http://www.geekskillz.com/tags/7 Articles tagged with Software at Geek Skillz. Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:49:00 EST Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:49:00 EST en-us http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/review-mozy-online-backup Reviews, Software, Web


Geek Skillz, this green and white blog that has somehow caught your attention, is just one of my websites that I run as a hobby. I've got four websites running on an old IBM ThinkCentre box sitting on my desk. Why pay a monthly fee when I can run my own server? Until recently, there has been one problem with my setup: backups. Yes, I've been taking regular backups of the websites and the databases, but those backups have been sitting in a hard drive only one foot away from the server itself. So if my place were to burn down, both the server and the backups would be gone. If someone robbed me, they would probably take the server and the backup drive. What good are backups if they're in the same building as the source computer? Not very good at all, I say.

A few weeks ago, I discovered Mozy.

Mozy is an online remote backup service that gives you up to 2 GB of space on their servers for FREE where you can backup your files. Even better, it will keep the backups up-to-date automatically, similar to the way Mac OS X's Time Machine works. I'm a huge fan of Time Machine, and wish that Windows had something as elegant. Mozy comes close. Instead of keeping a huge archive of backups like Time Machine, Mozy keeps a backup of only the latest versions of files. This will probably be good enough for most users' needs.

If you need more than 2 GB of space for your backups, Mozy offers monthly and yearly payment plans for as low as US$4.95 a month. For businesses, there are Mozy Pro plans. I've been more than happy with the MozyHome free plan, so give that a try before deciding whether a monthly plan is for you.


How Does It Work?

To start backing up, you need to first install the Mozy software, which is available for both Mac and Windows. Once installed, the easy-to-use interface lets you choose which files you want to backup on the Mozy servers. There are some predefined backup sets that you can choose to let Mozy decide how to do it. For example, if you want your e-mail to be backed up, choose the Outlook or Apple Mail backup set. Other sets include Firefox Favorites, IE Favorites, Word Processing Documents, iCal, Keynote Presentations, and many others. Backup sets make it easy, as Mozy will figure out which files need to be backed up for you.

The backup sets aren't good enough for me, as I want to backup the code for my websites and my database backup files. Mozy lets you choose any files and directories on your computer easily. Click on the screenshot to the left showing my backup configuration on my Mac, where my Ruby on Rails code resides. I checked the "rails" folder and a few of the subfolders underneath.

Once you tell Mozy which files and directories you want backed up, you can set a schedule for how often Mozy will send backups to its servers. Or you can let Mozy perform the backups whenever your computer is idle. Note that Mozy will only backup changes to your files. It won't waste time by uploading files that haven't changed since the last backup. Nice.

Mozy allows you to include more than one computer in your account. I've got my server, which runs Windows, and my laptop, which is a Mac. Mozy backs up the database backups from the server, and my website code from my laptop. Both the Mozy website and the Mozy client software keep track of how much data is being stored from each computer. The website will even tell you when each machine was last backed up, so you don't need to log in to each computer to check the status of your backups. It's a simple feature that's makes the service even more convenient to use!

What Doesn't Mozy Do?

Mozy is not a "file archive" service. It is a remote backup service. What's the difference? A file archive service lets you upload files where they will be stored and never changed unless you change them yourself. A backup service like Mozy will keep backups of the latest versions of your files. If you delete a file from your computer that Mozy had been backing up, then Mozy assumes that you don't need it anymore. From their FAQ: "If you delete the working copy on your machine and then run a backup, Mozy will assume that you no longer need a backup copy, since you got rid of the working copy, and will mark the file to be removed from our system in 30 days. (We keep it on file for 30 days, just in case you change your mind.) After 30 days, you cannot get these files back."

So, you can't upload all your vacation pictures to Mozy and then delete them from your hard drive. If that's the kind of service you're looking for, then Mozy isn't going to help.

Also, you can't share files with others. You can't backup a file to Mozy and tell your friends to download it.

Let Mozy Do What You Should Have Been Doing All Along

Mozy is a backup system for your files. If your computer gets stolen, or your hard drive goes up in smoke, or a meteor crashes into your house, Mozy will be there to restore your files to the way they were a few days or hours before tragedy struck. That's what Mozy does, and it does it automatically. Tell Mozy what to backup, and it will do it all by itself, without asking you to do anything. Set it and forget it.

