Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

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?

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).

One company that I have been meaning to write about for quite some time is SpiderOak, which is an online backup and sync provider I have been hearing a lot of good things about.

Cross Platform

While other online backup providers have been Windows-only until just recently, SpiderOak has been cross platform right from the start. They have clients for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware).

In addition, they provide remote access over the web so you can get at your files from any web device.

What is ‘Zero Knowledge?’

It goes without saying (or does it) that an online backup company needs to have security in mind.

SpiderOak takes this to the next level by having a zero-knowledge policy. What does this mean? Aside from strong encryption, which they have, the company never stores or sees your password or encryption keys.

One of their FAQs is “could you read a user’s data if forced at gunpoint?” and the answer (they say) is no.

This is a big benefit if you are concerned about privacy of online backups, but of course it does have one downside. If you forget your password, you are completely and totally on your own. The company can’t help you, because they don’t know your password in the first place. (You can set a password hint, so I strongly recommend setting a good one!).

Not just backup

SpiderOak doesn’t limit itself to just online backup. They are in the sync-ing game too. If you are familiar with Dropbox, it is the same sort of deal. You can sync files across multiple machines automatically, and do it cross-platform between Mac, Windows, and Linux as well.

Pricing

The pricing is tiered. The first 2 Gigs are free, which is great if you don’t have too much to store. After that, pricing is in 100 Gig increments. It’s $10/month for the first 100 GB, and then $10/month additional for each 100 GB on top of that.

They have yearly discounts so if you buy a full year, it is $100.

Sync-ing wise, SpiderOak is cheaper than DropBox which is also free up to 2GB, but then $9.99/month for 50 GB and $19.99/month for 100 GB.

Geeks Make The World Go Around

One thing I like about SpiderOak is that you get the sense that it is run by people who really care about making good software and giving back to the software community. It sounds cheesy, but I love the fact that they have an “Engineering Matters” section of their website that describes what is going on in techie terms, and that they give back tools and code to the open source community.

If you are looking for online backup or syncing software, you definitely want to make sure SpiderOak is one of the ones you look at.

According to the Mozy blog, the online backup company has just updated their Mac client.

The biggest functionality that they have added is the ability to exclude types of files from your backup. Seems like pretty critical functionality for a backup client but hey, who am I to judge?

Here’s a list of the enhancements in the 1.4 Mac client:

• Improved overall performance and stability for file selections and backups
• Added menu option to automate the collection of log files
• Moved preferences to global System Preferences
• Improved sorting for Files and Folders in Configuration window
• Improved the behavior of saving and canceling in Configuration window
• Added a new icon to indicate partially backed up folders in Configuration window
• Added menu item to start a backup from Configuration window
• Added ability to create Backup Sets to exclude files
• Added ability to sort by column in the Backup Set Editor window
• Updated online guides
• Added menu item to send product feedback or suggestions
• Improved appearance of menu bar icons and other graphics
• Improved speed of file preparation
• Added ability to use the escape (ESC) key to close the Configuration window

Has anyone upgraded to the new client yet? Any issues?

Did you know that datacenters worldwide use up as much energy as Sweden?

Neither did I, but it is one of the many things I learned from this awesome post by Mozy from a few weeks ago where they put together a bunch of stats to show how much data a petabyte actually is. Awesome!

How Much Is A Petabyte? – Mozy.com  

Photo by technicool

Recently, Om Malik wrote a post called The Ugly Truth About Broadband: Upload Speeds.

The article is about slow upload speeds in general – you can have the fastest download speeds in the world, but for many tasks that involve uploading, even our broadband is excruciatingly slow.

One of the things Om wanted to do was sync up his music collection using DropBox and backup his whole computer using Mozy.

It’s been about four days since I set everything up, and the results are dismal. Only 1 percent of my hard drive is backed up and less than 15 percent of my music has been uploaded.

The slowness of uploading to online backup services is something that is not really talked about a lot, but it is an issue at least initially.

More interesting to me are the comments on that post. In particular, people have come up with strategies to deal with the time it takes to upload everything.

When I first started with Mozy, I didn’t back-up my whole drive at once. I started with the most critical folders, and added a new one to the upload every day until it was all up. Then after almost all of it was up, I finally set it to back-up everything. Not a big issue

Personally, I just let it run and back up everything for a number of days, but I probably should have done something like that.

If you use online backup, did you just do the whole thing at once? Or did you do a hack like that commenter? Any good online backup tips? Leave them in the comments!

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:

Mozy

• Salt Lake City
• Dublin
• (likely other EMC data centers)

Carbonite

• 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

SpiderOak

• Chicago

Like I said, this list is likely incomplete. If you have any additions or modifications, leave a comment below.

Where is your data?

In the last few weeks, two online backup services, HP Upline and Yahoo Briefcase have both announced that they are closing.

While some have said that this is a sign that the online backup market is not sustainable, both Mozy and Carbonite have been clever and used it as an opportunity .

Nate from Mozy has posted a blog post entitled “Hey Upline Users, We Love You!” giving a discount code to ex-Upline users.

Dave Friend, co-founder and CEO of Carbonite, has posted two blog posts: one on Yahoo Briefcase and one on HP Upline, discussing the decision to close both.

By the way, I really appreciate the fact that Dave personally blogs and shares his insight. It’s great.

What do you think, is Upline and Briefcase a sign of things to come, or is it just separating the wheat from the chaff?