CrashPlan is the perfect backup solution

Posted on 16 March 2012 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 2 comments

Image representing CrashPlan as depicted in Cr...

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Yesterday, I posted my experiences with Carbonite and Mozy and explained why they’re not a good option for someone who wants an inexpensive, truely unlimited and fast backup solution. Today, I’m going to explain the solution I found with CrashPlan.

CrashPlan is a direct competitor to Carbonite, Mozy and Backblaze. However, the wonder of Carbonite is that they separate their software from their service.

CrashPlan Plus is the service. For $3 per month, users can upload an unlimited amount of personal data. The low cost alone sets it ahead of Mozy and Carbonite.

The CrashPlan software, however, has the ability to backup not only locally but also to a friend. The CrashPlan software can be freely downloaded and used without a subscription.

Controls are very easy to understand and use. CrashPlan assumes you want to backup the data in your home directory. You can easily adjust that setting and specifically include or exclude individual folders or files. You can limit the upload and download speeds based on time of day or if you’re present or away from your computer.

Let’s look at an example use case. A large amount of data exists on a file server at the office. I want to automatically backup that data locally and off site. I purchase a Drobo and a large external USB drive. I configure the Drobo at the office and connect it to the file server. I take the large external drive home and connect it to my home PC. I install CrashPlan on the file server and on my home PC, telling the file server to backup friends’ data to the Drobo and the home PC to back up friends’ data to the external hard drive.

I configure CrashPlan on the file server to back up all the data stored on the server to the Drobo connected to it. This action creates a second copy of my data that is stored locally on a different type of media – I’m making the case that storing the data on a Drobo with its drive redundancy is different from storing it on a single drive. I tell it to also back up the data to a friend. It prompts for the friend’s authorization code and I give it the code from my computer at home. It instantly begins copying the data to both the Drobo and over the Internet to the USB drive at home.

On the home computer, I tell it to back up to a friend and provide the code from the computer at the office. It begins backing up any files from home to the Drobo. If I stored important information at home, I could easily tell it to also backup to the external drive in addition to the Drobo to satisfy the 3-2-1 practice for my data at home.

I could also configure Crashplan for my laptops and coworkers by simply giving them the code to bakup to the Drobo. It’s remarkably easy, and only the user can restore the data. The security theoretically makes it safe to back up to a stranger, since you’re only storing encrypted data on the other machine.

I recently had the opportunity to test this configuration. In my configuration, I have my parents’ computer set to back up to my media center. When their computer crashed and they purchased a replacement, I plugged the replacement directly into the Drobo, installed Crashplan and began the restoration process directly, saving the time of having to download the restore files. A huge advantage to CrashPlan is that it can recognize the data storage location both locally and remotely. The initial backup can be done locally and then the drive can be moved to a computer off site.

I’m much more fond of this backup solution than using a commercial service. While the initial cost of the Drobo and the hard drive seems high, factoring in the cost of paying for backup subsriptions to several PCs and laptops each month as well as the enormous expense in the event of a crash makes this solution much more economically desirable in my mind. Remaining in control of the physical backup destination may be more responsibility, but if something bad every happens the solution is to simply retrieve the backup sets from the off-site location, not spending months downloading or spending a ton of money. That piece of mind is priceless.

Have you found a better solution or a problem with CrashPlan? Let me know in the comments.

CrunchBase Information on CrashPlan
CrashPlan
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Problems with popular backup services Carbonite and Mozy

Posted on 15 March 2012 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 1 comment

I take a laptop everywhere, and I know you do, too. When I think about what would happen if suddenly someone were to steal my laptop, there are three aspects about which I worry. What will it cost to replace? What sensitive information was on it that I don’t want anyone else accessing? What data was on my computer that I can no longer access?

Outside of simply carrying insurance, there really isn’t a solution to the cost of the physical hardware. Theft is theft. The second solution is solved by using TrueCrypt, a fantastic encryption solution about which I wrote in October of 2008. This post begins to address the third problem – a way to ensure that data is safe in the event of theft, crash or other loss – by defining the problem and detailing some bad experiences I’ve had with two, popular backup services.

