72 hours later, and I’m barely passed 12G with Carbonite.com. Just under 20G left to go…
Is Carbonite a realistic solution? Unless your machine is on all the time, and you have a month to spare waiting for your backups to get pushed up to the online storage vaults, I don’t think so. For my wife with her thousands of digital photos on a laptop that’s on only when she works? Definitely not.
Mozy: just under 2G in less than 2 hours. So for the barest of essentials, this is a fast tool. It kicked on when I stepped away for dinner, and was done by the time I got back. Kudos for keeping out of my way.
Carbonite: just under 2G in the last 12 hours, and with 30G more to go, this could be a long, long, long wait. But let’s face it, once it’s all up there…right?
Recently I started looking at options to offline some of my backup data. I backup all my home machines to a single 400GB LinkStation NAS (gigabit!) using SyncBackSE. I keep a weekly rotation of data (full on Sunday, incrementals for the rest of the week) except downloads and music, which are on a monthly backup (full). At the end of any given week, I am up to about 70% used, so there is enough space on that NAS for me to put all our digital photos on a share.
But that’s not enough for me–I want to make sure that if something REALLY bad happens, I can still find the most imporant stuff–taxes, quicken files, code, digital photos. And I’m just too unlikely to follow through with a DVD backup each week, a fireproof safe or a safety deposit box. So I looked around at some of the online backup options out there, and while there are a few that are free, the not-free aren’t exactly cheap. I settled on mozy.com, which gives you 1Gb free, another gigabyte for answering some questions, and has a referral program for adding more (so click on that link…) Having 1 (ONE!) gigabyte is a bit like answering the question that Ricky Gervais once fielded:
“…what three things I would save if my house was on fire. I said my cat, my salamander and oh…one of the twins. Later a journalist asked, ‘How are the twins?’”
While Ricky doesn’t have twins, I have a whole lot more than 1G of REALLY important info. I got to 2G, and trimmed it down to the barest of essentials–then left it alone. A week later, I tried a recover (no backup strategy is worth a fig if you haven’t attempted a recovery, as I once learned), everything worked like a charm. And while Mozy has a 5G option for-pay, I decided I would try other options (I’m keeping Mozy for now, but 5G just ain’t enough for a real backup of my most important data–which runs to just over 30G). During my research phase, I came across Carbonite as an option for handling the 10′s of gigabytes of digital photos that my wife has taken.
Carbonite: unlimited storage, flat fee. Me: woah.
On the home page they mention a PC backup option, coming soon–and today, I got an email invite to join their beta. A quick install, a kill-restart of explorer.exe (reboot? We don’t need no steenkin’ reboot), and wow–I must say a very nice look. Carbonite does image overlays in explorer to let you know which files are being backed up. With a shell extension (does it work in x64?) to select what you want backed up, this was a VERY easy config. The admin tool is a little grandma-ish (click HERE to START!!!), but hey–I guess that’s the target. This is something I could definitely hand off to the parents and in-laws for their backup needs.
Memory usage for both mozy and carbonite seem minimal, I haven’t noticed any negative impact on network performance either (though I have the killer Comcast 6M connection–wouldn’t consider this otherwise). For a beta product, this Carbonite tool seems pretty sharp.
Are there better options out there, short of buying a tape drive and calling Arcus armed security guards for a weekly pickup?
One of my favorite uses of FolderShare is a one-two punch with the unsupported VMware DiskMount utility. All my work on my desktop is done in VM’s–that allows me to try out new software, and revert snapshots in moments if something goes wrong. And while I put as much as I can in my foldershare folders, sometimes I just need access to something on one of the several VM’s I leave behind when I travel for work. Enter DiskMount. Released for VMware 5.0, it works just fine with my my recent upgrade to 5.5. I mount each of the VM’s as a separate drive letter before I leave, and they’re ready for me any time I need them while on the road. Just browse to the correct device in FolderShare, then the correct drive letter, and presto–all my work in the VM mounted as a drive.
I’ve been using the paid version of FolderShare for several months now, and I love it, but I’m looking for ways to use it better. Right now, I have the following:
1) All my utility apps–think of it as yet another USB key
2) All my MSDN keys (I don’t know when they started this, but you can export your list in XML)
3) My Visual Studio 2005 settings file (Tools | Options | Environment | Import and Export Settings)
4) A recent addition, my PWM file
5) My browser (both of them) favorites
6) My current list of projects, all code, libs and docs associated with them
7) My MaxiVista Viewer client executables
If you haven’t tried FolderShare yet, you’re missing out on a great tool that goes a long way to simplify sharing between machines–it just works!
If you’ve wondered what VMWare was like, what it did, and how you could use it, wonder no more. You’ll need two free downloads:
1) VMWare Player 1.0: Open any VMWare virtual machine–for free.
2) Any one of the free VM’s for download at VMWare’s Virtual Machine Center. I tried the Browser Appliance, a customized install of Ubuntu that “enables you to safely browse the Internet from within a VMware virtual machine — protecting your host PC from spyware and malware.” Comes with Firefox and a couple of other utilities–at just under 1GB when uncompressed (~200MB zipped).
Yes, that’s a Terminal Server Client window. A very interesting demonstration of VMWare, a safe way to play with it for a bit, and a pretty convincing exercise in the usefulness of VM’s. This one joins the list of tools on my USB key…
Don’t forget to take a look at the other VM available for free download on that same page. An interesting way to serve up demos.
I decided the other day to give VoIP a try–I wanted to see what it sounded like, how well it worked with the volume of traffic I put out across my router, what interesting devices are available, and so on.
I started off by going the easy route, letting Vonage do all the work: I got their basic service, with a Linksys SIP device (a full blown 4-port router with two telephone ports, quite nice actually). I decided to keep my original POTS line still connected.
Since Vonage requires you to use their devices (buy at a store, or order online), I had to wait for them to ship the Linksys router. In the meantime, I decided to try out their softphone, basically software much like Skype. And, much like Skype, the quality was low. For the five days I waited for shipping, I found myself more and more annoyed with the stuttering that you get over VoIP–which, as I discovered later, was mostly due to the softphone. Anyway, as soon as the Linksys router arrived, I “disconnected” (and uninstalled) the softphone. At $9.99 a month, with only 500 minutes, it was a bit of a joke. One benefit out of the experience though–I discovered an *excellent* computer headset from VXI with a single USB connection. Fantastic quality, both speaking and listening.
I’ve got a decent Polycom SoundPoint Pro (getting a little long in the tooth, but still a really good office phone), so I moved my main line into the second port, and connected the first to the Linksys. First call out, and the quality was excellent–far superior to the softphone.
Over the next couple of weeks, the connection held up well during conference (three-way) calls, during heavy use (both down and up, and I’ve configured no QOS), lengthy international calls, and general all day usage. I would get complaints from time to time about a stuttering, requests to repeat things, but in general the audio was excellent, and I got not one single drop during that time. With some QOS love (which my older router does not support), I’d give Vonage 2 thumbs up as a second line option.
And then my Cisco 7960G arrived.
