Entries tagged “data”

What It Is: Mozy is an online backup service that runs in the background on your computer, continously backing up your files to Mozy's servers. It works on Windows and Macs, and you can restore your files either by browsing to them through Mozy software, downloading them in batches from Mozy's site, or by having Mozy send you DVDs of your files. Mozy saved my bacon, and it's the best five bucks I've ever spent.

The Experience: The whole reason I wanted to write a series of unsolicited testimonials was because of my experience with Mozy. Mozy costs money even though it has free competitors. Mozy's software, when I started using it, was wonky and bogged down my machine. I didn't have a lot of confidence that the service was doing anything at all, and the company's web presence could be a lot more polished. Test restores of files were slow and I'd kind of even forgotten I was using it, after a few months.

And then one day my hard drive crashed, losing hundreds of gigs of files, many of which were unreplaceable. Mozy saved my ass, gave me back my files, and left me so happy that any shortcomings I'd noticed before were forgotten and then some. You should use this service.

Now, I use Macs and Windows machines, but the machine I use Mozy on was a PC running Vista. (I've heard the Mac Mozy client software is a little less polished.) Mozy runs as background software, with a straightforward interface that lets you pick what files or folders you want to back up, and then offers more advanced settings if you want to tweak things. The defaults are smart, and work right. And of course, unlike Time Machine or any other popular backup system, Mozy gives you an offsite backup of your data by its very design.

Mozy also works for restoring older versions of files, though I have no use for that functionality and have never tested it. More recent updates to the software have made my Mozy backups browsable as virtual drives, which means if I want to just restore a single lost (or corrupted) file, I can get it as easily as I could pull it off of a CD or Flash drive.

The Gotchas: Mozy's far from perfect, of course. There's the caveats I mentioned above, and the client software is clearly a little rough around the edges. It does weird things like always showing the percentage of backup time remaining for files that haven't been backed up, instead of the percentage of the overall job, which makes you feel like it's never doing anything.

What It Costs: The best $5 a month you've ever spent. If you sign up using my link to Mozy, we both get an extra 256MB of space. You can also put in the referral code "32M6CD" or my email address (anil@dashes.com) when you sign up.

Recommended If You Like: Power outages, coffee spills, storage in the cloud, giving up on ever writing that Amazon S3 client you've been thinking about

This post is one of a series of unsolicited testimonials. Please view that introductory post for more background information.

I found Frank Hilario's rant entitled Microsoft’s Mr Bill Gates And The Boy Who Cried Worp to be largely incoherent, but from what I could deduce, he thinks my assessment of Microsoft Office 2007 is off-base. Actually, he says:

If you can’t beat them, don’t join them; instead, change the rules of the game. That’s what Worperer Microsoft did with Word 2007, Paul Thurrott (2006, cited) says. Yes. Anil Dash (2006, cited) says: ‘By radically changing the user interface in Office 2007, Microsoft made the riskiest bet in the history of commercial software. And I think they’re going to win the bet.’ Wanna bet?

So, here’s another idea, also from me: Go get a fresh tablet of stone and etch on it the idea of an entirely new word processor. Worperers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your worps!

Once you've lost your worps, you may enjoy Rafe's musings on music collections, inspired in part by my loss of my iTunes library. There are also a lot of really great comments on that thread, thanks to everyone who's contributed.

Features that didn't make the cut for Windows Vista. For those of you who already think I'm too much of a Microsoft fanboy, check out the list. My favorite is "Safe Delete":

Clicking this button would instantly delete all of the files shown in the window permanently from the system, overriding every confirmation, bypassing the recycle bin, and also zeroing out the space on the disk that the files used to occupy (hence the "safe" name).

• Still not sick of my months-long rant about monoculture? Witness Ryan Naraine's insightful look at the One Laptop Left Behind program:

If the plan is perfectly executed, Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project will deploy 100 million laptops in the first year. In one fell swoop, the nonprofit organization will create the largest computing monoculture in history.

Wary of the security risks associated with a computing monoculture—millions of machines with hardware and software of identical design—OLPC foundation officials are seeking help from the world's best hackers to review the full specifications of the $100 laptop's security model.

• On a completely un related note, from one year ago, What it's like at Web 2.0. It's like that, but more so, now. I think the event was a success, and have nothing but respect for the people behind it, but the standout panel was the one where they ask kids how they use technology. I think it's called something like "Talking to Teens", and I'm always shocked how out of touch the audience is with young people -- they treat 15 year olds like they're from the moon. Interestingly, this panel could also have been called "Talking to People of Color", and been used for the same poke-them-with-a-stick anthropological purposes. Good thing cultural diversity isn't a life-or-death issue for our industry. Oh, whoops.

• This is a segue about natural selection. It's Safe Delete for bad ideas.

• The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. A simple entrance to the collection is also available. I had a chance to see Darwin's notebook offering up the quiet assertion "I think" and found that surprisingly, profoundly moving.