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SpiderOak

Susie Ochs — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:50:51 -0500

SpiderOak is flexible enough to back up anything, to share files easily with your friends, and to sync files between Mac, Windows, and Linux machines. It installs as an actual application, but it’s Flash-based, so if you use it on two or more platforms, the experience will be the same.

You can back up as many computers, external hard drives, and network volumes and servers to your SpiderOak account as you want. The other services we tested don’t allow you to back up network volumes, but since SpiderOak sells storage in 100GB increments, you’re encouraged to back up as much as possible. You select the files and folders to back up in the Back Up tab of the SpiderOak app, or you can just click the checkbox for a preset category, including Dekstop, Documents, Email, Movies, Music, and Pictures. The preferences let you exclude files and folders by wildcard (filenames including *.zip, for example) or exclude files based on their size or age.

The Backup tab lets you select categories (to the left) or specific folders to back up.

Once files are backed up to your SpiderOak network, they appear in the View tab, where you can browse the folder structure for each of your backed-up devices. Select a folder to highlight the Changelog and Merge buttons. Merge does a one-time merge of all the files in any two folders on your SpiderOak network. The Download button restores your selected files to a location you specify in the preferences.

Your files are encrypted with a combination of 2,048-byte RSA and 256-bit AES and compressed, so you’re not paying for more storage space than you need. When you change a file, SpiderOak only saves the changes, so the data blocks for the parts of your file that didn’t change aren’t backed up again. And if you have a file on two machines and back up both to your SpiderOak network, the file will appear in both machines’ View list, even though it’s only stored on SpiderOak’s server once. You still see all versions of your files under the View tab, and clicking a file with more than one version displays the date each was updated, so you can find the one you need.

SpiderOak keeps all versions of your files, in case you want to restore an older one.

Share sets, which are set up in the Share tab, make chosen files and folders in your SpiderOak network available to anyone via their Web browser. You choose a Share ID and Room Key, which are combined into a URL you give to friends. And the Sync tab lets you set up Sync sets, choosing two folders in your SpiderOak network that will always stay in sync on the local machines. We used one Sync set to keep our ~/Documents/Receipts folder synced between our home iMac and work laptop, or you could sync a local folder to an external hard drive.

SpiderOak even encrypts your encryption key. The company doesn’t know your password, although you can set up a hint. SpiderOak employees can never access your data—and if you forget your password completely, neither can you.

This review is part of a larger feature which compares five different online backup services.

Dropbox

Susie Ochs — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:27:43 -0500

Kiss those USB flash drives goodbye.

Dropbox is the mayor of Sync Town, working like iDisk but more reliably. And since anyone can have a 2GB account for free, there’s no reason not to try it out. Paid accounts are $50 a year for 50GB of storage and $100 a year for 100GB, so you might decide not to back up your entire hard drive. But the sync and sharing services are the whole point.

Installing the Dropbox client puts a new folder called Dropbox into your user folder, and any files you put in that folder are synced to Dropbox’s servers. You can access those files through a browser by logging in to GetDropbox.com. You can also install Dropbox on your other computers (even Windows and Linux machines), associate them with your existing Dropbox account, and access your files from there. It’s meant to replace clunkier methods, such as emailing files to yourself or carting them around on USB flash drives.

Your Dropbox lives in your User folder and acts like any other folder in your Finder. We added ours to our sidebar for extra convenience.

Dropbox syncs your files instantaneously—we stuck five JPEGs in ~/Dropbox/Photos, and they appeared in our list of synced files on GetDropbox.com within 10 seconds. Your Dropbox folder contains folders called Public and Photos by default. You can share files in the Public folder with friends (even if they don’t use Dropbox) by emailing them a public URL. To get it, just view your Public folder at GetDropbox.com, click the file you want to share, and choose Copy Public URL from the contextual menu. You can email the link or paste it into an IM chat, and your recipient can view or download the file in their browser.

Drag some photos into the Photos folder within Dropbox, and Dropbox creates an online gallery. It’s not as attractive as MobileMe’s online galleries, but it’s an easy way to share photos online—just email friends the link to the gallery or right-click any photo and choose Copy Link Location to get links to specific pictures.

You can also set up Shared folders from which other Dropbox users can upload and download files. You invite friends by email address, and they’re required to sign up for Dropbox accounts. And if they don’t want to install the Dropbox client on their computers, they can stick to the Web interface only. Referring friends to Dropbox gets you each 250MB of extra free storage; grab your referral link from GetDropbox.com > Account > Referral Status. You can earn up to 3GB of free space from referrals. Joining other people’s Shared folders does affect your quota, since the files in that folder now show up in your Dropbox as well.

Any photos you add to Dropbox's Photos folder also appear in an online gallery.

In our tests, Dropbox was smooth and stable. And it’s convenient: We added the Dropbox folder to our Finder window’s sidebar, plus put an alias on our Desktop. Status updates appear as Growl notifications, or you can see them by clicking the menubar icon.

