austinpreneur

My Backup Strategy for Macs

I use Macs at home and at work. Here is my backup strategy:

Level 1 - Hardware RAID

I use a redundant RAID configuration for the hard drives that store the primary copy of the data so that if there is a hardware failure it can continue to operate without any interruption. This doesn't protect you from accidentally deleting something, but it does protect from hard drive failure and ALL HARD DRIVES FAIL.

Level 2 - Time Machine

I use the built in Time Machine backup program from Apple. It's easy and seems to work well. I haven't had to restore much yet so I can't say from personal experience but I've heard that the restore is easy an reliable. I do find that it slows down my computer when its backing up a lot of data and sometimes I use the menu bar icon to cancel the backup if I'm in the middle of something. 

Time Machine is brain dead simple. It literally is like plug in your hard drive and press one button and forget about it.

In addition to being easy and automatic, Time Machine stores many 'snapshots' of your data at different times and makes it easy to browse these snapshots and restore. This does protect you against accidentally deleting something because you can go "back in time" and get the file you deleted.

Time Machine backs up to an external hard drive attached to an iMac at my house. That disk is shared so that all other Macs in the house (and my laptop when its home at night) can backup to the same disk using Time Machine. I'm currently using a 2 TB drive for my Time Machine but I really should upgrade it soon.

Level 3 - JungleDisk

But what if my house burns down? I use JungleDisk from Rackspace to backup all of my local data (and I mean EVERYTHING) up to Amazon's S3 file storage service or Rackspace CloudFiles. This way all of my data is stored securely in the cloud. 

I have over 500GB of data, so it took many months to complete the initial upload. Once that completed, I don't seem to have any problem keeping up with the new data that I bring (mostly through photos and video).

You have to be a geek to set up Jungle Disk because you need a separate account at Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloudfiles. I would expect that its going to get easier now that Rackspace owns JungleDisk but I haven't tried setting up a new account in years.

Level 4 - Safe Deposit Box

What if my house burns down AND Amazon loses my data? Every six months or so I swap out the hard drives at home with a duplicate set in my safe deposit box. Every year or two I buy new, bigger hard drives, copy the data to the new drives, and put the old drives in the safe deposit box. This is pretty fast and easy. Each year my storage needs grow and hard drives get bigger and cheaper.

How do you backup your computer data? Leave a comment below or talk to me on Twitter here http://twitter.com/joshuabaer

What if your email account got deleted?

TechCrunch reported that a blogging site called JournalSpace lost all of its customers data. It sounds like their database crashed and they didn't have any good backups. What a nightmare!

Have you ever thought about what would happen if you lost access to your email account? What if you logged into your Gmail account one day only to find that all of your email messages were gone? Or what if you just couldn't remember your password and the password reminders went to an old email address? It is also quite plausible that your account could be incorrectly suspended for abuse (the bad guys also try to make it look like someone else).

I use Google Docs, and I have a number of important documents up there that would be quite painful to lose. A few times, I've logged in only to see a warning that my documents weren't available. I almost had a heart attack! Fortunately it wasn't long before they re-appeared.

What about your photos? I have the master copy of all my photos on my local hard drive, I back them up with Time Machine on my Mac, and I also upload them to Amazon S3 with JungleDisk. So I feel pretty safe. But I have heard of lots of people who start out with their photos on their computer and on Flickr, but then their computer crashes and Flickr becomes the master copy. What if your Flickr account got deleted along with all of your photos? Or what if they just decided your pictures were obscene and took down your account?

Have you ever lost something important that you assumed was safe "in the cloud"? Have you heard of any major websites losing customer data?

Austin Cloud Computing meetup

Stephen Oskoui and I have been talking about the need for regular meetups for people interested in Cloud Computing in Austin. In my head, I see a format very similar to Austin on Rails... a once a month meeting on a week night somewhere central, with free pizza and time to schmooze, one long presentation or two short ones, and close to a bar so that people can grab a drink afterwards.