Backing up your data is important, but creating a comprehensive strategy to prevent catastrophic loss can be challenging. The general rule for backing up is easy to remember as 3-2-1. The best solution is to have three copies of your data on two different media types and one needs to be off site. One of the best ways to solve the off-site problem is to use a service that runs automatically on your computer and copies the data securely to the cloud as you work.

Image representing Carbonite as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

Allured by the Carbonite advertisements in my podcasts and other media, I signed up for Carbonite a few years ago. It seemed to work well, didn’t slow down my machine too much, and it seemed to work as advertised.

When I built my media center and began to aggregate all of my personal media there, I began to notice a very severe limitation of Carbonite. After reaching a threshold, they limit the upload bandwidth. Unfortunately for me, that limit was about 200 GB. I needed to upload 1.5 TB including a large amount of video from the Aaron Traffas Band, so Carbonite was no longer an option.

Image representing Mozy as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

I subscribed to Mozy, Carbonite’s closest competitor who also advertised unlimited uploads for about $5 per month. It took a couple of months, but it was finally able to copy all of my data. Shortly after it caught up, the unthinkable happened. The filesystem on the hard drive storing all of my documents and media became corrupted. I was faced with having only two copies of my data remaining. I had an old copy of everything from a few months before that I stored on my Drobo and I had the current copy on Mozy’s servers.

The 1.5 TB was too much to try to download, so I called Mozy to learn how I could get to my data. I learned that Mozy will send data sets over 200 GB to users on hard drives, but at a significant cost. They would send me all my data on three hard drives for $1,100.

I ended up comparing the old backup with the data on Mozy and downloading the changed files, but it took an enormous amount of time. I learned two very important lessons from my experience. First, the cost of an off-site backup solution isn’t just the monthly fee, the recovery costs need to be considered. Second, Mozy wasn’t for me. Mozy later discontinued their unlimited plan, meaning that they’re not an option for many others either.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the solution I found that I believe to be the right solution for all scenarios.

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Google Docs vs. Dropbox

Posted on 10 March 2012 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | Leave a comment

Over the last few days, I’ve had several conversations with auctioneers about Google Docs and Dropbox. There seems to be a misconception that they’re operating in the same space and that you can replace the use of one with the other. There are very important differences between these two products. I use both regularly and intend to provide two easy rules to help you get the best use out of each.

  1. Use Google Docs
  2. If Google Docs doesn’t work or doesn’t make sense, try Dropbox

Image representing Google Docs as depicted in ...

Image via CrunchBase

Google Docs
If you’re working on a document, spreadsheet or presentation, Google Docs is the answer. If you’re collaborating with others in real time, Docs is the obvious answer because it’s really the only answer. Docs wraps up a document editor like Word, a spreadsheet like Excel and a presentation system like PowerPoint in a single, browser-based service that uses secure cloud storage. This means that you don’t have to worry about your recipients having Microsoft Office or not – anyone with browser can access the documents.

It allows very granular sharing control, allowing you to grant read or write privilege to specific users or to anyone with the link. Distributing documents with Google Docs is easy. Simply grant read-only privileges to anyone with the link and email the link to the people with whom you wish to share. If it’s a confidential document, simply use the built-in sharing controls to submit an email list of only the people you wish to obtain the documents and those recipients will have to log in to view them. It’s much more polite than sharing with Dropbox since it doesn’t create new folders on the hard drives of your friends or colleagues. Moreover, using Google Docs means anyone will have the ability to view it natively, rather than having to convert your Microsoft Office document to Google Docs or LibreOffice.

You can upload any kind of file to Google Docs, making it a great alternative to services like YouSendIt or WeTransfer. Simply upload the file and get the public link. Your recipient will appreciate the direct link rather than having to use a clunky, third-party service.

