Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Flawed Backup Solution - Solved

Published
by
admin
on October 23, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I thought I had a good backup system but I still ended up losing 2 weeks worth of assignments.

So what went wrong? Well have a look at by backup solution and see if you can figure out what happened?

  • Images backed up to PicasaWeb - 1 Gig free.
  • My Documents backed up to JungleDisk ~ 50 cents a month.
  • Manual backusp to USB stick.

Now before I tell you what happened lets have a look at my parent’s backup solution:

  • Monthly backups to DVDs.

Their problem was that they stored the DVDs with the laptop so when their laptop was stolen last month so was the backup. This is an important lesson:

  • Don’t store the backup with or on the same machine.

My problem was I started to edit files directly on the USB stick so when I lost it I lost the files that were on it because I didn’t manually copy them back to the computer. This teaches us another valuable lesson:

  • Backups should not rely on manual processes.

and also

  • One way backups often end up becoming two way backups.

So how did I solve my problem and what is my recommendation?

Well online backups are a good idea and also fairly cheap but often inconvinient. My Dad had too much data for online backups. JungleDisk also doesn’t work very well with external drives.

So after looking around I found Allways Sync which can automatically detect when USB drives are plugged in and then sync the files that have changed automatically. I’ve been using this solution for the last couple of weeks (in addition to my online backup) and it’s been work fantastically.

Recomended Backup Solution

So here is my recommended backup solution which costs less than $10.

  • Allways Sync configured to automatically synconrise files when a USB drive is connected.
  • A USB stick (currently 1G is less than $10). Put the USB stick on your keyring and then you’ll never be temped to leave it with your laptop/computer.

You could use an external harddrive (currently 1T is less than $200) BUT you will be tempted to leave it with the laptop/computer so I don’t recommend this solution if you can avoid it.

Anyway I hope this article prevents someone else from losing thier data.

TED & other amazing videos

Published
by
admin
on October 10, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I’ve been watching TED videos for almost two years and I thought I had told everyone about them back then. Apparently I didn’t (or less they forgot) and I’ve been suprised by how many people still haven’t seen any of the amazing videos on the site.

TED Talks are short incredabily well produced talks about Technology Education & Design. Every talk is less than 20 minutes and I’ve enjoyed every talk that I’ve watched. Here are some of my favourite TED talks:

New Insights On Poverty

Squatter Cities

Multi Touch Screens

Wii Remote Hacks

Photosynth

If you like TED but want more you might want to Talks@Google which is similar. It use to be hosted on Google Video but has since been moved to YouTube. The Talks@Google are slightly different to TED talks. The biggest differences are that they are longer and more educational. Unlike the TED talks there talks are not done at a conference so they are not quite as polished. They are held primarily for the Google employees and are often more technical than TED talks. That being said they are generally given by the top person in the field so if it is a topic you are interested in then they are worth the time. Because of the specilised nature of the videos I’m not going to recommend a specific video.

Finally if you haven’t watched “The Last Lecture” I highly recommend it.