Backupify.com

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Paul

Backup Cloud ImageThe Cloud is all around us these days.  Mail, contacts, calendars, social networks, music, files, most of it no longer lives on our machines full time.  So, despite the elegance of an Apple solution like Time Machine for local backups, only some of our data is regularly backed up – until now.  Welcome to the Cloud a service that offers to backup all of your tweets, your status updates, your Gmail, and just about any other online services you might currently using.

Sporting the unlikely (but descriptive!) name “Backupify”, there are three basic options:

1, Totally free.  This gives you up to 5 accounts, 2 GB of space, weekly backups, and email-only support.  It’s a good way to just be sure that your stuff is backed up, but if you use Gmail heavily, or you don’t want to lose a whole week’s worth of anything, it’s a bit light.

2, Pro 100 plan.  Basically, fills in all the missing parts of the free plan. Phone support, nightly backup, 20 GB of space, up to 25 accounts, and availability to back up Google Apps for Domains, something that is becoming increasingly popular.  All this for $5/month (and a 30 day trial available.)  This plan is really for serious backup, but for personal/friends/family or small business use.

3, Pro 500 plan.  Same as above, but unlimited space, 8 hour tech support response time, unlimited accounts, and 10 Google apps users included ($3/each add’l).  This plan is really for businesses and enterprise use as it’s $20/month.

Setting up the system took moments—literally.   All you need is the account info for any accounts you want to backup and the faith to give them all to Backupify.  They encrypt login credentials in the cases they need to store them (some of the online services) and use a login token to just authenticate once for others (like when Facebook asks you to give permission to let an app access your Facebook information, they don’t ever see your login credentials.)  Because you’re not backing up things from your desktop, there’s no drain on your resources when they do the backup.  It’s “Cloud to Cloud”, if that’s a term that makes sense.

Backup is done to Amazon’s S3 systems, one of the largest, most reputable storage clouds in the world.  They say to give it 2 or 3 days for the initial backup to be done, and after that the backups are actually sort of browse-able.  I’m waiting for my Facebook backup to finish as I’m curious what browsing Facebook outside Facebook would look like.  I checked my Twitter archive and it’s pretty much unreadable.

I’ve had my Cloud backed up for a week now.  I’ve never had to retrieve anything.  In reality, I probably never will, but it does feel better knowing that I have that safety net if Mark Zuckerberg decides to delete my account on a whim.

Backupify can be found at http://www.backupify.com.

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Pros and Cons of the Types of RAID

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Paul

As we mentioned in the last post, there are three main types of RAID configurations. Below is the breakdown, along with the pros and cons of each.

RAID 1:
RAID 1 is a Mirrored array, which was detailed in our last post. This is essentially when both disks are written to simultaneously, and the two drives are identical to each other.

Pros:  Complete redundancy, only 2 drives required.
Cons:  Slowest RAID configuration, lose 50% of total drive capacity.

RAID 0:
RAID 0 is striped. Striped RAID sets are the polar opposites of Mirrors.  In a Stripe, both drives are written to simultaneously, but data is only written in one place.  The function of the Stripe is to allow double the speed that one could get out of a single hard drive.  The advantages are that a Striped configuration is blindingly fast and you get the full amount of space that you would from two hard drives stuck together.  The major disadvantage is that if either drive dies, the entire RAID set is lost.  Generally, Stripes are used as scratch disks for things like video or graphics editing, where the data is temporary and there’s virtually no issue if it gets lost due to a crash.

Pros:  Fastest RAID configuration, 100% of available drive space available.
Cons: No redundancy (in fact, data is less secure than a single drive as there is now twice the chance for a set failure)

RAID 5:
RAID 5 configurations have long been the providence of very expensive pieces of hardware, often upwards of $5000, and, as a result, inaccessible to the home user. RAID 5 requires a hardware RAID controller, and is built into the device that houses the drives.  In addition, RAID 5 requires at least 3 drives.  Through some very clever programming, a RAID 5 configuration will allow you to only give up about 25% of your drive space to the RAID system and still have complete data redundancy to lose a hard drive.  As an example, let’s say that you have a 4 drive RAID array, and each drive is 1 TB in size.  A RAID 5 array will give you about 3 TB of space available to use, and you can lose any single drive without losing any data!   Often RAID 5 arrays are very large, and are really the only way to have a very large, redundant storage solution. While a server admin might set up a Mirror as the internal server hard drive, the data was generally stored externally on a RAID 5 configuration, giving the setup redundancy and flexibility.

Pros: Medium speed (faster than single hard drives, for sure), redundant, can be very large.
Cons: Expensive.  25-30% of potential drive space unavailable.

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RAID and Beyond

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Paul

The server world has long enjoyed a type of hardware redundancy call RAID for critical data storage.   Now, thanks to fairly recent drops in hardware costs, external RAID devices are easily accessible to the home user.   In these posts, I’d like to detail in very general terms the basic function, usage and costs of a RAID solution for your data.

What is RAID?

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and basically means that thanks to a bit of very clever programming, data can be stored on several disks at the same time.   RAID is about choices and trade-offs, with each type of RAID having advantages and costs.

What kinds of RAID exist?

There are 3 main, standard types of RAID configurations: RAID 1 (“Mirrored”), RAID 0 (also called “Striped”) and RAID 5 (not really known as anything other than RAID 5 for some reason!)  The configuration you choose depends on your intended use and your budget.

