Anyway while picking through the other magazines, I picked up a fairly hefty one and realised that it was one on computers. Back then, computers filled rooms and cost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds. I didn’t know enough then to know smaller and cheaper computers were making an appearance, but this fact hit me square between the eyes, when I saw a full page advert for the Sinclair ZX80 computer. It was very small, white and about half the size of an A4 sheet of paper. At one end it was about 2 inches deep and the other about half an inch, which meant it kinds of resembled a wedge shape, with a lump on the thicker side. The keyboard was a very, visually interesting shade of blue, with white lettering. The technical specification looking back were laughable, but here was a computer anyone could afford, well nearly anyone. Every day I went back to the school library, thumbing now exclusively through the computer magazines, lusting after a computer of my own, but not really knowing why. I think I might have asked for a ZX80 for Christmas, but it was still a lot of money, especially for something that could have been just a child’s fad.

In 1981 Sinclair launched the successor to the ZX80, predictably called the ZX81, with all manner of technical improvements. The biggest differences to me, were that it was now black, which made it look very futuristic, and it was cheaper. I seem to remember the ready built version (yes it was available in kit form, for the adventurous) was £79.95, but Wikipedia seems to disagree. As soon as I saw an advert for the ZX81, I desperately wanted it. It was virtually all I could think of. Fortunately for me, I had a birthday coming up and my Mum and Dad gave me the money I needed. After school on the fateful day, I caught the 73 bus near my school with my friend Steve and off we ventured to the West End, more specifically Oxford Street, to Bourne and Hollingsworth, inside of which was a W. H. Smiths, then the main outlet for Sinclair stuff.

I gently cosseted my new ZX81 at the checkout, along with a tape called Super Programs 1, which looking back was astoundingly written by ICL, the then, huge corporation, which was later to be taken over by Fujitsu. Why they were writing games for the ZX81, I have no idea. Upon getting home and unpacking my new computer, the first thing that struck me was the manual, which was 212 pages and took the user all the way from setting up the machine to actually programming. I didn’t need too much help hooking it up to my 14 inch black and white TV, as I had already owned numerous games consoles. Well you can call them game consoles, but they are not quite in the same league as todays XBox 360’s, PS3’s and Wii’s.

Bizarrely enough, the thing that really stumnped me was getting the tape player communication to the computer. I’d type the LOAD “” command into the computer, press play on the cassette player and be greeted to 2 minutes of awful electronic screetching. When the noise stopped, my ZX81 did nothing, but sit there, as it had the previous 2 minutes. For some reason it took me a while to realise I had to plug the supplied cable into the cassette player. Even then it was all a little hit and miss, but eventually I had loaded in my first computer program, the impressively titled Invasion from Jupiter. The title was impressive, but the games was a very simplistic counting game. Several aliens ‘*’ were randomly drawn across the screen and you had to guess their position, by counting across the screen, then typing in the number that corresponded to the alien’s position. This might have been simplistic, but considering this was the first computer game (not console) that I’d ever played, it was mighty impressive for this 11 year old. I remember dragging my Mum and Dad into my bedroom to show them the awesome power that was my computer. I’m not sure what they made of it, but I think they knew I’d found something I was passionate about.

Time is an illusion, computer time, doubly so. I lost track of the nights, I stayed up into the early hours of the morning, working my way through the manual and typing in computer programs from the magazines that had been created for this new, emerging market. That being said a computer program written in BASIC, didn’t take too long to type in, as the basic ZX81 only had 1K of memory, the same technically as 1024 Characters, or about 5/6 of the first paragraph. Even this isn’t quite accurate, as the computer itself needed some memory to work, which left the user with about 800 characters. The ZX81 had a few tricks for squeezing the most out of that 1K. One of these was to tokenise the keywords, which took 1 byte, instead of say the 5 bytes needed to save the word ‘PRINT’. The best way to make the most effective use of the memory was to program in machine code, the language the computer could understand natively, rather than BASIC, which the computer had to first convert to machine language, which is the reason BASIC is much slower. Machine code is commonly referred to as a low level language, meaning you are at the lowest level to the computer. BASIC is considered a high level language.

