Interactive Whiteboard
My buddy Van told me about this…and I see some fun applications with this, especially with kids…imagine a white board that the kids could actually write on the walls with…or turning the home theater system into an interactive gaming area as well. Hell, even with the low budget office, this could really be an advantageous tool to have for staff meetings, R&D meetings, and just general brainstorming…
Procrastination about backing up
Backing up your computers, it is an important thing. In business, keeping backups is not only important, but in many cases mandated by law, with Acts such as the Sarbanes Oxley and HIPIAA. At home, many of us don’t think about it until just after a hard drive fails, and we kick ourselves. Then come the stages of regret and anger because we just lost 5 years of photo’s, your 50 page thesis, or just all your passwords that you couldn’t remember for email, banking, and so forth.
Many of us know that we could automate backups on our home computers, but since it takes more than 5 minutes of reading, and you’re not “a computer expert”, you won’t do it. Even just doing a copy and paste from your my Documents folder to a DVD and letting windows just burn it for you is just too manual of a process. Besides, your computer is only a year old, or just got it last week. Nothing could happen.
Well, like I’ve blogged about before, computers are not infallible devices. They will crap out on you when you need them the most, and more importantly, will die in a way that you will have no way of recovering your data.
In any case, backing up your data, whether it be for a home business/office, or just personal stuff such as pictures and documents, one critical part of backing up is to get the backup off site. This is probably the single most overlooked task that anybody, to include businesses, do. What good is your backup going to do if it was burnt up along with the rest of your house?
I’m going to go over a few online backup solutions. It doesn’t completely solve all your problems, some won’t offer automated backups for instance. Some cost more than others. I will outline the ones that I have researched, prioritizing by first the free ones, how much space you get, how you can get access to your files, and finally but not least important, security.
The first one I will detail, and my personal favorite, is Mozy. For starters, you get 2GB free. It does require downloading an application that, but it can be scheduled out to run backups. For the Mozy Home, it also supports both PC and Mac, which is a plus for any Mac user. You can also get what they call Unlimited backups for $4.95 per computer. If unlimited is truely that, then that’s a great deal. Even if it only goes to 25, 50, or 100GB, that is still one hell of a deal. Now, with Mozy, you can backup 3 different ways. First, you can use the software to replace backed up documents, you can order a DVD with your information on there, or there is a web interface where you can peruse the directory structure of your backup and choose which file(s) you need to restore. Mozy also offers a very tight security package, ensuring that your data is safe both on the server and while being transmitted from your computer to their servers.
Next on the list is XDrive. I have yet to try this out, as with the rest of them in this roundup, but this will be my next on the list to try. I have to admit, the reason I haven’t tried XDrive out is because it’s owned by AOL, and I just haven’t liked them in 15 years….anyways. XDrive offers 5GB of free storage, and 50GB of storage if you want to pay $9.95/month. 5GB is not a bad deal for free. From the looks of it, it too requires a downloaded application, what looks to be in the form of a toolbar. It also integrates into your My Computer folder directory, so that your XDrive will also appear as a regular drive, allowing you to drag/drop files at your leisure. It also seems that you can schedule your backups as well, so there is relatively little interaction (remembering) on your part. On top of having the folder view in My Computer, it also seems to have a WebDAV, or web interface, so that you can access your files from another computer. It seems that this product is supported by Windows only however. The site says that there is encryption, but to what extent, I cannot report on.
OmniDrive is third on my list. Omnidrive seems really geared towards the mobile person. For starters, you get a 1GB storage area for free, with 5GB of bandwidth per month. With the free account, however, you do not get web access or the ability to transfer data through an SSL link (meaning secure link). For paid space, you can get 10, 25 and 50GB services that are billed annually. Though the service is a little costly for the space, they do offer other services such as a web version of Word and Excel so you can edit files on the fly, and a web based photo editor. From a disaster recovery standpoint, this is a decent service because it gives you twice the bandwidth than your file storage, for instance, you get the 10GB of file storage, you will get 20GB of bandwidth a month. If you are sharing your files however, others will eat into that bandwidth, so that is something to take into consideration. It also supports both Windows and Mac clients, and they do offer specialized packages larger than 50GB if you contact them.
AllMyData is another strong contender. They offer only a 1GB of free storage, but again the backups can be scheduled out. There is the same types of interfaces and backup methods that both Mozy and XDrive share, so again making it very versatile. It offers encryption as well, and has a great support page that rivals the Mozy site, not geared towards making you feel better about using their service but instead actually giving hard answers to tough questions. For an unlimited storage, it is slightly more expensive than Mozy by a few cents, being $4.99/month per computer. From all the documentation on the site, they too make Unlimited sound like just that, no limit. Though as of right now, it only supports Windows, the site does specify that they will have a Mac client out soon.