We're currently trying to put together a date and location for at initial meetup in December or January. If you're interested in learning more, please join the Google Group and leave a comment comment below!

Rackspace cloud computing lunch at ACL studio 6A on Wednesday

Rackspace is hosting a lunch in Austin next week to talk about their vision for cloud computing. I expect this will be focused on their Mosso hosting platform, which my outsourced development company Capital Thought helped to build the first version of back in 2005. I'll be attending and hope to see you there!

Come hear about OtherInbox at Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour next Thursday

Next Thursday, September 11 I'll be presenting OtherInbox at the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour at the Austin Music Hall. Register for the event and be one of the first to hear about OtherInbox!

SXSW Panel Picker is up - cast your vote!

Every year, SXSW puts up all of the great panel submissions and lets the community vote on which ones are best. They combine this data with their own advisory panel and staff to select the final panels.

At the very minimum, please show your support for me and OtherInbox by clicking here and
PLEASE VOTE 5 STARS FOR THESE 4 PANELS.
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/3/company:otherinbox

Here is a list of all the panels I'm involved in, of course I'd recommend them all!

Don't Declare Email Bankruptcy! Take Control of Your Inbox.
Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Your inbox is overflowing with spam, bacn, ham, email lists, Bcc's, and even a few emails that you actually want to respond to. Learn about new tools to help protect you from spam, prioritize your inbox, and save you time. Don't be a slave to your inbox!

Should I Build my Startup on Ruby on Rails? Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

You've heard Ruby on Rails is the hottest new technology for developing web applications. You've also heard of concerns about scalability and hiring talent. How do you separate the facts from the hype? Hear the business perspective on why to consider Ruby on Rails now and why you might want to wait and see. Get ready for a head-to-head comparison with PHP, Java and .NET!

Hackproofing Ruby-on-Rails Web Applications Mike Subelsky, OtherInbox.com

Ruby-on-Rails makes building web applications deceptively simple, and for most Rails startups, security is usually an afterthought. Through a live coding demonstration, I will demonstrate how thinking from the attacker's perspective can help you protect sensitive data and avoid the pain of a hacking incident.

Scaling Ruby-on-Rails Using Cloud Computing Mike Subelsky, OtherInbox.com

Skeptics argue that Ruby-on-Rails "can't scale". In this talk, I prove them wrong by demonstrating how cloud computing technologies have changed the game, enabling developers to use the expressiveness of Ruby and Rails to build high-performance applications that scale easily. Will include a case study and live scaling demonstration.

Email Deliverability Secrets from Deliverability.com Dennis Dayman, Eloqua & Joshua Baer, Datran Media

Okay so you have read all the white papers about email deliverability and you've got the basics covered - but some of your email still goes to the spam folder. Learn about advanced techniques for segmenting by IP address, building your email reputation, removing spamtraps, and more. Find out how to get your problems priority access from ISPs like Hotmail or Yahoo. Plus we'll take 3 volunteers from the audience and help to diagnose your deliverability challenges on the spot!

Spend More & Pay Less: How to Create a Great Company Culture Brett Hurt, Bazaarvoice & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Learn from successful entrepreneurs the do's and don'ts of building a company culture. Take home a list of specific ideas you can implement to make your employees perform better and increase their loyalty. What's the rationale behind providing free drinks, catered meals or free cab rides? How much strategy and financial information is appropriate to share with the entire company? Can employees work from home? How do you celebrate your successes? Find out what really works and what is just a waste of time and money.

Hire an Employee, Hire a Local Contractor, or Outsource it Overseas? Steve Bell, ShangBy.com & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Should you hire employees in-house, work with local contractors, or outsource overseas? Learn the overall pros and cons as well as the specific exceptions. Hear personal success stories and horror stories from entrepreneurs who have extensive experience building products in-house and overseas. At the end, we'll take specific examples from the crowd and give recommendations on how to proceed and who to work with.