I remember typing in an amazing space invaders style of program that ran in 1K, printed in the Your Computer magazine. There was row after row of hexadecimal numbers like, AE, 00, FF, CB, CD, 09, 15… You had to be extra careful with this kind of program. It was imperative that you saved the program to tape first, as a single wrongly typed character, could cause the computer to crash, losing everything if it wasn’t already saved. You could have struck me down with a feather when after saving the completed program, I ran it and it worked perfectly. This was a miracle in itself as typing on the ZX81’s membrane keyboard was a pain, quite literally sometimes.

As I learnt more and more, I began pushing the ZX81 until it kept running out of memory. I managed to get the necessary funds to purchase a nice new 16K ram expansion pack, which I think cost about £49.95. Suddenly a whole new dimension of game-play presented itself. Unfortunately, so did the dreaded RAM pack wobble. Many times I can remember typing in a program and forgetting to save, then having the ZX81 crash as I inadvertently touched the RAM pack, or nudged the ZX81, causing the RAM pack to wobble and the ZX81 to reset itself, losing all my unsaved work. Clive Sinclair’s solution, was to use a bit of velcro, which I only found out about recently while watching a documentary drama, based on the kind of feud between Chris Curry, head of Acorn and Clive Sinclair in their race to be the BBC micro. Not really the kind of thing you want to hear from the head of a company, to who you just gave your hard earned money. For some reason I never did anything to alleviate myself of the RAM pack wobbles, but fortunately it wasn’t something I had to suffer for very long anyway.

I remember one day dragging my Mum and Dad to one of the unmissable events on every Sinclair enthusiasts diary, the ZX Microfair, this one held at the Royal Horticultural Hall in London. There I saw an amazing full action keyboard, which my Mum and Dad treated me to. Unfortunately the company Fuller, didn’t have any at the show on that day, so I had to return the following to to pick it up on my own. My new keyboard also had the added bonus of curing the RAM pack wobble.

I went to many ZX Microfairs, at the Horticultural Hall, and later at Alexandra Palace. In fact I was also an exhibitor at one ZX Microfair, working for the Micromania Software Shop, which used to be on Caledonian Road. Working at that shop was a blast, but more of that later.

One of the amazing things about the ZX81 is that it had no sound and no high resolution graphics. These limitations however did not stop people coming out with creative ways to overcome these limitations. For sound someone realised that if you switched the computer multiple times between SLOW and FAST modes, and turned up the TV’s volume, you could get the ZX81 to make a tone. Painstakingly, people began writing music for the ZX81, to be played this way. I think my most memorable was a rendition of Beethoven’s 9th, which seemed to be a piece of music used a lot on computers.

Using some low level creativity, it was even possible to boost the ZX81’s graphic resolution from a blocky 64×48 to an impressive 256×192. However high resolution games came relatively late in the ZX81’s life by which time most people had moved onto the ZX81’s successor, the ZX Spectrum, which had a native resolution of 256×192, all in colour, but not without it’s own limitations.

Looking back, I really wish I would have kept my ZX81. I sold it to Wayne Robinson from school, for 50 quid I think it was. Be interesting to hear what he did with it. Is it languishing in a closet somewhere? In the years since, I’ve owned a few ZX81’s. Unfortunately when I left the UK, I sold all of my retro machines, as they would not work over here in Canada, with the different power supply of 110V, instead of 240v and the different TV standard, NTSC as opposed to PAL. I did pick up a Sinclair/Timex TS1000, which is the North American equivalent of the ZX81.

So that’s how I got into computers. The next part to this series will be about the ZX Spectrum. I hope you enjoyed reading this, I’d love to hear about your first computers.

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I met a character from Dickens

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One of the hats I wear is a programmer, more specifically a programmer for desktop, web and mobile/hand held applications. One type of system I develop is Proof of Delivery (POD), where the hand held is used to capture the consignees signature. I’ve done this before using the OpenNetCF Signature component, converting the signature on the hand held to bitmap and then sending it back to the server when the hand held is docked to the desktop machine. The system I was recently working on however worked in wireless mode across a wide area network, so the thought of sending hundreds of bitmaps across the network, wasn’t something I relished.

