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So you think your hard drive is on its last legs.

You’re no computer genius, but you know enough to know that the sound your computer is making? It’s not supposed to sound like that.

The first thing you need to do of course is backup your data, but how do you know how bad the sound really is?

The data recovery company Datacent has a page with hard drive sounds that I find way too entertaining.

For each brand of hard drive, you can click the play button and listen to the various sounds that a dying hard drive makes. Then you can click into the manufacturer to get more information on all the problems that brand can have.

So, if you ever want to hear what a Seagate “nasty drilling noise” sounds like, now you can know before finding out the hard way.

(Photo by jon_a_ross)

Since I’ve done quite a few Mac posts lately, I thought I’d throw something out for my awesome Windows users (don’t worry Windows faithful, I have even more coming soon).

A while ago Mozy released their version 2.0 software, but for Windows only (the Mac version will be out later in 2010).  I thought I’d take a look and see what is new/improved.

Now Prettier

Mozy has improved the UI somewhat.  The fonts and the buttons are a bit bigger and easier to read.  It’s still not the most beautiful UI in the world, but I guess with online backup software, the important part is what happens on the server, not on your computer.

Now Faster?

Mozy claims that Mozy 2.0 is “up to” 25% faster at transferring files to their servers.  I don’t really have a way to empirically test this, but I will take their word for it that they’ve made client-side improvements to speed things up.  It’ll be interesting to see if the Mac version has similar speed increases.

Since slow uploads can be one of the biggest issues with online backup, anything they can do to speed things up is great.

Local and Online Backup

Whenever someone asks if they should go with local backup or online backup, my answer is always “Yes”.  In other words, you want to have your critical files in as many places as you can, both locally and offsite.

The biggest new feature of Mozy 2.0 is what they are calling “2xProtect”.  This new feature is sort of like what CrashPlan does.  In addition to backing up your files online, you can also back them up to a local drive. A very welcome addition.

I had a bunch of screenshots of 2.0 ready to go for this article, but my VMWare Windows install has just started going crazy so I will post them later.

If you want to check out Mozy 2.0, it is free for 2 Gigs of backup, or $4.95 a month for the Unlimited Home version.  There is also a Pro version for businesses.

In the meantime, any Windows users want to chime in on the 2.0 upgrade?  Do you find it is actually faster?  Any general experiences with Mozy pro or con? Leave a note in the comments.

As many people know, I am a big believer in a multi-pronged approach to backing up your data.

Yes I am a fan of online backup, but it is good to have your backup local as well. You can never have your important data in too many locations.

Most people, myself included, start out with a cheap external hard drive that they picked up at Costco or wherever, but if you want to take things to the next level, a popular choice is the Drobo.

A Drobo Is Not A Hard Drive

How is a Drobo different from an external drive? Well, to start with, a Drobo isn’t a drive at all. You can think of it as a container that you put hard drives into.

What you do is pick up some good quality hard drives (for example, some 2TB Western Digitals), and put them into the Drobo.

The Drobo will then mirror your data on all the drives, so that if one drive fails (as they often do), your data will be safe on the other drives. You can just swap out the bad drive and put in a new one. You can expand your storage by just adding new drives.

Different Drobos For Different Jobs

There are five different models of Drobos. I’m only going to bother mentioning three of them because frankly, the DroboPro and DroboElite are just crazy expensive.

• Drobo: The original Drobo can take up to four hard drives for up to 16TB of storage. It can connect to your computer with FireWire 800 or USB 2.0
• Drobo S: The next model up is the Drobo S, which has increased speed, hard drive bays, and can connect to your computer with FireWire, USB, or eSATA (if you don’t know what that is, you don’t need it). The Drobo S can survive two hard drives failing at the same time and has “self healing technology”, which just means that it is constantly checking your drives and flags bad areas
• Drobo FS: Drobo FS is built for file sharing. It has a Gigabit network port and will attach (obviously) to a network. It has five hard drive bays and has the same dual drive failure and self-healing technology as the Drobo S

Things To Know

There are some things that you should be aware of if you are thinking about picking up a Drobo:

• Storage: To accomplish the data mirroring, quite a bit of the hard drive space is taken up as “overhead”. Drobo provides a capacity calculator so you can tell how much actual space you’ll have.
• Noise: Some people report that their Drobo is quite loud, while other people say they can’t hear theirs at all. I don’t know if it is people with different sensitivities, or bad batches, or what. If you have a Drobo, let us know in the comments what your noise situation is like.
• Price: Drobos are definitely more expensive than just picking up an external hard drive (especially since you need to buy drives too), so that may be an issue for some people

If you have a Drobo, or another “RAID-like” solution that goes beyond just an external HD, let us know in the comments how that is going for you.

Many people know that Dropbox is great for syncing up your files between different computers.

The other day I was thinking about how in the pre-Hootsuite days I used Dropbox to sync my TweetDeck groups between machines, and I thought I’d look into some other creative uses that people have come up with.