So You Want to be an Angel Investor? Hall T. Martin, Central Texas Angel Network & Joshua Baer, Austinpreneur

Wishing you were an early investor in Facebook? Have some extra cash? Or maybe you just love talking to startups? Whatever your reason is, Angel Investing can be fun and financially rewarding. As software and hardware costs go down, many startups don't need as much money and Angel investors become more attractive than venture capitalists. Hear from a panel of experienced Angels to learn basic strategy, evaluate opportunities, negotiate terms and find other investors to partner with.

The New Inbox Mark Schmulen, NutshellMail & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Everyone knows that email is the killer app. But we get so much email that we're in danger of information overload - and its only going to get worse. New paradigms for email are evolving to help prioritize the email you want and ignore the email you don't want. Hear from the innovators in Inbox management about what to expect in the years to come.

Bootstrap Your Startup Bijoy Goswami, bijoygoswami.com & Joshua Baer, OtherInbox.com

Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and Virgin were bootstrap companies that were able to get started without raising traditional venture capital. Bootstrapping is not just capital efficient, it has many other positive influences on your business and your potential to profit from its success. Learn why you should consider the bootstrap method and ask questions of a successful bootstrap entrepreneur.

And here are some other friends doing panels that are also worth voting for:

Widgets and Mashups - Enablers or Risky Business?
David Altounian, iTaggit Inc.

Time-to-market demands on web developers are leading to the creation of widgets, mashups, and embed code to add functionality to sites. This panel will explore the options, benefits, and risks of using third party sites and modules.

Dancing With Zombies: Monetizing the 'Old Media' Graveyard Matt Cohen, OneSpot

With online content exploding, the “old media” deathwatch has become a popular spectator sport. But with large financial war chests, millions of readers, and a burning need to re-invent their business models, big media brands aren’t joining the departed anytime soon. They’re just turning into something new. This panel will contemplate the old media metamorphosis and discuss why these brands will offer substantial syndication and revenue opportunities to third party online publishers in the years ahead.

Blog Revenue Strategies for the Web Discovery Era Matt Cohen, OneSpot

What will it mean to be a professional blogger three years from now? As the Web becomes more intelligent, bloggers must be prepared to evolve their publishing, syndication and monetization strategies. A better collective understanding of individual consumers, “smarter” content aggregation tools and new models for content distribution will transform the current landscape, creating new opportunities for market leadership and revenue generation. This panel will examine the major trends at work, and dig deeply into these new opportunities for the online publisher.

PR for Pirates Jeremy Bencken, BuzzStream

Doing your own PR? How to use the latest tools and techniques for finding the right bloggers & reporters, researching their contact info, writing a great pitch, and conducting highly personalized outreach, without making it your full-time job.

The Whole Business Web - Making the Shift Jon Lebkowsky, Social Web Strategies

The accelerating emergence of Web 2.0 and the new converged digital social media enables business to move all its processes, not just sales/marketing/PR, out of the deep-hierarchy low-velocity world of conventional mass-based operations, up into the high-knowledge high-velocity network structures of the Web, creating a whole new platform in which the old tradeoffs of quality vs. speed vs. cost no longer apply. This panel explores how the Whole Business Web is emerging, and how you can make the shift now.

Making Green Visible Jon Lebkowsky, Social Web Strategies

Sustainability requires informed buyers. The accelerating convergence of real and virtual is opening vast new potentials for us to make the “green” visible in every purchase by increasing the interaction between the product and the buyer, making the product’s true history and composition transparent. This panel explores these trends and the globally emerging new technologies and businesses working to make this happen.

Showtime -- Bringing the Co-Web to a Screen Near You! Andrew Donoho, IBM

The Co-Web, the collaborative, media converged web, is upon us. Showtime uses Web 2.0 technologies (OpenAJAX, XMPP and RTP/RTSP) to build a Co-Web page where we all interact on the same data at the same time, see the same context and make better decisions as a result.

