Why CrashPlan Kicks Ass

CrashPlan is righteously presenting itself as
"The most comprehensive backup solution".

Commenting on Mauricio Prinzlau's article, How Crashplan Online Backup Service Trumps Competition, I felt I needed to give some complementary indications on why Code 42's CrashPlan software is such an efficient and flexible backup solution. In the end, I felt the comment itself would make a great blog post! So here it is.

One thing that is pretty cool with CrashPlan is that you can backup your files accross your different local or remote computers, and you are even allowed to share backup storage space with friends. It actually allows you to do that with the free version.

To save some bandwidth, you can backup large data sets on a local drive, copy it on a portable drive and import it on any other computer with CrashPlan running (yours or your friends'), and CrashPlan will automatically identify the backup and start syncing it right away across the network.

It's also easier when you need to restore a lot of data: just copy and import the backup set back to the original computer, and you won't need to rely on the network or CrashPlan to send you a hard drive to restore your data [yes, they can].

As the data is compressed and encrypted, the owner remains the only person to have access to the actual backed-up data, so privacy-wise it is bullet-proof, too. Just keep your password strong, and to yourself.

Using a combination of paid licensing (where you need to split a lot of data in multiple "backup sets") and free licensing for computers with simpler needs, you can manage your own off-site backup cloud for the entire office, as well as all your family members and your friends, while keeping the overall backup budget to the lowest and maximizing your storage and bandwidth cost.

CrashPlan is very good software, however there are a few issues that can show up once in a while. In particular, one should be aware that when backuping data located on a removable drive, make sure the drive remains connected to the computer. If it remains disconnected for a few days and CrashPlan keeps running, it might silently sweep off the backed-up data from the backup destinations (local, off-site and CrashPlan cloud as well). It happened to me once after a source hard drive had a fault, and it remained offline for a certain time while I was running an interminable chkdsk on it, using another computer. Since some files where corrupted after the fault and CrashPlan swept away the backups -- exactly at the moment I would have needed them -- CrashPlan ended up being useless. But if I knew this beforehand, I would immediately have made a copy of the backup set and saved the day. So you better know this.

It can also become a headache when, for some obscure reason, one computer is suddenly unable to reach any backup destination, even though they are online. CrashPlan do it's best to establish the connections without needing to reconfigure your firewalls and routers, but you can encounter situations that require you to read through the manuals and forums to fix them.

But overall, I agree that CrashPlan is, as far as I know, the most innovative, complete, painless and affordable backup solution on the market nowadays.

You can download CrashPlan for free here.

On "A New Way of Thinking" (Anonymous)

The Problem clearly exposed. Go read and think. Sheet. So right.
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/03/01/a-new-way-of-thinking/

"As a consequence the internet as proven to be a generally more effective at disseminating disinformation than information. Because it works within existing networks it can strengthen and facilitate the actions of a healthy progressive movement, but -->not substitute for it, nor create it.<--"

Social media ARE effective, but definitely INSUFFICIENT. We need a new "CONCRETE CULTURE" -- off the Internet gateways.

"[...] Movement in that people are always on the move and interchangeable. They do not bond to place or one another, but rather move between increasingly uniform jobs, neighbourhoods and social circles to which they feel no particular allegiance. Speed in that the value is placed on doing everything faster, more efficiently. Natural, human values are slow and take time. Sex can be done quickly and efficiently, love cannot."

Our current lifestyle is unsustainable. We need to slow down, and find a way to "sacrifice" the non-critical, high-energy activities: travelling for fun, drive back and forth to work daily, individually buy electronics for entertainment -- funny hey, all these induced individual needs become simply useless if we learn to LIVE CLOSER ONE TO ANOTHER and start SHARING space, transportation, goods, food produce, books, knowledge, ideas -- the real stuff... Will materialism save us, AFTER ALL?

"[...] In seeking solutions we usually look for culprits in the forms of institutions and individuals, when they are entirely interchangeable and -->the real culprit is the entire value set and our way of understanding how we can and should live<--."

Right on the money, Bill.