I remembered that the native format for the signature was vector based. This means that instead of storing every individual pixel, the signature is stored as lines between two points, which is much more efficient. To give you an idea, the raw windows bitmap, averaged out at around 35K, while the vector version is between 200 and 1000 bytes, or 1K. As you can see this is quite a saving. I decided for this project to store the vectors as is, thinking I would make use of them on the server when the time arrived. Unfortunately when the time came around, there was seemingly no way to convert this vector format, back to a bitmap, as the OpenNetCF library was only for Windows Mobile. I did have a fall back plan, but was hoping not to use it, should the conversion not be possible, which it nearly wasn’t.

This though didn’t stop me adding a reference to the OpenNetCF libraries in my ASP.NET project and trying to use the signature control to go from the vector format back to a bitmap. While this seemingly appeared to be possible, when push came to shove, I kept getting an error saying the vector size was different to the signature size I was specifying, even though I was coping the size specified on the hand held. I think I may have a solution to that problem, but thankfully I didn’t need to go that route.

This lead me to do some Googling and after many dead ends, I finally found a post on the OpenNetCF forum, which appeared to be an answer to my prayers. The only two problems were that the solution was based on version 1.4 of the framework and I was using 2.1, and the sample source code was in C#, and I’m predominately a VB.NET programmer. I decided to convert the source anyway, which really wasn’t that bad. And I ended up with something that worked great and didn’t require me to use the OpenNetCF libraries on the desktop. This solution works fine and has been used for version 2.1, but should work unchanged for version 2.0 and 1.4.

Many thanks to this anonymous poster, on the OpenNetCF forums. Here’s the code:

I’d love to hear if you make use of this code, but it comes with no guarantees or warranties, so use at your own risk.

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While S3 is truly an amazing service, it’s not right for everyone. While their basic charge of 15 cents per gigabyte seems fairly cheap, I looked at using for my off-site backups and it wasn’t until I did the calculations on the Amazon S3 Calculator page.

I have about 200 gigabytes of data that I need to backup off-site, and when I plugged in the numbers into the S3 calculator, it came back with a figure in excess of $30 per month and that didn’t include all the video stuff I have. If you are using S3 in conjunction with a business idea, this will probably not be an issue. Indeed there are manyh companies that publicly state they use S3 as the backend to service their files. Two of the popular ones that come to mind are Smug Mug and Animoto, who use S3 to server photos and videos. When you consider the sheer weight of traffic served, they are finding S3 a very cost effective solution.

So where do we start?

1. Setting up an Amazon S3 account
Setting up an Amazon S3 account is a bit of a slog, but for anyone who already has an Amazon account, it’s at least slightly easier. First things first, you’ll need to go to the Amazon Web Services web page, http://aws.amazon.com/. Once the page has loaded, click on the [Sign Up Now] button:

If you already have an Amazon account, this would be the account through which you order books, you can log on, otherwise you’ll need to follow the steps, starting with the following screen:

If you have an account, login using your email and password, otherwise, enter you email address and then ensure “I am a new user” us selected, then click on the [Sign in using our secure server] button. You will now be presented with the following screen:

Complete this with your details and then click on the [Continue] button. Sign up is nearly complete, for the main Amazon part anyway. The following screen also needs to be completed with your personal details, address, etc. You will need to agree to the Amazon Web Sevices Customer Agreement, to continue:

Now those details are filled in correctly, click on the [Continue] button. An email will now have been sent to the email address you specified. One you have received the confirmation email, your Amazon account is set up. You now need to set up Access Key, to be used in the Simple Storage Service (S3) service. In the confirmation email, click on the link, relating to Setting Up an Access Id. On the page that is displayed, are two key pieces of information you will need for a variety of services and software you will use. Keep a note of them here for safe keeping. You will also probably want to keep an electronic copy, as it is much easier and less error prone, to copy and paste these keys, rather than typing them out. Please store them securely. The key screen will look something like this:

Your Access Key ID, will obviously not be obscured, but you will need to click on the [+ Show] to see your Secret Access Key.

Your Access Key Id : _______________________________________________________________

Your Secret Access Key : ____________________________________________________________

Now click on “Products” at the top of the screen and then click on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) link. You will probably want to explore a few of the links on this page. When you are ready, click on the [Sign Up for Amazon S3] button. You are now ready to link your credit card to your Amazon account. This is the credit card to which the monthly charges will be charged. Once you have verified your credit card details are correct, click on the [Continue] button.