Here are some of my favorites:

Lifehacker has two great posts about creative Dropbox uses like:

• Putting an encrypted TrueCrypt volume on Dropbox. If you like the idea of putting things in “the cloud” but are worried about security, this is a great solution. You can have your stuff encrypted before it even goes online.
• Using shared folders to simulate a network drive
• Make a customized start page
• Keep all your documents with you and accessible (even on your mobile device)
• Keeping all your passwords synced
• Run portable applications like Firefox and VLC

The Dropbox fan page on Facebook has a thread called “What do you use Dropbox for?” with some suggestions like:

• Synchronize your IM (MSN, AIM, etc.) chat logs
• Have a security camera save images to Dropbox so they can be viewed from anywhere
• Run a website (!) out of the Dropbox folder

MaximumPC has “How to Hack Your Dropbox“, with some tips, my favorite being to catch laptop thieves using a keylogger and Dropbox.

And finally, lets hear from the source itself. Dropbox has a Tips and Tricks wiki with a bunch of ideas, including:

• Sync your Firefox bookmarks
• Sync a USB Drive
• Keep your passwords in sync
• Print to PDF on your Mac
• Remotely print MS Office docs
• Sync your saved Windows games that save in My Games

That should be enough to get you going. Do you have any other awesome Dropbox tips? Let us know in the comments.

A while ago, a reader (Boba Fett to be exact – I guess intergalactic bounty hunters need to back their stuff up too) suggested that amongst the other backup providers that I mention, I should talk about CrashPlan.

Since I know better than to cross the Fett (look what happened to Han), that’s exactly what I will do.

Cross Platform

Being a Mac dude, I appreciate when companies don’t just make software for Windows (though I understand when they do). I was pretty impressed that CrashPlan made their client not just for Windows and Mac, but for Linux and Open Solaris too.

Handles Both Local (For Free!) And Online Backup

One of the decisions people usually make when they think about backing up their computer (if they think about it at all) is whether to back up to an external drive, or whether to back up online.

CrashPlan handles both. The free CrashPlan software will let you automatically back up your stuff to an external USB drive or even to another computer.

The “other computer” part is kind of interesting. Chris over at Solo Technology has taken a clever approach using this.

Now, most of the computers I and family members own tend to have way more hard drive space than we need, so now we’re all hosting each other’s backups.

Here’s what I’ve got setup so far:

• My laptop backs up to my home machine. The backups are fast when both are on at home on the local network. Normally I wouldn’t want backups to be so close to where the machine is at night, but the “key” data on the laptop is also in DropBox so this is acceptable for now (until my little web of backups grows).
• My Home machine backs up to my mother’s machine – 700 miles away.
• Mother backs up to my home machine.
• Father backs up to my home machine.
• Wife is still on Mozy.

As I work on other family member machines I’ll be adding them to the “mesh” as well and continue to aim for geographically diverse options.

It, of course, has an Online Backup service called CrashPlan Central. If you just want to back up one computer it is $4.50/month, or if you want to do the unlimited family thing, it is $8.33/month. If you buy multiple years at once there is a discount.

Get The Party Started

As I’ve written about before, one of the problems with online backup is that the initial backup can take forever to transfer that stuff up to the cloud.

CrashPlan has a pretty clever option where for $125, they’ll send you a 1 TB drive. You can back up your stuff to the drive and mail it back, and they will restore it to your online account in one shot. More details about that here.

“I’m Big On Twitter”

Aside from Boba’s recommendation, I have seen a number of great comments about CrashPlan on Twitter. You can check out a search to see what people say about it.

All in all, CrashPlan looks like a good option if you want to do both offline and online backup. If you have any thoughts/comments/reviews of it, leave a message in the comments!

If you’re a Carbonite online backup customer, they’ve released yet another way to get at your files when away from your computer.  The company has released a Carbonite iPhone App (it works on iPod Touches as well).

From the CEO of Carbonite:

The Carbonite app gives me access to the backed up files from each of my computers, even if the computers are turned off. And I don’t have to be logged into a Wi-Fi connection or lug my laptop with me. It displays my photos, documents, and other important files and allows me to share any of my backed up files with someone else via email, right from the app. It’s fast and super-simple. I’m really proud of this Carbonite app and I hope you all will find it as useful as I do.

Any Carbonite customers want to comment?  Have you tried it out?  Do you see the trend towards getting to your files on a mobile device a useful one?  Let us know in the comments.

Being on the geekier side of the spectrum (as my wife is happy to remind me as I am hooking a Mac Mini up to our TV), I really like hearing about the inner workings of the software that we use. Too often things are dumbed down so much that they aren’t actually saying anything.

SpiderOak, an online backup and sync provider that I mentioned before, has no such problem on their blog.

Take for example their most recent post: Why and How SpiderOak architecture is different than other online storage services: The surprising consequences on database design from our Zero-Knowledge Approach to privacy.  

