Google Gears, Popfly, and other interesting things
I’ve got entirely too much to do, but I still find the time to tinker with stuff, read blogs, travel down obsure virtual bunny trails to find various solutions and cool things.
One little post I read today came from Stephen Shankland at CNET News that suggests that Google is working on making Gears (formally Google Gears) work with GMail and Google Calendar. It already works with Docs, though since I don’t use that app too often (until they get the word processor app working decently) I haven’t gotten to play with it much. Essentially, what Gears does is sync your online data for offline use, so if you’re not somewhere with an internet connection, you can still use the data, edit, so forth. I don’t know how this works with syncronizing the data if multiple people have access to one document however, but eventually (3rd quarter, 2009) I’ll have some time to play with these and do more in-depth research.
Gears is also going to be bundled with Wordpress 2.6, so after lunch there is a good chance you could read my blog offline (why’d anybody do that?: )
Popfly, at www.popfly.com, is something that i just came across the other day. It seems that it’s a browser editor that will allow someone to create mashups, little games, and what looks like a reduced version of a webpage (think Google Apps web-page creator, Google Page Creator). In any case, though it offers very limited content and so forth, it is built so that anybody can create something, not just a code monkey. At least that’s what it sort of looks like. I’ll try this out in the next few weeks and see if I can produce a couple little games for the kids to play, and put up a site for that.
I did allude to other interesting things, didn’t I…well, work becons, and I’ll have to do that in a bit.
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.
The Online Experiment
So I finished up this semester using primarily Google Apps. The experience has left me with two separate critiques.
First, Google Notebook is very handy. I was relatively impressed on how easy it was to use, to grab snippets online and import them into the notebook, and to do some light cross referencing. It made it very convenient to keep a working document going between home and work without getting into doing a lot of change revisions and trying to keep those straight. I wouldn’t recommend Notebook for anything that is cross reference intensive, such as programming and using it to lay out modules and code snippets. For something like that, I’d still recommend using something commercial such as MS OneNote.
Second, using Google docs for making word documents, I was not entirely impressed with. Mainly, it’s the formatting. It is relatively impossible to format a multi page document with formatting rules such as APA. Even importing a formatted document to use as a template lost its formatting altogether. Now, using Google docs for basic spreadsheet and slideshow presentations, it’s easy to format and translates well into other formats, such as the MS Office formatting.
Now, I talked about a site called ThinkFree earlier, how it is a web-based Office suite that you can either download and use as a stand alone office suite, or use purely in a web browser. I have to admit that I have yet to use this. I can say that along the same lines, there is a site called Ulteo that offers the same thing. It has the ability to create documents in a web browser, gives you a 1GB storage area to store documents, so forth. The big difference is that this is a port of OpenOffice, another free office suite that is the forerunner of StarOffice (now is free through Sun or through using the Google Pack download). Why I mention Ulteo is that I am very familiar with OpenOffice, I have been using it for years. It will open any MS Office document, as well as any of a multitude of other office suite formats.
The goal here, to show you that you don’t need to spend 750 bucks on an office suite when there are many others free to use, to download, and now, some you don’t even have to download at all, just create a login and use away…