Click on the [Use this address] button if the billing address is the same as the address you entered earlier, otherwise enter a new billing address and then click on the [Continue] button.

You know have the opportunity to verify that everything you entered is correct. Once you are satisfied, click on the [Complete Sign Up] button. You will now receive a confirmation email. Sign up is now complete.

2. Uploading files
Although Amazon do not provide any means to manage the files on your S3 account, there are numerous applications and websites that fill in this vital missing link. One of the most popular is the S3Fox add-on for Mozilla’s firefox browser. If you have not used Firefox before, it is an excellent, extensible browser, with many neat add-ons. It is also considered one of the safest browsers, with many built in protections against pop-up and phishing schemes.

If you haven’t already installed Firefox, you can get it from the following webpage:
http://www.mozilla.com

Once you have installed Firefox, you need to install the S3Fox add-on. go to the following web page:
http://www.rjonna.com/ext/s3fox.php

Now click on the “download it here” link, which you can see here:

As part of Firefox’s security, it will not allow you to install this by default. You will see the following appear at the top of the browser window.

Click on the [Allow] button to begin the install of S3Fox. You will now see the following screen.

The [Install Now] button will be active after 3-5 seconds. Click on [Install Now] when it is ready. When the installation is complete, you will be prompted to restart Firefox. To do this, click on the [Restart Firefox] button.

Now that S3Fox is now installed, you will find the S3Fox icon at the bottom right of the status bar:

You can start S3Fox by clicking on this logo. The first time you start S3Fox, you will get the following message:

This is basically informing you that S3Fox needs some key information before you can proceed. Once you click the [OK] button, you will see the main screen, which looks like this:

To set up your account, click on the [Manage Accounts] button and the following screen will appear:

Enter anything you want to describe your account. Then copy and paste your Access Key and Secret Key into the text boxes. Please ensure that no extra spaces are added to the end of your keys when you paste. When you are satisfied that you have entered everything correctly, click on the [Close Button]. Then click on the minimise button next to the [Manage Accounts] button. S3Fox is now set up. This screen can be used for data transfers, by dragging files to the remote view, however a more conventional screen is also available. Click on the “Tools” menu item in the main Firefox menu, and then click on the “S3 Organizer” menu item:

A two pane view is now displayed, showing your local hard disk and your S3 space. You can create buckets (directories), and copy files two and from both views.

3. Making files available to the public
By default all files and directories created, are only visible to you. Even if you know the URL to get to the file, you will only get a pretty terse XML file :

This means that you can store file securely, and at the same time have a folder that has files available to the public. It’s even quite feasible to have both public and private files available in the same folder, but this could potentially get quite confusing. It make be a good idea to create both a public and private folder (bucket). Remember to bare in mind that all folder names have to be unique across the whole of the Amazon S3 service, so you may want to having a naming convention, something like name-video-public and name-video-private.

After you have uploaded a file to one of your folders, that you wish to be made available to the public, the next step is to change the files rights, using Amazons Access Control List (ACL). This is similar to changing a files rights within Windows, Linux and a whole host of other operating systems. You’re basically telling the Amazon S3 service, who can do what with the files you upload.

With the S3Fox Organizer open, ensure you have created at least one folder (bucket) and then upload a file to it. When the upload has completed, open the folder by double clicking on it, if you haven’t already and you will see the file you just uploaded. Now right click on the file and select “Edit ACL” from the menu that appears. You will now see the following screen:

To now make this file publically available, click on the red “X” next to Everyone and the click on the [Save] button. This file is now available for anyone to download, that is once they know the URL. You can easily get the files URL, by again right clicking on the file and selecting “Copy URL to Clipboard”. If you now go into your browser and in the address bar, paste the URL you have on the clipboard, when you press enter, you should now see the file you uploaded, if it is an image, or see the usual download dialog.

As I mentioned before if you want to make all files in a specific folder, public, you can right click on the folder name, and again select “Edit ACL” and repeat the process we did for a file. Now when all files are uploaded to this folder, they will be publically available.