It goes to great length talking about why they designed the system like they did, and what some of the advantages and disadvantages are. How often do you hear about software companies bringing up their disadvantages?

That said, a surprising benefit is the implications for total service cost. You may have noticed that SpiderOak offers some of the best pricing per gigabyte for online storage available anywhere. There are other factors contributing to this, but it definitely helps that SpiderOak clients handle most of the database work. The server’s role is mostly relegated to data storage and retrieval. This lets us focus on building servers with very dense storage without the need for high speed databases and lots of system memory to run them in. (Although some of those needs reappear for servicing functions like Web-Access and SpiderOak Shares.)

For us, regardless of the advantages and drawbacks of the decisions we made, the choice has always been clear. We set out to build a backup system we ourselves felt comfortable using which is why zero-knowledge privacy was always the right path for us.

The post is a good read and gives the impression (hopefully true) that SpiderOak knows what they are doing.

Anyone else have any geeky software company blog posts they want to share? Let us know in the comments.

OK, this has been out for quite a while. I realize that. However, I just had laser eye surgery and have been down for the count for a little while so you’ll have to cut me some slack here.

I still want to mention this because Dropbox is one of my favorite services, and their new free iPhone app is very cool.

Here is a blog post where they give a sneak peak of it, and you can get it from iTunes here.

It’s really cool to be able to access your Dropbox files on the go on your iPhone or iPod Touch (it has syncing capabilities for offline but to be honest I have not played with that yet).

Anyone else using it? What other DocumentSnap-ish iPhone apps do you recommend?

If you are a user of Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage service, you have probably come across CloudBerry Explorer, which is a tool for managing your S3 data.

Well, now the team from that product have taken the next step and have a new product in Beta called CloudBerry Online Backup which, not surprisingly, acts as a front-end for Amazon S3.

I personally am a big fan of Amazon S3. Even if you are nervous about storing your data “in the cloud” with some startup company, in the case of S3, its pretty unlikely that Amazon is going anywhere any time soon.

Currently, CloudBerry Backup is Windows-only, and of course an Amazon S3 account is required.

Installing CloudBerry Backup is pretty simple. Once you do you are greeted with a welcome screen.

It has easy to access buttons for doing a Backup and a Restore, and helpfully comes with Backup Plans (what you set up to tell CloudBerry what to backup when) already defined for My Pictures, My Documents, and My Internet Bookmarks.

When you first install, you will be asked to set up your Amazon account.

If you don’t already have an account, they have a link to set one up. I know some less technical users might have a hard time wrapping their head around this step, but with S3 there isn’t really a way around it (that I can think of). CloudBerry does a good job in helping the user along and pointing them where they need to go.

Setting Up Backup

Setting up the backup is pretty easy. They use a wizard system to take you step by step.

The first step is a tree where you can choose the directories you want to back up.

Next you can choose whether you want to backup all files or just certain types (or exclude certain types).

The next step will be good for privacy-conscious people. You can choose to compress or encrypt your files on upload. They have a ton of different options for encryption, which are too many to list here but suffice it to say there are a lot.

You also have the option to purge files (if you choose). You can purge versions of files older than a certain number of days, or only keep the last x versions of a file.

Finally, of course, you can choose the schedule that the backup runs on.

Running The Backup

When you run a backup, you get a progress report (of course), and then once it is done you can check the history, either for all backups, or for each backup plan.

Restoring

Restoring is also done via a wizard. You can bring back the latest version of a file, or bring it back to a certain point in time (great feature), or of course you can also choose it manually.

What’s Next?

Of course, this is a Beta, and CloudBerry is still working on some new features. The first is to create a virtual disk so that your S3 backup looks like a drive on your computer.

They will also be adding estimates for storage costs. This is a great idea. One of the problems with using S3 as backup is you really don’t know for sure how much your backup is going to cost. Sure you can sit there and use Amazon’s calculator, but who wants to do that? If CloudBerry can estimate before uploading, that would be great.

They’ll also be expanding to support Azure and Sun Cloud storage. This is a smart move to not be tied to one provider and give people choice.

So, if you want to check out the CloudBerry Online Backup beta, go here. Anyone else using Amazon S3 for their backup?

Most people know that Carbonite is a good solution for backing up your PC or Mac. However, what a lot of people don’t know is that you can also access your backed-up files on the go.

A while ago, Carbonite rolled out their new Remote File Access feature.

To access it, go the Carbonite homepage. Up at the top right you will see a link for Remote Access.

Once you’re in there, you can see the files have backed up for your computer(s) and you can navigate the tree view.

There are a few limitations to this. A few types of files can’t be accessed or downloaded via remote file access:

• Windows Encrypted Files
• Mac Package Directories (such as the application packages in the Applications folder)
• Files backed up by Carbonite version 2.3 or earlier (if you started backing up with Carbonite in late 2007 then you have 3.0 or higher).

When you’re using online backup, is having remote file access like Carbonite an important feature for you? Or would you prefer a vendor not have it at all?