Image representing Dropbox as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

Dropbox
Dropbox is best thought of as a personal file repository that’s backed up. I see it used for document collaboration, and it is really inferior to Google Docs for the reasons listed above. In addition, two people can’t work on the same file at the same time in Dropbox and expect the changes to be properly merged. Dropbox is much better suited to be used to synchronize your own files among multiple computers.

Dropbox’s strength is in the software that runs automatically on your computers. When you make a change to one of those files, those changes are replicated among other Dropbox installations. If you’re working on an office document and make a change to a document you’ve shared with someone else who is also making changes, you’ll end up with two versions of the file and the need to merge those changes manually.

When you share a Dropbox folder with someone, that folder exists in her Dropbox account until she leaves it. If she’s anything like me, she likes a well organized and uncluttered Dropbox, so asking her to use Dropbox when Google Docs would have sufficed can be quite annoying.

While Dropbox isn’t very good for collaboration on office documents, it does work well for pictures and video. The latest versions of Dropbox allow instant upload for smartphone pictures directly from the phone app as well as automatic import of media from memory cards.

The right tool for the job
Dropbox is great for media like videos and pictures. It’s great for documents you need to keep offline and private. While it works to share office documents, it’s clunky, annoying and inferior to Google Docs. Google Docs is great for document distribution and collaboration, as well as sending large files, but doesn’t work well to share lots of media like movies, photos and music.

Dropbox and Google Docs are great, free tools. I use both each and every day and can’t see how I ever got along without them. Hopefully this article helps disambiguate the two and gives you a better idea of which tool is appropriate for which job.

CrunchBase Information on Google Docs
Google Docs
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CrunchBase Information on Dropbox
Dropbox
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GPS apps Waze and Google Maps obsolesce stand-alone devices

Posted on 5 March 2012 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 1 comment
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series All things must end

Remember the last decade? Those were the days. We used MySpace, we built websites that had FAQs and sitemaps, our laptops had DVD drives and we actually spent $100 or more on stand-alone GPS devices that lived in our cars and trucks and told us which way to turn.

Waze on a 7" tablet in Kansas City

These days, purchasing a dedicated GPS device is silly. There’s no reason to have a device with such a limited use that’s outdated the moment you buy it. While it’s true that most GPS units can be updated, it’s still a hassle and an expense for a device that – at it’s updated best – is inferior to something we already carry with us wherever we go. Today, our smartphones and tablets have mapping abilities far superior to anything a dedicated GPS can offer, we take them with us when we leave our vehicles and information we receive from the cloud is always more current than the maps saved and stored in our unconnected and outdated GPS boxes on the dash.

Google Maps for Android

Image via Wikipedia

Google Maps
Preinstalled on Android and iOS phones and tablets, Google Maps is the most reliable and accurate mapping software I’ve seen. Rather than spending a ton of money on a GPS unit, I can now spend $3.57 on Monoprice for a windshield mount that keeps my phone conveniently in front of me. I recently purchased a tablet mount, which puts a beautiful 7″ map directly in front of me as I drive.

Waze
A relatively new alternative to Google Maps, Waze has recently become my preference for longer trips. Waze uses crowdsourcing to bring real-time road and traffic conditions to the maps of its users. Waze users are known as Wazers and their devices are continually updating ground speed to Waze. Portions of roads where current traffic speeds are significantly below the average road speed are highlighted and a speech balloon tells you the current average speed. Knowing when there are traffic jams ahead of you will let you find an alternate route. When a Wazer sees a police trap or a road hazard, a couple of easy button presses allows that report to be sent to everyone else using Waze in the area.

Waze brings game features to traveling. Each report of road conditions is rewarded by points which you can compare against a leaderboard of your friends or of all Wazers in your state. Roads that haven’t been visited by other Wazers are signified by dots on the road. When you drive down these untraveled roads, your car turns into  Pac-Man which chomps the dots, rewarding you with points.

