Backup software for the home: A review of Mozy

I consider myself to be an IT professional after spending most of my career in IT. A while ago I realized that my backup strategy on my own home PC was not very professional. Much like security, backup is a layered approach, designed to reduce risk. This means you should not just stop at one backup solution. I have a Seagate USB backup drive, but the problem is that if there is something like a house fire, you can lose your backups. Since we keep all our family videos and photos on the PC, the thought of losing all of that in a house fire was just too painful to bear. After some research, I signed up with Mozy in June 08. One of the appeals of Mozy was the unlimited personal backups for just $5 per month because I have over 800 GB of data.

Fast forward about 2 years. A few months ago my XP home computer required rebuilding because it was the easiest way to resolve problems that had developed. It was also an opportunity to increase the size of the hard disk. Also, although I had two backups, the most prudent approach was to buy a new hard drive, and not reformat the old one. Then the unexpected happened – first the Seagate drive demanded that I create new partitions. It has lost all my data! No idea why this happened, but nothing I could do would get my data back. Then when I set up Mozy on the new hard drive, about 75% of my files seemed to have vanished. Although Mozy’s documentation makes moving your Mozy account to a new PC look simple, it really isn’t. In my case, the old hard drive was installed as a 3^rd drive on the PC, and I was able to copy all the files across to the new drive, and no files were lost. And when Mozy was doing the initial backup of the new hard drive, it found most of these files on the Mozy system. Perhaps they were not lost after all, but they certainly weren’t visible in the recovery pane. My suggestion is that if you are moving Mozy from one system to another; do not delete the old system in Mozy. Rather create a new system on Mozy, and only once you have all your files on the new system, delete the old one from Mozy. It will cost you $5 per month extra, but at least you won’t lose any data. While prudence had paid off (i.e not reformatting the old drive), it was a bit sobering to think that both backups had failed.

A little on Evernote indexing from images

I have been using Evernote since about March '09, and have found it to work well (4499 notes as of today). I have always known they analyze images and extract the text in the background to index it, but never had occasion to make use of that until yesterday.

While searching for a particular person's name, I saw that Evernote found it on a screen shot that had been pasted into a note. Now that was impressive, because it was an image of the name; there was no actual text there. Evernote recognized the text and indexed it; in fact the text was even highlighted in the image when I searched for the name.

I also use Evernote to store images of all the business cards I get, rather than leaving the cards in a pile in a drawer. Along with the image of the card I usually a few words about the person and why I have their business card. Now I know that Evernote can find all those names in the business cards. Taking the idea a bit further, if you take a photo of a meeting room whiteboard, Evenote will analyze and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the text, and then index it.

All of this takes Evernote's usefulness up a notch!

Blog move

For some months technical problems have prevented me from posting on my blog; and a lack of time prevented me from fixing them. I have been thinking of using a SaaS (Software as a Service) approach for hosting this blog for quite a while, and these problems pushed me over the edge. After looking at the possibilities available, Google seemed an excellent choice.

I must say I have been very pleasantly surprised by how well Google's Blogger just works.  One example is "After the jump summaries". This is a feature which allows you to create expandable post summaries in your blog posts, so longer posts appear as an intro with a link to "Read More".

There are a few formatting issues that I need to resolve, but that will come later.Once all the articles are moved, I will point the blog's URL over here. The articles will keep their original dates, and if possible I will try to keep the original URLs. Unfortunately the comments probably won't make it across. Once the blog is in its new home it should be significantly easier to maintain, which means I should add articles more regularly again.

Managing information in your personal and professional life

While all of us suffer from an information overload, how we deal with that information is often what separates us on a professional level. This blog entry is a review of my experiences managing this information, leading up to Evernote, a product that works well in practice.

Here at work we are slowly implementing a records management policy, and a probable outcome is that we will be unable to keep email older than one year. As an IT professional this has implications, because my email is full of useful information that I want to keep. After discussing this at length with our records manager, I came to the conclusion that I really need some sort of "personal information manager". In about March 2009 I discovered Evernote, an online service.