer, I paid special attention to making sure everything was backed up and I am really glad I did.  I had several issues with bad hard drives fairly early on and recently had another issue with some older drives that I have on the computer dying.  The only purpose these other drives had was to store the log files of my SQL Express Databases.   When they died, I actually didn't notice for several days until I tried to access one of these databases for some work on a development project.  All of my databases were offline.

Luckily I had set up an automated backup off all of the DBs.  Getting this setup using the Free SQL Express isn't obvious and requires (or at least helps to have) a great app that is out there called ExpressMaint.  This lets me run a Scheduled task that automatically backs up all my databases.   Those backups are then backed up by windows backup to a USB hard drive and by Carbonite online.

These databases were easy to restore after I changed the settings on my server to have the logs be on a different drive and made sure to restore to the good drives.   

Gmail's Priority Inbox (Categorized Important Messages)

I like Gmail's new "important" message feature that they are testing in beta currently.  To use it effectively with my setup that already automatically sorts my Gmail into categories, I had to do a few alterations.  I am using the "Multiple Inboxes" lab feature and I wanted to get the new division of "Unread and Important" and other "Unread".  The priority inbox only shows those emails that are in my inbox in those categories but because I have popfile moving my email to other tags, I needed to change the filters in my multiple inboxes.

I set the my filters to

• is:unread is:important
  (show me unread items with the important flag) 
• is:unread -is:important  
  (show me unread items that DON'T have the important flag)

So now my inbox has all my unread important messages at the top (sorted by category) and all my unread, probably not as important categorized emails in the next section.