4. Hosting a Complete Site on Amazon S3
While it is quite possible to host your website on Amazon S3, this is only feasible if you site consists of static pages, i.e. pages that are not dependent on some kind of backed programming language, like PHP, Ruby, Python, ASP.NET and Coldfusion, to name some of the most popular. This is because the scripting language your site is dependent will not be available on Amazon S3. That’s not to say you cannot host interactive sites, just that your choice of languages will need to be client based, i.e. Javascript and Flash (although even then some Flash options will not be available). Remember S3 is geared primarily at providing a means of serving up large files, quickly and realiably.

5. Making Content Look Like it is Being Served from your Website
As you will have found out, the URL’s S3 generates for your files is pretty long, take this one for example:

http://colboys-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/cdm.jpg

A much more attractive alternative would be:

http://videos.colinmeeks.com/cdm.jpg

This makes it look like the file is coming directly from your website, but more importantly, it means should you decide to cease to host your files with Amazon, you just need to create a sub domain that replicates the one you create for S3 and there will be no disruption in the files you are serving, which is very important should you care about links being picked up by search engines remaining valid. If you decide to go down this route, you’ll probably want to keep a duplicate of the content you upload to S3 on your own website.

To set this up is relatively straightforward, but is not covered in this document.

6. Final Thoughts
S3Fox is just one of a many of programs that helps with managing your S3 account. It’s also free, but not only that, it’s very well written. However should you prefer to have something that doesn’t run in a browser, there are a few programs available. One of the most popular is JungleDisk, this is an excellent program that has a myriad of features, the most important one, for me anyway, is the ability to map a folder to a drive. That is, I can have my folder “Backup” mapped to the logical X: drive on my computer, and copy files to and from the X: drive. This is very convenient, but really comes into it’s own when you have JungleDisk installed on multiple computers, meaning the X: drive is common to all drives. I use this a lot for backups, but also as a central place to hold written works in progress, meaning I can work on documents on which ever computer, without needing to email it myself or carry it around on a flash disk drive. The only downside to JungleDisk, is that it uses it’s own method to store the files, so it is not able to use this to make content publically available. JungleDisk costs $20, and you are allowed to install on as many machines you want that share the same S3 account.

The second program is called BucketExplorer. This is the only client I’ve find that allows you to set up the more extensive permissions on files, including time limited URL’s. I haven’t yet used this personally, but it looks to be pretty good value at $49.95.

Amazon is never one to rest on it’s laurels and there are a host of other features sure to be coming down the pipes. Suffice to say, S3 has landed with a a sizable thump, providing an excellent service with Amazon’s weight behind it.

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Not wishing to state the obvious, but being diagnosed with a terminal illness can’t be easy, but at least it does allow you to get your affairs in order, as well as tell those around you how much they mean to you. The more I think about Randy Pausch, the more I can’t help but think how hard it must be for families, where they lose a loved one suddenly, that person never getting the opportunity to say all the things on their mind, nor being able to get their affairs in order.

Like many, I first came upon the name Randy Pausch watching the Oprah Winfrey show. Actually in my case it was stumbling upon a YouTube clip from the show. Here was a guy dealing with a terminal disease, in his case pancreatic cancer, in front of the world. His appearance on Oprah, was as a result of what has become a bit of a phenomenon, often referred to as “The Last Lecture”. I tracked down the full lecture, given at Carnegie Mellon University and watched it in full on YouTube, to say I was blow away, is pretty much an understatement. Here was a guy who probably looked fitter than me, doing press ups, with but a few months left.

After watching the video in bursts, I did a bit of Googling and found that the video could be purchased from Carnegie Mellon for the princely sum of $7.00 which covers the production and handling costs. I picked up a copy, a) because I wanted to watch the video in something better than YouTube quality and b) I knew that this was a video that I wanted others, especially my older children to see.

A few months after watching the video, I noticed that a book was also available. I added this to my Amazon wishlist, because Christmas was approaching and sure enough it was under the tree waiting for me to unwrap it. It wasn’t until the frantic holidays was over, that I got to sit down and read the book. At 224 pages, it’s not a weighty tome in substance, but is in content. A few times, I found myself reading with a tear in my eye. Much of this is when Randy speaks of his children. Being a father myself, this kind of thing really strikes home and I couldn’t resist look in on my sleeping children and realising what a luck man I am.

