Crashplan

Whoa, there, let's backup a bit.

Okay, bad pun.

Seriously, though, backup is something everyone should take very seriously and almost no one does. Ironically, the people who should back up the most diligently, i.e., the non-geeks, are the ones who almost never do so.

Backups are painful to do, take time, space, cosmic energy and are no fun. Until your hard drive crashes and you lose all those photos of grandma on the rollercoaster.

Enter Crashplan.

Crashplan

Important pricing information:
Free, as in no money required. Or, as low as $5 p.m., but read the fine print.

You need:
An internet connection, preferably one that's always on while your computer is on. And a suitable lead time for the first backup - if you have lots of data, it could be running (auto) for several days. A local disk is faster but is not an offsite backup.

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Filed under  //   backup   clouds   essential   mac   practical   software   windows  
 

Cloudy thinking

Bumped into this article a week back, on Yale’s delaying its switch to Google Apps. The full article is here (Mashable).

While reading it, it struck me that there’s more to this than meets the eye. Ideological issues? What are we discussing here, whether to invade China? Statements like “was met with concerns and reservations from the faculty and administration. Several felt the decision had been made too hastily and without proper University approval” reeks of an incredible degree of resistance to change. 

A university, in theory, is supposed to be a think tank and a trend setter and a research hot bed, adopting, adapting and espousing the cutting edge. Let’s not forget that the Internet’s daddy, ARPANET itself was created by professorial geeks to link up three universities and a research institute (see Wikipedia) and the world wide web was invented by a professor working as an independent contractor at CERN.

This statement from Yale does not sound like they are keeping the pioneering flag flying. It sounds more like bureaucracy at its very finest.
Filed under  //   clouds   rant   theory  
 

Heads in the clouds? Unfortunately, no.

Looks like I'm not the only one with a poor opinion of CIOs (still CTOs in the Indian context). Here's Marc Benioff of salesforce.com deploring their stick-in-the-mudness:

"My message to them: We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator. Many of them haven’t even made it to Cloud 1—some are still on mainframes. They are working on MVS/CICS, or Lotus Notes, and they have never heard of Cocoa, or even that there is now HTML 5. This is unacceptable. The next generation is here. The iPad that shows us what now is really possible—and that we all need to go faster. Unfortunately, some CIOs would rather retire than go faster."

 I like that last line, so true. Read the full article here.
Filed under  //   clouds   iPad   theory  

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Technology addict, former operations chief, serial entrepreneur, consultant, writer, blogger

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