In my opinion, Mozy does what computers should do for us. Why should I have to worry about such mundane tasks as keeping backups of my files, keeping track of which files have changed recently, and finding a safe place to store my backups? Our computers need to be more autonomous, making decisions for us. Even the most tech savvy computer users make bad decisions when using and maintaining their computers. It's about time that software starts doing these things for us, and Mozy is one of those products that does that for me. MozyHome is free, so give it a try.




Confession: Yes, the links in this article are referral links! I can make a few dimes and nickels by recommending Mozy to you. Nevertheless, my opinions are sincere. Managing data is a nerdy thrill for me, so Mozy is an exciting service because it's an elegant solution to an important problem. Anything that manages data automatically for me is awesome! Mozy was recommended by Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times and PC Magazine, so my glowing praise is hardly original.]]> Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:49:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/review-mozy-online-backup http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/geeks-watch-tv-better Software, TV

Who can be bothered to watch TV shows at their scheduled times anymore? A show better be frickin’ amazing for it to make me sit in front of the TV at a certain day and time, and for me to suffer through 18 minutes of irritating commercials that interrupt the fun. Only Lost has been addictive enough for me to routinely park my butt on the couch every Wednesday night at eight o’clock.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t other shows that I want to watch. I just prefer other kinds of entertainment that I can turn on and off when I want them. I grew up playing video games, which you can jump into when you feel like it, and turn off when you’ve had enough. Books also wait patiently for audiences to enjoy them. Television’s format is just inconvenient and annoying for those of us that have become accustomed to “on demand” mediums of entertainment.

I recently found a program called TVShows for the Mac that lets me watch shows when I’m ready to watch them. Yes, I know that you can download shows from BitTorrent sites, but that means that for every episode I want to watch, I need to search for the correct video file and download it myself every week, or every day for daily shows. Forget it. Sounds like something that can be automated... which is what TVShows does.

TVShows lets you subscribe to the shows that you want to watch. It will automatically find the torrents for those programs and use your default BitTorrent client to download them in the background. Without any effort on your part, your shows will arrive on your computer. As a bonus, the shows are commercial free! So far, I have been very happy with the video quality of the shows I've been downloading. Since everyone who has subscribed to a show will start downloading at roughly the same time, the speed of the torrent download can be extremely fast. But if you insist on watching shows the same day that they air, you might be disappointed. For less popular shows, it can take a day before the download completes. Still, once you break free of the TV schedule, you may not care about watching shows a day or two later than you used to.

Just let the shows get downloaded to your computer, and when you’ve had your fill of video games, if that should ever happen, you can see how many shows you’ve got waiting for you. It’s nice to have a week’s worth of Colbert Report waiting for me on the weekend. I’m often not interested in his guests, so I can skip the interviews, reducing the length of each episode to around 15 minutes. That’s a lot of time saved that can be better spent on games, books, blogging, and even going outside! (Probably in that order.)

I have been watching On The Lot this way, and can’t imagine watching it the old-fashioned way. Like other reality shows, the show tries to cause suspense by pausing and filling time with biographies of the contestants and other stuff I can’t bear watching. I can watch an episode of On The Lot in about 25 minutes now. No longer do I have to suffer mean-spirited tricks like when the host says, “The person who is going home this week is... coming up right after this!” When commercials are intentionally inserted into the middle of a sentence, I don’t feel bad downloading commercial-free versions of the show.

If you’ve got a TiVo or other PVR, then you already know how nice it is to watch TV this way. But with TVShow, you don’t need a cable TV subscription, and you're not limited by geography. Want to watch a British show that hasn't made it to your country yet ? Subscribe to it in TVShows! Once you’ve got a way to deliver those downloaded shows to your TV, then you’ve got it made. Television networks had better start adapting fast before this trend takes off. Crying foul and calling people thieves won’t be good enough.]]> Fri, 22 Jun 2007 09:01:00 EST http://www.geekskillz.com/articles/geeks-watch-tv-better