Measuring the Health of Your Online Community: Metrics That Don't Suck Miles Sims, Small World Labs

There is a lot of buzz today around measuring & defining community health. This panel will focus on the right way to work WITH your community to measure success and make sure value is being provided for both sides.

In the Cloud: Massively Parallel Computing for Everyone Mason Hale, OneSpot

"Machine learning" once implied PhD's and racks of servers. No more. With projects like EC2, Hadoop and Mahout, and accessible texts lining bookstore shelves, advanced distributed computing techniques are going mainstream. After introducing the basics of map/reduce and collaborative filtering we will ponder the possibilities of web-scale computing for everyone.

Martha Stewart-izing Your Site with Rich Complementary Content Steve Waters, OneSpot

Recipe for Vertical Media Destination Site: Place high volumes of exceptional content in bowl. Add 2 cups of affinity focus. Stir in 1 cup of SEO flavoring for richness. Bake at 500 degrees all day. Serve hot. Repeat indefinitely. Until now, only fabulously wealthy master chefs could make this dish, because only they could afford the staff and tools necessary for its successful creation. This panel will explore the emerging content syndication trends and technologies that are allowing the rest of us to turn our humble sites into vertical media destinations. Felony conviction not included.

Lessons Learned from the Open Source Software Neelan Choksi, SpringSource

Open Source Software, once considered revolutionary, has increasingly been accepted as mainstream. In this panel of some of the most experienced open source leaders and analysts, we will explore what has made open source successful and what lessons all businesses can learn from this paradigm shifting technology.

Making Money with Royalties and Revenue Share Agreements
Lou Ellman, RoyaltyZone

Technology companies often enter licensing or partnership agreements to target new markets and increase revenue. The panel will discuss common licensing agreement strategies, keys for success, and effective ways for companies to track and monitor agreement performance.

Downtime at Amazon, Gmail and Facebook - is the world coming to an end?

Wow, last week Amazon was down and now today I get error messages when trying to log into Gmail and Facebook. What is the world coming to?

Interestingly enough, it appears to just be GMail webmail that is down. I also access Gmail via IMAP and that is working fine.

Great explanation of Web 3.0

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, gives a great 2 minute explanation of Web 3.0. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com also has a decent article in TechCrunchIT. I'm a believer!

Keep your head in the clouds

I'm a big fan of cloud computing, in particular Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com. Anywhere that I can outsource the actual hosting and management of computer systems I usually do.

With OtherInbox, we've been pretty religious about it. The only computers we own are the laptops and desktops that people work on.

• We host our email and shared calendars on Google Apps
  
• We use Google Docs as our wiki and for shared word processing and spreadsheets
  
• We host our website and blog at TypePad
  
• We host our version control software at CVSDude
  
• We send our outbound email through DNSExit
  
• We host our DNS with DynDNS
  
• We send out customer surveys with SurveyMonkey
  
• We test our software on many different platforms using CrossBrowserTesting.com
  

But probably most critical to our cloud strategy is hosting our production web servers and database servers on Amazon EC2 platform and using their S3 platform for backups and serving up static web files. We also use the SQS service to coordinate all our servers.

So what is all this talk about cloud computing? How can you take advantage of it in your current web application? What's the same and what's different?

From what I've seen, there are three major steps in moving from a traditional dedicated server architecture to one that takes full advantage of the unique benefits of the cloud.

1. Replace dedicated servers with cloud-based virtual servers
   
2. Move bottleneck code into modular work queues
   
3. Move database or persistent storage to an incremental solution

In upcoming posts I'll discuss each of those three steps in more detail.

Once you get to step three, you have a highly redundant architecture that scales incrementally. You only pay for what you use, so if you are busy in the afternoons but slow at night you can turn on twice as many servers at peak time without having to pay for keeping them standing by idle the rest of the day. If you suddenly get a lot of publicity and see rapid growth, extra capacity is sitting there waiting for you to use it and the architecture is ready to scale automatically. An the whole thing is probably CHEAPER than having dedicated servers!