Mozy On Down To Backup Town
Since I spend a lot of my life working with computers, you’d expect that I know a lot about backing up. I’m always telling people about how important it is to protect their digital belongings, and yet I’ve got virtually no backup system in place! I’m not alone either, with most people I know being just as ignorant as I am. However data loss does happen, and I’m sure David Berlind’s story will be worryingly familiar to a number of people.
This morning, I woke up to hell that’s worse than the blue screen of death: a hung system. You know the type: mouse frozen, unresponsive keyboard… Today, the situation got worse because now, the system won’t boot either. It booted fine yesterday. I get to the Windows splash screen, but after that, something goes terribly wrong and the hard drive, which sounds normal up until a point, starts to make a rhythmic grinding noise as though it’s trying to get at something it just can’t get at.
I’ve had a hard drive or two fail in my time (stupid good for nothing lightning!), so I am aware of the situation. Every year or so I have copied some or my important files around to other computers on my home network. Also I’ve recently bought a portable hard drive that lives on top of my server, and I store another copy of my files on there. All in all, it’s pretty inadequate. I’m left completely unprotected, losing all of my precious files in the event of fire, meteorite, or theft.
So as my blog starts to take shape, I thought it was about time I looked into implementing some sort of real backup system. I don’t need anything fancy, and I’ve come up with this list of requirements:
- Cheap – I don’t like wasting money.
- Simple – If I have to constantly manage the backup then I’m not going to do it.
- Automatic – Same as above. I’m too lazy to think about backing up, let alone click a button to do it.
- Offsite – If the next asteroid near Earth takes out my house, my photos will still be safe.
- Versioned – Sure I can restore a deleted file, but what happens if I delete the contents and save it? (rhetorical)
I’ve been an avid listener of TWIT for a while now, and if you’ve ever heard Leo Laporte open his mouth you’d know about Carbonite. It’s an offsite backup service that automatically uploads your selected files and folders to their servers distributed across multiple data centres. I thought that I should give it a go, so I signed up for the 30 day free trial.
Yeah mmm it was ok. I did everything that I wanted it to I guess. There was just some little things that annoyed me, and for about $6 a month it didn’t seem worth it. One of the things that bugged me was the user interface. Mainly based around shell integration, the look and feel seemed almost hacked together and unfriendly. Also, Carbonite has a “feature” (probably designed to save storage space on the server) that stops videos as well as system style files from being backed up by default. To a developer like me, system and configuration files are really important, and it was too much effort manually selecting them all. Goodbye Carbonite!
I generally liked the idea behind Carbonite, just not the implementation. Using the Google comparison trick I checked out the competition.
Hello Mozy! And welcome to the family! Mozy was exactly what I was looking for, and has none of the things I complained about with Carbonite. These are the things that I like:
- The interface is clean and simple, which makes it easy to select the folders you want backed up.
- Every file type is backed up automatically, with no exceptions.
- It even backs up open and locked files like Outlook PST files!
- Every fixed disk in your computer can be backed up.
- 30 days of version history.
- Backups are scheduled incrementally, and only when the computer is in low use.
- Multiple restore options, including ordering your data on a DVD!
So for approximately the same price (US$4.95 a month), I get unlimited storage space with all of these features! In comparison it seems much cheaper. For those of you who think they don’t really have enough data to warrant the cost, Mozy offers a free version with 2GB storage. If you need a little more space, then every 2 friends you refer gives you another gigabyte of space.
I’m sleeping much better at night knowing my precious 1′s and 0′s are floating around safe in the cloud. It doesn’t complete my system as only my server is backed up, but that’s where most of my data lives. The next step is to use another third-party tool to back up my other machines onto a network share (yes that’s supported!), but all in good time. So next time you hear the click of death, will you be crying, or sighing with relief that you signed up with Mozy?
Bookmarks Are Back With Xmarks
Since the first popular web browser was released in 1993, bookmarks have been a fact of the internet that keep us organised and cause us frustration at the same time. Originally when the web was a tangled mess, and the world was still using AltaVista, bookmarks were necessary for you to find your GeoCities site or your favourite web comic. These days we have RSS readers to find the latest updates, GeoCities has closed its doors, and it’s usually faster to Google something than to type the address in the bar. (I do this all the time, including Googling for Google!)
The main problem with bookmarks that has existed since they were born, is the issue of keeping them organised. These days I use multiple computers, with a number of different browsers, and my bookmarks get out of control. Why would anyone want to use bookmarks anymore? In his post titled “Do We Still Need Bookmarks?“, Jono answers this question with these insightful use cases:
- The Todo List. “I want to look at this, but not right now.” Someone gave me a link to a cool video about robots, but I don’t want to watch it right now, because I’m in the middle of something. Or, there’s a web form I need to fill out, but I don’t have the information I need yet. I bookmark the page because there’s an action I want to take later.
- Sharing. “Oh man, this is funny!” This time, I found the cool robot video, and I want to show it to someone. I found a hilarious picture, or a news article that proves I was right in that argument we had a week ago. Either way, the value is in the sharing. I bookmark it so that later on I can give the link to others.
- Frequently Used. “I want to get back here fast.” The page where I view my bank account status, the central documentation page for the project I’m working on, or a hub from which I often start surfing. I bookmark it because I expect to return often and I want to get there fast.
- The Research Collection. “This fits right in to something I’m working on.” I’m a history teacher, preparing a lesson plan, and I’m collecting resources about World War 1. Or, I’m a political blogger, and I’m collecting links about all the ways my Least Favorite Politician has screwed things up. I bookmark pages because I want to add them to my growing collection of data on a certain topic.
