Tonido Plug = Private Cloud

Cloud computing is getting a lot of play these days, and like everything else it has pros and cons. Perhaps the biggest downside is that you are trusting your data to a third party — their service could go offline for a while, or your data could be lost or otherwise compromised. Probably not likely with a reputable service since they have much to lose in that scenario as well, but it’s an obvious risk.

The Tonido Plug is a small $99 appliance that provides a way to set up a private server that you can share among others in your home or office, and also access over the internet (access is secured via password). The device plugs into your internet router via standard Ethernet cable, and also has a USB port for attaching an external hard drive (or even a small thumb drive). This is the NAS (Network Attached Storage) concept.

I like this approach for a home or small office that doesn’t want to invest in (or really need) a full-scale server machine for sharing files among a family or work team.

It comes with built-in software for:

• File-sharing
• Music streaming of your MP3s from your browser
• Blog / Journal
• Photo-sharing
• Search (your computer)
• Money Management

So the real upshot of this device seems to be that you can store your files and access them from any computer on the internet, as well as share files out selectively with others. Attach an external USB drive and you have your own private cloud on the internet.

Evernote

Evernote (www.evernote.com) is a product that probably falls into the Personal Information Management (PIM) category, but goes a little further in overall functionality. I’ve been using it since early July and I like it pretty well, although I’d like to see some minor improvements in upcoming releases.

The basic concept behind Evernote is to have a quick and easy way to capture bits of information that you want to keep for future reference, and be able to manage and access it from anywhere — on your own computer (Mac or Windows), on another computer with web access, or on your smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre or Windows Mobile device). Think of it as an all-purpose “digital bucket” for holding random things that you want to get to later.

You can capture notes, tasks, links, emails, web pages (entire pages or selected parts), photos, sounds, documents (PDF, text, html, Word, etc) — pretty much anything you want to grab and drop in there. It leverages the cloud to keep things in sync between your computer and handheld device. You can create tags in Evernote to categorize the things you put in there, which makes it easy to find them as the collection grows. Multiple tags can be associated with any item for cross-referencing, and the entire collection is searchable.

There’s an ad-supported free version that provides some good features and makes it worthwhile to try it out if you’re interested. The premium version is $45 for a year and offers much more — higher online storage amounts, SSL encryption for security, greater monthly upload allowance, and sharing and collaboration options.

In the short time I’ve been using it I have been pretty impressed with Evernote. Synching between my computer and my phone has worked quickly and seamlessly. If mobility is an important part of your work life, this is a good way to grab information from just about anywhere and have it with you wherever you go.

Backup Your Data

If you’ve never had a hard drive failure or accidentally deleted some important data (photos, video, documents, email, etc) then it’s probably just a matter of time until you do. Stuff happens. And when it does, having a good backup strategy in place can save the day.

I use a two-part process:

• Full system clone — this is a complete copy of the entire hard drive, in bootable form so that I can start up my machine from this copy if I had a severe failure on my laptop’s drive. (This backup is for system restoration — it only saves the most recent copy of files.)
• Incremental backup — this is an ongoing copy of files that I work with. When a file is edited or changed in any way, the next incremental backup will create a copy of that file, while also preserving the previous copy from the last backup. So if I change a file or delete it, and decide that I want to go back and get an earlier version of it, I can restore it from this backup. (This backup is for file restoration — it saves multiple versions of files but does not create a bootable version.)

The Setup

I have a 500 GB external firewire (IEEE 1394) drive. I created two separate partitions (volumes) of about 250 GB each. On the Mac you can do this easily with the Disk Utility program in the Applications > Utilities folder. One partition is for a full bootable clone backup (I name this partition Clone), the other is for an incremental backup (I call this partition TimeMachine, for reasons I’ll explain later). A firewire drive is not required if your computer doesn’t have a firewire port — USB 2.0 will do fine as well, but firewire is typically faster and uses the more intelligent peer-to-peer architecture for negotiating data transfers.

These two partitions exist physically on one hard drive, but the partition process makes it appear that there are two drives there. Drive partitions should be set up first, before any data is copied to the device. Once data has been copied to the drive, you cannot go back and partition it later without wiping all data from the drive. You don’t have to partition a single drive for your backups — you can use separate devices if you prefer and allocate all of the drive space to each backup process. I like the partition approach because I can just leave one device attached to my laptop all the time, and run backups without having to attach another one.

Clone Volume

The full bootable clone is created with the excellent, award-winning SuperDuper utility. This app is highly recommended. I configure SuperDuper to use the Clone volume for full backups. SuperDuper copies your entire drive over to the backup drive, configured to act as an independent startup volume. After the initial backup copy is created, you can set SuperDuper to just copy the changes next time, so it shouldn’t take very long to run subsequent backup jobs.

With a bootable clone you can startup from the clone in the event that your hard drive has a serious, unrecoverable failure. (This kind of error is rare but if it happens your data may be gone for good. Professional data recovery firms like Drive Savers might be able to recover your data, and it will likely cost you a minimum of $2,000. There’s no guarantee that they will be able to recover your data, but it is guaranteed that you will pay them for the attempt.) I run the clone backup every couple days so I always have recent restore point.

Time Machine Volume

Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) comes with a backup utility called Time Machine. This program runs incremental copies every so often throughout the day. When a file on your hard drive changes, the next backup of that file will capture the new, updated copy while also leaving the previous version in place. So if you accidentally changed or deleted a file, you can go “back in time” and restore a previous copy using the Time Machine program. The incremental backups are only limited by available disk space, so the more space you have on this volume the further back you can go.

I configure the Time Machine program to use the volume called TimeMachine as the backup drive. The first time it runs a backup will take a while, so plan on letting the initial copy finish the job. From that point on, brief backup jobs will run occasionally to update the changes you’ve made to files on your hard drive. If you discover that you need a file that you deleted two weeks ago, just enter Time Machine, navigate back to that point in time, and recover the last backup that was made of the file and restore it to your hard drive.

The last point about backups: test them regularly. Don’t just assume that your backed-up data is in good shape and ready to restore. There could be errors that will prevent restoration, and if this happens you want to know it before you need that data. I occasionally boot up from the Clone drive and launch a few applications, open some documents and photos, and just generally make sure that it is functioning exactly as I expect my main boot drive to function.

Also see the Dropbox post for an online option to file backup.