Mirrored RAID sets are basically a set of 2 hard drives that are exact, live, instant duplicates of each other.  All data is written to both drives simultaneously, and as a result you can “lose a drive” without losing a bit of data.  Hard drives die—it’s just a question of when—and this is an excellent way to make sure that if a drive dies, you not only don’t lose data but you don’t even have to stop working.  A Mirrored RAID will continue to function (albeit sometimes not smoothly) with one dead member, and when that member is replaced, the Mirror can be rebuilt while the RAID is being used.  This means, in theory, no downtime, in addition to no data loss, and its best use is in anything considered “mission critical.”  These days, that can simply be your desktop and the fact that you don’t want to be down without a machine while your hard drive is replaced—even if you do backups.  The major disadvantage of a Mirrored RAID set is that you lose half the space that the drives would have been in total.  E.g., if you make a Mirror of two 1-Terrabyte drives, you end up with 1 TB of total storage.

That’s a brief summary. Our next few posts will give you the in’s and out’s of RAID, so you can best use it to protect your data.

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MacSupport.com Is There For You. I’m There For You.

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Francis

People call me all the time. I haven’t worked as a consultant in years, yet I still hear from old clients regularly. I started my business by going to people’s homes and businesses. I would introduce myself, learn about them, and learn about their problem. Then I’d fix it. I’d show them exactly how I solved their problem so they could, if inclined, fix it themselves if it ever came up in the future. At the very least, they’d have the knowledge to explain it to another tech. I was there for them, so they always called me back when they needed more help.

Building my network of clients took effort. I had to get work by pitching. Telling stories. I’d tell stories about other clients, I’d tell stories about myself. I’d tell stories about the future, about how technology I was excited about could be useful to them, and where they could be with help. Any help, not just me. I may have named my business “Wizard,” but I don’t know any magic. I’m just good at what I do, and so they called me.

I got involved with a startup, MacSupport.com. MacSupport is there for you in ways I could never be as a consultant. We have techs waiting for you to call. We answer when you email us and we’re there for you on the phone. While we can’t travel and come to your house, we’re instantly beside you, in your computer, showing you how we’re doing what we do.

Our techs are smart and friendly and our customers love us. I’d like to consider that a success. Our problem is, I don’t know how to pitch on the internet. I don’t know how to find enough customers. And since we’re not meeting out clients I don’t know how to go the extra mile that gets them referring us to their friends. A handshake and a smile made a lot of a difference.

I’m trying a few ideas:

1) We haven’t been talking to our current customers enough. We sent them one email on purchase and one in the beginning. When we have them on the phone we play our part well, keep them calm, and teach them enough so they’re not more worried about their situation than we are. They almost always hang up happy. We’re supposed to follow-up in the end, but we haven’t been (miscommunication with the techs). I would like to be better at that.

2) We’re too expensive for the small quick questions. I want to have a free email support option. One or two questions a month free, you can subscribe to a package for more, or you can refer friends for more. (think dropbox)

3) Improve the site’s UX. I can talk about this one more later, we should have screenshots in the next few days.

4) Better email capabilities. I want to be able to say “Just email us at support@macsupport.com” and have our backend system work the way it should, creating account, adding messages to tickets, etc. (Just call, or IM us should work the same way too.)

5) Marketing. We need to figure out how to get more referrers and conversions. We’ve tried traditional press releases, and we constantly tweak our Google adwords. We got nowhere with the press, and the business we do have is from months of continually refining our adwords campaign. I feel like we’re missing something, but I don’t know what.

This is a “review my startup”. I think these are our core problems, but our solutions fall short. I’d like to know what you think.

Thank you for your time.

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FaceTime’s Expansion

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Sara

FaceTime is a nifty little tool for the iPhone 4, taking full advantage of the device’s two camera’s. It turns your phone into, well, into a video phone. Like Skype for mobile devices.  And with iOS 4.1, the app will spread beyond the device.

Right now, users of FaceTime don’t have to make an account, because “calls” are connected to your phone number. This won’t be the default on iPods, iPads, and computers, though. The solution? Rumor has it that the use of FaceTime on other devices will be tied to MobileMe accounts.

Specifics have yet to be seen, although we’ll probably find out when iOS 4.1 emerges. The full article can be found over at AppleInsider.

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iPhone 4 Security Hole

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Sara

As many people know by now, the iPhone 4 has been successfully jailbroken! However, what many people still don’t know about is the security hole that makes the hack possible.

For now, the phone can be jailbroken by going to a website in the Safari browser on the phone, and sliding your finger across the screen. Done. But the inner workings are what’s troubling. You see, by sliding your finger across the screen, you’re downloading a PDF with executable code. And there’s no warning to let you know that you’re about to download a file that, in a different situation, could be programmed to crash your phone or steal countless amounts of personal data from it.

Ironically, for now the only way to solve this issue is to jailbreak your phone. Then you can install a plugin which warns you whenever you’re about to display a PDF file, so you can navigate away before it’s too late if you’re on a site you don’t trust.

Apple is sure to move to fix the hole as quickly as possible. For now, though, jailbreaking remains easier than ever, and the security hole remains a threat.

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As a side note, I’d like to apologize for missing a couple of scheduled blog updates. We’ve been plenty busy at Macsupport.com, working to bring new features into the mix. And, on a more personal side of things, my kitty, who I had since I was 5, passed away last week. So I needed to take a couple of days to get myself together. I still miss her like crazy, but don’t worry, starting today the blog posts will be back on track.

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