Diino is an online backup system that seems to try and offer all the bells and whistles. I can’t tell from the site if it’s geared towards teen/20-somethings that want to have the ability to share music and files, or if it’s geared towards the traveling business person. The prices and what they offer say the latter, but the layout of the website says the former. Maybe they gear the website to appeal to business travelers who like teenage girls and pink…anyways, enough on the website critique. Diino offers 2GB of free storage, but any other storage levels above that come at a steep cost. The list of offerings above online backup include a photo album, online work space, file sharing, secure email, online music (through the Diino player), web and mobile access, as well as a high bit encryption and the standard upload/download recovery. It seems from the website that this service isn’t so much geared towards the standards backup, but more of a mobile office, or teen with a lot of music to share.
MediaMax seems to be a really decent service. You get 25GB of online storage for free, and for higher levels of service, the pricing is really good. You can get up to a Terabyte of storage for $29.95/month. Not bad. Why is this not at the top of my list you ask? Because, you can upload your 25GB of storage, but for downloading, you only get 1GB a month. For the paid services, you are still limited to 10% of bandwidth of what you’re allocated, meaning that if you did get the Terabyte of storage, you could only download 100GB of data a month. From a disaster recovery standpoint, this is not acceptable, since you will need all your backed up files as soon as possible, not scheduled out over 10-25 months. Like Diino, it seems that MediaMax is geared towards Media, like music and movies, that can be shared about. They do offer a downloaded application that will allow you to schedule your backups, and a web interface to manage your documents as well. The application is in beta however, and only supports Windows 2000 and up clients.
There are plenty of other online backup systems, though the other ones I reviewed such as EZBackup, StrongSpace and BingoDisk are geared more towards the corporate marketplace and come at a price. There are also other solutions, such as using the 5+ GB of storage through GMail and using GSpace or GDrive to store your files as well, though this is not entirely secure, is sometimes problematic in getting files bigger than 10MB back, and I’m not entirely sure if this goes against GMail’s Terms of Service (TOS). In any case, there are options out there. Backing up shouldn’t ever be the last thing on your list, and if you’re a home business owner/operator, it should be one of the first things on your list.
Starting the Online Office
So, I use Google Apps right now for my documents, calendar, planning, and so forth, for OBriNet. I’ve got a list of a hundred things I have to do still, like register my business, apply for a Federal EIN, open a bank account strictly for the business, so forth. The more I start looking into what needs to be done only for the business (not for the client support), I have some work to do still. Most of it is not hard, but as of right now, I’m about $100 in the red on the business books, and I have other stuff I have to do with my regular paycheck (like insulating the attic and Christmas) that I can’t afford to dump many resources into the business right now.
Anyways, on the back-end stuff, I’m using Google Apps for documents. This does leave something to be desired for the most part, but it works enough to do what I need it to do. I was doing a little research into the costs of leasing an online server (Server 2003 preferably) so I could do a cost-benefit analysis (CBA), compared to building out another server, and making it strictly a business server (along with the dedicated internet line, static IP, so forth) so that I could really have an online office. Anyways (again) I found something that could rival, if not beat, Google in the documents department. It’s a site called ThinkFree, and from what I’ve read, it’s just about as good as using the standard MS Office for creating documents, spreadsheets, and Presentations.
One thing I like about this so far (from reading documentation on the website) is that not only can you use this online, but you can download the software for use on your computer. It supports the standard Windows, but also current versions of Apple’s OSX and Linux with a Kernel of 2.2.4 or newer. How can it do this you ask? It’s run solely in Java, which is OS Independent. Nice :)
On top of being able to use the document creation on the site, you can also invite others for collaboration, and store up to 1024MB (known as a GB) of documents as well.
Why am I writing about this? Is it that I just try and find multiple ways of doing the same thing? Yep. Am I just a geek with apparently entirely too much free time? sort of. Most importantly, however, is that my goal is to try and help small businesses with their IT needs without incurring the typical IT and consultant fee’s, which can be great. If I can cut down on the typical expenses such as online backup, online hosting, and software, this could save a single small business a couple of thousand bucks a year. (case in point, I just moved my one single client over to a new online backup routine, which is just more secure and offers more options, saving him 780/yr)
The more I look for ways to help my own small business out in the long run, the more I’m finding ways of cutting costs for other small businesses. Nice