Waze works everywhere, but it learns appropriate routes based on the way it’s used. The more people who have used Waze to get to your destination in the past, the more accurate the guidance will be. Accuracy is based on usage, so it’ll be more accurate in the cities than the country. The community reporting functions are obviously currently more valuable in urban settings than on rural roads and will likely continue to be until it’s more widely adopted. Until then, I’m going to keep munching the dots on the dirt roads and using Google Maps when I honestly don’t know how to get to my rural destination.

CrunchBase Information on Waze
Waze
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Practice calling bids with Virtual Auction

Posted on 3 March 2012 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | Leave a comment

I sold my first lot at live auction exactly 10 years ago next month. I never went to auction school. A decade ago, I was in college in Manhattan, Kan., and driving the 200 miles back and forth from Sharon, Kan., at least once a month. I had recently started working for an auction company and had decided that I wanted to be a bid caller, so I spent mile after mile practicing my chant. Fence posts and telephone poles are too regular, so I took my bids from yellow signs on the highway.

I got pretty good. I had a fairly quick chant, with several variations of filler words and could do fairly good impressions of my bid calling colleagues. My favorable assessment of my own abilities was quickly reset, however, after an auction one night when my coworkers threw me up on the stand and I actually got to practice selling to real people.

People don’t bid like signs bid. Signs are predictable; arbitrarily resetting the bidding increments is unrealistic. To a new bid caller, taking bids from people is very unpredictable – perhaps chaotic or even frightening – compared to practicing alone. Until now, it’s been nearly impossible to simulate an in-person bidding environment that could be used to practice bid calling in private.

Enter: Virtual Auction
Virtual Auction is bid calling practice software that is the first and only in-person auction simulation system I’ve ever seen. I caught up with Virtual Auction’s creator David Whitaker at the Missouri Professional Auctioneers Association convention and got a first-hand look.

With better 3D graphics than some video games, Virtual Auctions allows the user to control the graphics quality, screen resolution, bidding environment, size of crowd, bid speed, difficulty of bid signals and number of bidders.

Virtual Auction simulates five types of bidding environments.


The crowd behaves according to the settings, bidding in unpredictable intervals until the auctioneer says sold and clicks the sold button. The view then zooms to the last bidder who shows a bid card. Each environment features a tutorial. The software even includes appropriate background sounds for each environment as well as audible ringmen “yeps” which, thankfully, can optionally be muted. Each environment has subtle differences in aspects like view angle, crowd positioning and crowd attire. For example, the crowd in the benefit auction environment are all dressed in black and the livestock crowd will request to cut the bidding increments.

In addition to the auction simulations, Virtual Auction includes a battery of number drills that many bid callers will remember from auction school, though the ability to control increment and speed by software makes the drills much more useful. ”I want to help students continue doing what they learned in Paul Behr’s class at auction school…a study guide to use at home,” said Whitaker. He says, “I don’t want to teach you how to auction, I want to let you practice.”

I asked David why he created Virtual Auction.

I wanted to create a practice platform to help auctioneers, both old and new, improve their bid calling. I’m trying to make connections with auction schools to raise awareness among new auctioneers and hopefully work with the National Auctioneers Association to get the word out to established auctioneers.

He says the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “The auction schools I’ve contacted so far tell me it fills a very important need within the industry.”

What’s been the biggest challenge so far? In addition to learning the ropes to becoming a vendor and getting the word out, Whitaker says the release itself has been an ordeal. “Finding the developer has been hard. Taking an idea and turning it into software isn’t easy. It took six months to find a developer who could understand the concept as well as handle the animation and build it for a reasonable cost.”

He already has some good ideas for version two. “I’m thinking about voice recognition and competition mode for the next version, perhaps even turning it into a playable game.”

Virtual Auction sells for $149.99. That seems like an easy sell for any professional bid caller who wants to improve or change his or her chant. However, it seems like an invaluable must-buy for any rookie auctioneer or recent auction school graduate.

Virtual Auction works with any Mac or PC with a DVD drive. Learn more and see demonstration videos at virtualauctioneering.com.

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