So what’s the point of this blog entry you might ask? Certainly I think you should watch the video and maybe purchase the book, but more than that, this is about counting your blessings and realising life is so much more than the material things. With the world in economic ruin, it’s easy to wallow in the doom and gloom being fed to us in the daily media, but we are still part of this amazing thing called life. I never knew Randy, never met him, never got to skim more than the surface of his every day persona, but I’ve seen a side of him, that gives me something to aspire to. Be the best person you can be for yourself, bur most of all be the best person for the other people in your life.

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Nero is a good case in point. I’ve been on the upgrade path for this, since version 4 or 5, however I’m quite content with version 7 and don’t see myself upgrading anytime soon, even though Nero is now at version 9. I’ve just taken a look at the Nero site and the download for the trial version is over 300 megabytes. I love Nero, but all I used it for is creating CD’s and DVD’s. Why force me to pay over and over again for stuff I don’t want or need.

So with this thought in mind, I tried to thing of other software that’s jumped this over functional shark and I’m not just talking about commercial software, some free applications also have a lot to answer for. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Paint Shop Pro
   Version 7 was the lean mean graphics machine. Version 8 prior to the Corel sell off, starting heading north and all the versions that Corel have produces have been total over kill
2. Adobe Reader
   I want to view PDF documents. I don’t want an update every week or so. Also the basic download is now 41 megabytes, which is crazy. Foxit Software’s reader a sylph like 3 megabytes.
3. iTunes
   As much as I like the way iTunes catalogues my music collection, there’s no denying it’s a unwieldy beast. A 70 megabyte download is just crazy, not to mention sucking my machines resources like an overenthusiastic hooker
4. InstallShield
   Yes I realise that this has all the functions a software developer might want for installing their software, but at a little shy of $1,000 for the basic version, I think I’ll be sticking to InnoSetup for the foreseeable future… and did I mention it’s free.

These are the ones that come to mind now and there’s been a whole ton more, but it’s always the way that you can’t think of them when you want to, but I think you get the general idea.I’d be interested to hear what software you think has jumped the shark.

Before I go, I realise that software companies have a living to make, I’m a programmer myself, but it seems that software is getting more and more bloated, without actually becoming more usable, in fact, many of the latest software packages, require fairly hefty machines. You should not need a dual core Pentium machine with 2 gigs of memory to do basic word processing. I think there is a great opportunity for software companies to rethink their software and strip software back to it’s essence, at least to allow the process to continue, but from a much more tightly programmed core.

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As per Andy’s request, yes I’d love a copy and my address is :

Colin Meeks
30 Dylan Way
Ottawa, ON
K2G 6K6
CANADA

I look forward to an interesting read.

Colin

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With the global markets suffering similar bad times, there has been a welcome side effect and that’s the plummeting price of oil, which has seen petrol prices here in Canada, fall from about $1.30 a litre to around 70cents. This lull in the price of petrol, and the auto companies desperate need for tax payers money, isn’t this the perfect time, to force the automobile manufacturers to make some serious inroads into making cars that are not reliant on petrol. Think of what one of the big three manufacturers could do if they took something like a Tesla and turned it into a full production car. Yes I know the Tesla is a $200,000 piece of car, but that’s because it has a relatively small production run, but at least Tesla seem to be solving some of the real issues with making an electric car. They claim the Tesla can do a 200 mile round trip on a single car, and it’s no secret Jeremy finds them amazingly fast, albeit an apparent couple of shortcomings, but Tesla isn’t on trial here. They have an amazing car, with some rough edges that need smoothing, but it’s far an away the most exciting electric car so far.

What if…. as part of the big bail out, Tesla were also to get a cash injection, in return for any patents/trade secrets they have for their electric marvel. The big three then get their cash infusion and the patents/trade secrets are then licenced to the big Three, in return for a royalty on each car sold using the licensed technologies. Tesla gets the money they need to build the cars many people have put a sizable deposit on, they also get a stack of cash to use for further R&D which the big three also have an option to licence. The big three get a kick up their backside to actually deliver some new cars that break their reliance on petrol and hopefully this will result in the big three making cars, people actually want to buy.