We especially liked how Dropbox deals with conflicts. If two users are working on the same file, whoever uploads it last “wins,” but the “losing” file is synced to Dropbox and time-stamped with the name of the computer that did the edit, so you can figure out which version you want. And we loved browsing our files on our iPhone: Head to m.getdropbox.com on your device, and log in to view recent Dropbox activity, browse your files, and view images and documents right in Mobile Safari.

This review is part of a larger feature which compares five different online backup services.

Carbonite

Susie Ochs — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:56:14 -0500

External and network drives are Carbonite's Kryptonite.

Similar to Backblaze, Carbonite lives in your System Preferences, with an icon in the menubar for checking backup status, pausing a backup for 24 hours, or launching the System Preference. By default, Carbonite backs up your whole hard drive (excluding applications, operating system files, and temporary files, just like the other services reviewed here), but the file browser is clear and easy to understand, making it a snap to assemble a custom backup set.

Carbonite excludes any file over 4GB, as well as any video file by default, but you can add them to your backup set manually. You can’t back up external drives or network volumes. You get unlimited storage, though, so go ahead and back up the entire 4TB in your Mac Pro that we’re so jealous of.

If you click the Automatically Manage Backups button, Carbonite backs up your whole hard drive. Or you can manually select your backup set, as we're doing here.

Once the initial backup is done, Carbonite keeps an eye on things and backs up changes automatically. If you need to free up system resources, you can pause Carbonite, which stops the uploads but keeps monitoring your drive for changes, or you can disable the
app, which stops it completely. But we didn’t notice any lag or system sluggishness on our 2.4GHz MacBook Pro while Carbonite was doing its thing.

To restore backed-up files, just click the Restore tab in Carbonite, choose which files to restore and where you want them saved, to their original locations or anywhere else you like. Each Carbonite subscription is tied to one computer (you can purchase subscriptions for additional computers using your same log-in). You can transfer your subscription to a new Mac by logging in to Carbonite.com, and clicking Restore. This walks you through installing Carbonite on the new machine, and the app starts in Recover Mode, which freezes the backup part so that Carbonite doesn’t think all your files are missing because you erased them. You can’t change your backup sets during that time, but when you’re done restoring, you just change the main Carbonite status from Recover Mode to Enabled, and your backups resume. A handy Restore Assistant can even copy all the files from your Carbonite backup to an existing or new user account on your new Mac.

Click Get Info when browsing your files under the Restore tab to see more about the file.

Carbonite has Remote Access to let you view and download your files from a browser, but we had trouble getting it to work. Your files are supposed to be available soon after they’re backed up, but ours didn’t appear. Carbonite.com said that new users might need to wait 24 hours for Remote Access to kick in, but several days later, we still had nothing.

Backed-up files you delete from your Mac are removed from your Carbonite backup after 30 days. And if you tell Carbonite to stop backing up a particular file, it’ll hold on to it an extra 72 hours, in case you change your mind. The service doesn’t support versioning, only keeping the most recent iteration of any file. And you can’t schedule backups, although the company plans to add that function in the future.

This review is part of a larger feature which compares five different online backup services.

Backblaze

Susie Ochs — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:22:51 -0500

Thorough backups with flexible restore options.

Set-it-and-forget-it Backblaze really wants to back up your entire hard drive, although you can exclude anything you want. It automatically excludes applications, disk images, the operating system, and temporary files, both according to where they are located (nothing in the Applications or Library folders, for example) and what their file extension is (no .log, .iso, .exe, and others). You can’t include anything that Backblaze excludes by default, but you can expand the list of exclusions. Backblaze will never back up a file larger than 4000MB, but you can nudge that ceiling down.

Backblaze lives in your System Preferences, with a status/shortcut icon in the menubar. Its Settings window has a slider where you can throttle the backup speed, request a reminder if you haven’t backed up in a certain number of days, and view a log showing everything scheduled for backup, plus a list of recent activity. To restore, you log in online, where you can browse your backed-up files and request a ZIP file to download (you get an email when it’s ready), a DVD mailed to you (4.2GB max, and you’ll pay a whopping $99 for it, including overnight FedEx), or get your files on a USB hard drive (500GB max, $189, also including overnight FedEx). Four weeks worth of changes are included, and you just “roll back” the date in a drop-down menu to find older versions of files. Backblaze even dates the files in the browser, which is a huge help.

Backblaze defaults to backing up all your files, but you can exclude certain folders or file extensions here.

Files you delete from your Mac are deleted from Backblaze after 30 days. You can back up external drives (except for Time Machine drives), but as with Mozy, be sure to reattach the drive within 30 days of removal, or Backblaze will think you deleted the “missing” files and trash them from your backup. You can’t back up network volumes, although it did offer to back up our iDisk, since that appears on our Mac as a local volume and then is synced periodically to MobileMe’s servers. (Which is why we, naturally, declined to back up iDisk.)