This is exactly how I use my bookmarks, as well as everyone I know. We’re all just stuck copying our bookmarks from one computer to another and importing into the various browsers we use. What else can we do? Call Captain Planet and the Planeteers? No, they’re too busy fighting Dr. Blight and Looten Plunder. What we need is Xmarks!
Formally known as Foxmarks, this service lives in the cloud and performs automatic synchronization of bookmarks between all of your computers and browsers. What evolved as a Firefox Add-on, Xmarks now supports the top 4 leading browsers today with a range of plugins and native applications. As it’s in the cloud you have the benefit of your bookmarks being backed up and available wherever you have internet access.
“It sounds ok, but I’m not convinced,” a random reader might say. Well that’s just the start, look at this impressive list of features:
- A simple web interface to access and organise your bookmarks.
- The ability to define different profiles for home, work, etc., to filter which bookmarks are available where.
- Secure sync of stored passwords between when you use Xmarks with Firefox.
- Mobile bookmarks are supported with a special mobile interface directly in your browser.
- The website has a cool blue colour scheme (I like blue).
Now to be honest, the mobile interface isn’t very strong. It’s not a genuine replacement for native bookmarks, but apparently there’s an iPhone application in the works.
Xmarks is my number 1 favourite browser plugin ever. The first thing I do when I use a new computer or browser is download the appropriate plugin, and pull down my bookmarks and passwords. The process usually takes less than a minute, and I have an exact copy of my toolbar links and all of my saved login information. Any changes I make will be synchronized immediately, which makes it perfect for the “Todo List” style of links. For the most important things I’ll place them on the toolbar so that I see them right away when I get home. Best of all, it works over HTTP so you can use Xmarks behind a proxy.
A year ago I would have agreed that bookmarks were dying off. With the power of the cloud, Xmarks brings back bookmarks, big time!
Synchronize Your Life With Google
The word “cloud” is thrown about a lot these days, with services such as Amazon’s EC2 bringing the cloud within the reach of your humble developer. For the uninitiated, Wikipedia describes cloud computing as the following:
Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (“computing”). In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.
Understand?.. No?.. Neither did I. I see the cloud as a magical room up in the sky, filled with an infinite number of computers that can store as much data as you like, and do a zillion calculations a second. The best part is you can access it from almost anywhere because it’s always up above you. It’s considered the future of computing, with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all competing in the race to become the cloud king.
So now that I’ve written an intro around the fluffy photo above, I’ll get onto the real post. What I love most about keeping my data in the cloud, is that it allows me to keep my data backed up in once place, and synchronized with all of my devices including my iPhone. Google have a number of services that help you do this, which I use to sync all of my email, contacts, and calendar entries “over the air” (another fancy term). If you’re nice, I’ll show you how to do it.
Doesn’t iTunes already do this for me?
Well kinda, but you have to plug your phone in for it to update your contacts, and it will only synchronize your calendar with Outlook (or the Mac equivalent)! If you follow these instructions, you’ll be constantly up to date without having to think about it.
1. You must have a Google account
If you haven’t already, head over to mail.google.com and sign up for a new account. Please please please use a sensible username, and save fluffy_bunny_69 or imdahottest for your Hotmail account. Have a play around and get a feel of your new home, then check out calendar.google.com to activate the calendar. You use the same username and password for every Google application, but you have to log in at least once to activate them.
2. Turn off iTunes sync
Next, we want to completely disable iTunes controlling the synchronization of your data. If we leave this enabled, it will mess with the data you store in the cloud.
- Open iTunes
- Connect your iPhone
- Go to the “Info” tab
- Ensure that synching of contacts, calendar and mail are all disabled.
3. Connect to Gmail via IMAP
The IMAP protocol allows you to keep your email messages synchronized between all of your clients and the server. You can use the standard Gmail option in your iPhone settings, but Google recommend that you use the custom account configuration:
What if I tap ‘Gmail’ instead?
Archiving and deleting messages will work differently. Our instructions ensure Gmail works as designed.
In particular this deals with the way Gmail archives emails instead of deleting them directly. Although not completely necessary, it’s probably best to follow their instructions.
4. Setup Google as an Exchange account
The Microsoft Exchange system is the market leader in the enterprise communication market, and for good reason. The wise folks at Google realised this and have emulated an Exchange server, which your iPhone can connect to. Now Google suggests that you enable synchronization of all of your data this way, but I recommend that you do not enable Mail synchronization via Exchange. I find the iPhone has trouble receiving notifications of incoming mail, especially when you have a large number of emails.
With the above caveat, follow these instructions on configuring an Exchange account.
5. Choose which calendars to sync
Whenever I add a new Google calendar, I always forget this step and wonder why it’s not working. It’s such a simple step that I bet you’ll do the same. Just head on over to m.google.com/sync, log in with your Google account, and pick which calendars you want configured. Bookmark the page so you can update your options in the future.
6. Play in the clouds
Now you’re set up with your data in the cloud! When you put new people in your phone book they’ll instantly be transferred to your Google contacts, and events you add to your calendar will always stay in sync between devices. Fiddle with the options, and suss out how to make it best work for you. Just remember if you’re going to play in the clouds, don’t forget to bring your umbrella!
Bonus!
For those of you who’ve made it past the corny images, here’s a bonus Facebook tip. With the latest version of the Facebook iPhone app, you can enable automatic synchronization of your contact’s profile pictures. Enable this using the “sync” button at the top right of the “Friends” page (choose both options). If you followed the above instructions, the pictures will also float up into the cloud and be added to your Google contacts!
In the future I’ll show you how to add Facebook events to your calendar, and how to share calendars with family and friends, but are there any other ways that you synchronize your data and live in the cloud?
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