I know this is a pretty simplistic view, but I think it’s at least adds some validity to handing money over to the big three, instead of just throwing it into a money put.

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This is a very simple program. Just enter each tag separated by a new line, i.e.

Colin Meeks
Indie Launchpad
podcast

and then click on the [Create Tags] button. The tags are then ready on your clipboard for pasting. The program itself is only 25KB, yes I mean kilobytes. I find it funny that the installable version is over 3 times larger, but have stuck with this, so you get your nice shortcuts, etc.

If you are curious why this program is so small, I shall let you into a secret…. but that’s a whole other post.

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It’s not that people don’t worry about losing their valuable data. It’s just that backing up is about as fun as watching paint dry. I used to be really bad about doing my own backups, but started to get serious with stuff like documents and programming source code. Unfortunately when it comes to photos, videos, etc, apart from doing a direct copy on an additional removable drive, I didn’t do anything for offsite backups. The reason for this is that I had around 190 gigabytes of stuff that needed to be backed up, but there was not real cost efficient way of doing this.

Recently I toyed with Amazon’s web services, particularly their S3 storage service. However once I did the math, it looked like it was going to cost me around $30 per month, and that’s just a starting price. With each additional gigabyte costing 15 cents, it’s soon going to get more and more expensive. I do love Amazon however and use it in conjunction with Jungle Disk, enabling every machine I own to have a shared virtual disk drive, something I find invaluable.

I’ve seen a few other services, one in particular was xDrive, which I’ve toyed with numerous times over the years. It’s currently owned by AOL though maybe for not much longer, as AOL seems keen on divesting themselves of companies they purchased in the dot com boom. Unfortunately though the xDrive client software has never been very good and in fact given numerous computers of mine indigestion. They do however have a free 5 gigabyte version of the service for you to try. Recently they released a Adobe Air desktop client, which seems to work much more reliably.

All through my investigating, I tried several other services, but kept hearing one above all others, Mozy. They too have a free 2 gigabyte service, so I gave that a trial run and was very impressed. The client software was easy to set up and over the course of a week, worked faultlessly.

The thing that really clinched it for me, was their full service offered unlimited storage for a monthly fee of $4.95 , so with nearly 200 gigabytes of stuff that needed a safe home, I was in. The first run admittedly took a while, now that’s not a while as in hours. Nor is it days. The first backup took nearly 2 months. I can’t imagine what my ISP must have thought , but as subsequent runs only backup changed or new files, the backup up is soon complete. The client software basically allows you to select folders and files to watch for, which means that as I download photos from my digital camera and video, as long as I put the files in the correct directories, everything is backed up, when the next backup is initiated, in my case, I have it schedules for the early hours of every day.

Depending on what you have needing to be backed up, you can either use the free service, which as I mentioned gives you 2 gigabytes of storage. This is great if you are a student and want to backup your schools classwork. In fact my nephew will be using this service soon, as his brand new Mac Book has recently suffered a hard drive crash, which fortunately resulted in just a couple of files being lost, but reiterates what could have happened , should he have been much further into his course. So fairly small files, like word processing or spreadsheet documents and programming source code, are ideal candidates for the free service. If you want to back up your music, photo or video collection, it’s unlikely you are going to squeeze that into the free service, unless you only upload a few files at a time. That being said, for just under 5 dollars a month it’s amazing the level of reassurance it provides.

I’ve restored files a few times from my backups, a) just to ensure it works and b) because I needed a file that was older than the one currently on my computer. Mozy however is not an archiving solution, you only get one version, albeit the latest version stored on the Mozy server. With now over 200 gigabytes stored on Mozy, I have no doubt there are going to be fairly interesting issues arise should I find my self needing to restore them back again. I can either restore them via the client software, from the web or the service I will probably choose via DVD. This is not going to be cheap however. Mozy charge $0.50 per gigabyte, $30 for processing and will charge your credit card for FedEx shipping, so in my case I will be looking at something in excess of $120 + shipping. The way I look at it though, if I need to make use of this service, something awful has happened, and spending $120+ is going to be the least of my worries.

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