"We need to educate ourselves about the possibilities that we have not even conceived and begin to build the structures and processes that will allow us to implement the broader range strategies and tactics that will get us where we want to go."

Nothing will change if we don't change ourselves. Sounds good, but will hurt, honey. So beware, prepare, share, and LET'S CHANGE ALL THIS.

The New Music Industry: An Appeal to Independent Artists

I stumbled upon a very intelligent manifesto by Ben Johnson, the creator of indietorrent.com, a small but promising website that offers free digital music distribution service for independant artists. His manifesto is truly brilliant, and inspiring.

https://indietorrent.org/v1/docs/manifesto.php

In particular, i'd like to cite this interesting insight into social networking, because, my Facebook so-called "friends" might have noticed, I'm quite questioning the social media phenomenum since a little while:

While it may be difficult to prove, many "community" websites, like MySpace and Facebook, are not meant to serve the community at all. In fact, many such "social networking" sites exist only as façades for the massive effort to construct databases full of information about Americans (and foreigners), their interests, preferences, personal details, attitudes towards particular subjects, reactions to contrived events (which are peddled as "news" through the mainstream media), etc. Facebook and MySpace are the very simply the polling arms of questionable (if not sinister) organizations and their sole function is to determine how many people are buying the "movie version" of events, and to what extent. The fact that MySpace and other data-mining operations sell the amassed data and use the profit to fund the further manipulation of this vicious systems' unwitting participants (who happen to be you and me) is entirely secondary to what's going on under the covers. We would do well to note that most (but not all) "free services" are offered only to divert attention from an underlying (and often nefarious) data-mining agenda.

By the way, I hate the new (is it new? I guess not) WYSIWYG editor of Blogger. I know, I'm a geek. If it's not plain text, it's bad.

How I Got There (Like If You Ever Cared) :

1. Was encoding Peter Peter's tunes for digital distribution in MP3, OGG and FLAC (a lossless audio coded).
2. Was making a "badge" icon for , and wanted to make sure what FLAC stands for.
3. Googled "FLAC", ended up on the FLAC sourceforge website, learning that it simply means "Free Lossless Audio Codec", as well as it is a very interesting and successful codec.
4. Among other very surprising headlines, this one got my attention: A new site called indietorrent.org is up and running. indietorrent.org is a digital music store which "enables independent musicians to sell their own music while keeping all profits." FLAC is one of the available formats.

Who Pulls the Wireless Strings?

It's not a localized phenomenum, it happens world-wide: wireless technologies are literally flooding into everyone's life. But are we aware of how they are really impacting us?

Who among us didn't make the acquisition of a new technology device in the last 12 months? Ask the question to people surrounding you, and you'll be surprised. Odds are very high that they did, and you can expect that at least one of their new gizmos is a wireless device of any sort.

Although this tendency might seem to be more acute in our industrialized countries and apply only to wealthy people, it is actually a generalized world-wide trend: poor children get equipped with wireless laptops,
refurbished cell phones are being provided to homeless people...

As technology bursts seeminglessly into our lives, it dramatically changes our ways of living. In just the few last years, maybe without even noticing it, we lost a great level of intimacy and privacy. It's affecting us drastically. But when we accept the "intrusion" of these devices into our life, do we ask ourselves where is it leading us to?

Is there a Plan Superior? Who's will is it serving? Are people asking themselves what is the bottom line of being surrounded by technologic stuff? Is it really beneficial for all of us, is it only for those high-tech companies, or are we only running that race without any concern about the long-term consequences?

It seems that we systematically develop and market new technology products only because it's achievable, without questioning the sense of doing so. Maybe it's an inherent (or natural) tendency of human beings; and thus one might propose that, being dictated by instinct, it obviously follows some 'natural plan'... Maybe we're on the way to a new level of interdependancy between elements of humanity, in which our individual identities will slowly merge into a global being, a plural consciousness, a vast noos in which we will (eventually) coexist in an harmonious metabolism. We might be coming to that point.

On the other hand, I doubt that those mortals who actually pull the industry strings (might they be wireless strings!) are actually concerned about the noos conception... If there is some sort of above-us plan that's being achieved, indeed it's through some sort of quite an ironical fate!