Amazon Kindle DX Goes International
January 19, 2010
Back in October, Amazon released the International Wireless version of their blockbuster Kindle, but it was only the 6″ version. The larger DX was still just for the US Market.
Well, as of January 19, 2010, the Amazon Kindle DX is now available in a Global Wireless version.
The Kindle DX is 9.7″ and holds 3,500 books.
Before ordering, make sure you check the Kindle DX page and see what restrictions (if any) there are for your country and where there is coverage. You can also compare it to the Kindle and see which one is right for you.
If you order a DX outside of the US, let us know how it works in your country!
CloudBerry Online Backup Uses Amazon S3 (And More Later)
September 22, 2009
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?
Amazon Web Services Eliminates Huge Upload/Download Times With Import/Export
August 27, 2009
As we all know, one issue with doing online backup is if you have a huge amount of data to upload or download, it can take a lonnnnnnnnng time to upload or download.
Amazon has a clever solution to take care of this problem for you. You can ship them a hard drive and have the data loaded into S3.
How it works is that you put your data on a compatible storage device, then you email them. They’ll email you back with a unique identifier that you put on the device. Once you get that, you ship the device off to them. They’ll load the data and ship it back.
This makes a lot of sense if you are someone who has a ton of data to upload for the first time, has to do extremely large backups, or has a DR situation and can’t wait days and days to download your backup.
How Much Does It Cost?
Obviously this is not free. Amazon charges $80 per device, and $2.49 per data loading hour.
Because of this cost, you obviously have to have a certain amount of data to make it worth it. To that end, Amazon has an Import/Export Calculator to compare the cost of using the service vs. just uploading it.
If you had a large amount of data would you use this? Do you think other online backup providers are going to start offering this? (If they don’t already).
Do You Know Where Your Online Backup Is?
April 9, 2009
Recently I came across this tweet from Ross L. Kodner and he brought up a good point – one of the benefits of an online backup is having your data safe and sound.
If you live in a city that is prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, etc., it kind of defeats the purpose to have your online backup residing in the same city as you.
To that end, I have put this list together of where common online backup vendors have their data centers. Not surprisingly, none of them were willing to give this information on request so this is mainly pieced together from some Google-fu. Therefore, I can’t 100% say for sure that it is accurate, but you get the general idea.
Here is the list:
- Salt Lake City
- Dublin
- (likely other EMC data centers)
- Boston
- Beijing
Jungle Disk (S3)/Dropbox
Jungle Disk and Dropbox both use Amazon’s S3 service. While Amazon generally does not disclose where their data centers are, the following are the edge locations for CloudFront, their CDN, so it stands to reason that S3 data is stored there too.
United States
- Ashburn, VA
- Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
- Los Angeles, CA
- Miami, FL
- Newark, NJ
- Palo Alto, CA
- Seattle, WA
- St. Louis, MO
Europe
- Amsterdam
- Frankfurt
- Dublin
- London
Asia
- Hong Kong
- Tokyo
Jungle Disk (Rackspace)
Since Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace, they have started offering storage in Rackspace’s data center too.
- Grapevine, TX
- London
- Hong Kong
- Chicago
Like I said, this list is likely incomplete. If you have any additions or modifications, leave a comment below.
Where is your data?
Going For A Paperless Life
March 23, 2009
Mike Elgan over at Computerworld has written a pretty good article about taking the paperless concept out of the office and into his every day life.
It’s a good overview of how he does it and the tools that he uses. There are some DocumentSnap favorites in there.
As a kind of “lifestyle experiment,” I’ve been trying to completely eliminate paper as a data storage medium for the past six months. I’ve gotten rid of most check-based bill paying, moved most of my reading to digital forms, nearly stopped paper mail from coming to my house, eliminated paper records and nearly purged all paper-based files. I’ve gotten into the habit of literally photographing anything with words on it that I might want to remember later, and uploading them on a service I’m going to tell you about.
I’m now ready to declare my experiment a success.
The biggest upside to going paperless is that finding information is more like a Google search and less like a scavenger hunt. But I’m also a lot more productive and waste a lot less time, and my life is a lot less cluttered.
The tools that the author uses to take his life paperless are Evernote, Shoeboxed, Earth Class Mail, reQall (that one is new to me), and of course the Amazon Kindle.
Great article. Check it out here.
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