Howtos, Rants, and Reviews : backup

CrashPlan - Affordable Online Backup System

willburns1 — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:57:00 GMT

I run an backup of all my files on to an external hard drive attached to my computer. What if you experienced some kind of natural disaster like a flood, earthquake, power surge, or fire. Then your computer and all your files would be ruined. There is also a possibility that both your computer and your backup could both die at the same time what would you do them? Well the simple answer is to backup all your files to a remote location. That way if anything were to happen to your computer or the structure that houses your computer all will not be lost.

There are many ways to backup your files online but I think CrashPlan is one of the simplest and most affordable ways of doing that. You have several options when it comes to CrashPlan. You can backup to a local drive, backup to a remote machine, or backup to their online servers. Backing up online is slow because of bandwidth issues, and could take weeks and restoring a large amount of data could take days. Backing up to a local drive is fast but it too could be affected by the same natural disaster as the original files. You can also backup to a remote machine that way the transfer is fast and both the computer and the backup are not in the same location.

The basic version of the software is free, but there pro version called CrashPlan+ for $60. The main difference is that the basic version backs up every hour and only stores the most recent version of the file where as CrashPlan+ will backup every 15 minutes if you want and store multiple version of the same file. The software is cross-platform and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The online backup plans are very affordable and offer unlimited storage. Individual unlimited plans for one year is $54, which is $4.50 a month, 2 years is $ 99, and 3 years is $125. The 3 year plan comes out at $3.47 a month which is hard to beat anywhere on the internet.

If you have been thinking about starting a backup system for your computer this is a great place to start. Checkout CrashPlan.

CrashPlan Online Backup

Change Time Machine Backup Interval from One Hour to Whatever you Want

willburns1 — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:37:00 GMT

Time Machine is a great way to keep all your files backed up and safe incase of accidental deletion or a crash. Time Machine backup runs every hour to backup everything you do from hour to hour. It you don't want your Time Machine to run every hour you don't really have a choice. You can either turn it off and only turn it on when you want it to backup or it backups every hour your computer is on.

With TimeMachineEditor you can change the interval that Time Machine backups your documents. If you are running an older mac that might get slowed by the constant backing up of information this might be helpful to you. If you just don't need a backup every hour and just want it to backup every week or everyday TimeMachineEditor gives you the freedom to do so.

TimeMachineEditor can backup your machine hourly on certain days, daily at a specified time, weekly on a specific day, or Monthly on a specific date. You can also simply change the interval from every hour to anything you want in hour intervals.

This application is free and has added a bunch of features that perhaps should have been a part of Time Machine to begin with. Try it out for yourself.

TimeMachineEditor Change Time Machine Backup Interval

Fairmount – Decrypt Your DVDs on the Fly

willburns1 — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:23:00 GMT

There is more than one way to rip and burn a backup DVD on your computer. Applications like MactheRipper and Ripit have always been my favorite. Both those applications however require you to copy the files off the DVD and onto your computer where you have to then compress them, which might include saving the compressed version as well, and then burn the movie.

This leaves you with 11GB of space needed to burn one DVD. 7GB or so for the full DVD and 4ish GB for the compressed version. Wouldn't it be nice to just pop in a DVD and go straight to compressing and burning it with only a temporary file that will get deleted after the disc is done? Well the problem with that is before the DVD is decrypted it can't be compressed or burnt using popular software like Roxio Toast or Popcorn. The Solution Fairmount

Fairmount is an application that will decrypt a DVD and mount it for easy access to all applications. Applications like Toast will not copy or burn DVD content that is encrypted. When you run Fairmount on the DVD within seconds the DVD is remounted in its decrypted form and can be compressed and burnt with Toast. This save a lot of time and disc space since the movie will only have a temp file used in the burning process.

I'm not sure of the accuracy of Fairmount or if it will work on all DVDs but the one DVD I tried it on worked like a charm. Try it out Fairmount is a free piece of software and you can get it here.