Your data is kept safe on Backblaze by 128-bit AES encryption throughout its encoding, transfer, and storage, in a secure storage facility with biometric security, a raised floor on seismic pedestals, and other cool-sounding stuff. In the Settings you can opt to add a personal encryption key, but Backblaze doesn’t have a copy, so you can’t ever lose it, or no one will be able to recover your data.

After you choose a set of files to restore, Backblaze prepares a ZIP archive and emails you a link when it's ready to download.

We liked Backblaze’s thoroughness and the ability to restore our backed-up files to any computer. If you only want to back up a few folders, the interface is a little trickier than Carbonite’s (see facing page), since you need to exclude folders from the default set. Carbonite lets you start with an empty backup set and then add folders. And Backblaze won’t let you totally exclude your main Macintosh HD volume, so if you only want to back up your external drive and not your main one, you’re out of luck.

This review is part of a larger feature which compares five different online backup services.

DV on DVD? (The Extra D Is for Don’t)

Scott Rose — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:04:00 -0500

I backed up a whole bunch of DV files to a data DVD. But when I play those DV files from my external DVD drive, they hiccup and skip as if they’re missing frames. But when I copy the DV files back to my hard drive, they play just fine, with no dropped frames after all. Any ideas.

For best results, always play your uncompressed DV files from a hard drive. Optical drives are slower than hard drives, so it’s not surprising that your video files are skipping when you’re playing them off your external DVD drive.

DV video files are extremely high-quality, uncompressed video files that demand to be played back at approximately 4.5MB per second, which is too fast for current optical drives to read smoothly. The fastest DVD drives available today can read data from DVDs at approximately 2.7MB per second.

So you may be wondering why playing a regular DVD movie in your DVD drive plays back just fine. That’s because a DVD movie typically uses lower-quality, compressed MPEG-2 files, which are smaller and less demanding.

A Neat Hard Drive Is A Happy Hard Drive

Eugene Robinson — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 18:10:28 -0500

Inspired by review editor Roman Loyola’s dogged insistence on every bit of technology lasting as long as physically possible, I’ve recently decided to resist the blandishments of all new gear and get my trusty PowerBook G4 to last as long technologically possible. Or, however long I can take it before I break down and yield to the KoolAid consumed in these regions every time Apple turns on the klieg lights.

To do that it’s clear that I need to do that which I most love doing: being a degenerate, paper shuffling neat freak. I don’t require things be clean. In fact I have very little interest in this, as the sticky mung that’s accumulated on the lapper will attest to. I just want to be able to find it [stuff, shoes, car keys] when I need to. And I need the desktop to look ordered. And I need it to work well and to know that I’ve not got stuff cluttering up the drive because I’ve slacked on the kind of mental maintenance neat freaks delight in.

So I hit up WhatSize 10.3.92 so I can quickly ferret out that which is slowing me down. I find which files are hogging up the most space and systematically delete all my abortive attempts at iMovie genius, all of my attempts at iPhoto genius and all of my genius literary attempts at genius. I get the 8 gig buffer I need to return my machine to semi-optimal functioning.

On my way to a newer, neater, thinner me.

I then use Xslimmer to de-fatify some of my heavier duty apps. The demo version is free. This thins out big apps where it’s clear I don’t need all of what’s in there. Total elapsed time now 30 minutes.

I delete a few other things, back up all of what’s left [yes, I have learned], empty trash, restart and yes, breathe a sigh of relief because you see, laptop neatness is once again MINE.

Prevent Hard-Drive Crashes

Tom Geller — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:33:58 -0500

Every columnist has written about their catastrophic hard-drive crash, so I won't bore you with the details of the one I had last week. Suffice it to say I'm doing fine, thanks for asking. I also won't harangue you about making (and testing!) regular backups - you know that already, right? (I bet Mac|Life senior editor Eugene Robinson still hasn't gotten over his loss.)

Instead, I'm going to tell you about something that could have saved my tuchus at the expense of ten minutes per month of (unattended!) Mac time. To wit: Disk Utility - it's included in Mac OS X, installed by default in /Applications/Utilities.

In particular, you should make it a monthly practice to run the Verify Disk command in Disk Utility. If it finds problems, you may have to startup from an external disk to repair them. The Mac OS X installation CD or DVD that came with your Mac functions nicely for this, since it includes both Disk Utility and the software your Mac needs to boot up. But be warned: This "repair" might destroy some files, so try to do a backup first. (Unfortunately, the catalog file problem I had returned errors when I tried to do a full backup. Woe!)

Also, run Disk Utility at the first sign of anything odd, like the existence of files you can't delete or Finder changes that mysteriously don't "take".

The Lessons:

1. Backup regularly, like MacLife.com's smug webmaster, Rik Myslewski.

2. Run Disk Utility regularly, or immediately if you notice anything odd.

3. Accept that all life is transient, and data doubly so.

Good luck!

Ah, the sign of success! What the results of Verify Disk should look like.

Check out more from Tom Geller on his website, TomGeller.com.