The Verge–Great On Line Storage Comparison

The Verge comes up with great articles delving deeply into products and product comparisons. And again they have put together some great information that I want to pass along to my readers that have been following the last few articles that I have written.

Their comparison includes the following services:

• Google Drive
• Dropbox
• iCloud
• SkyDrive
• Syncplicity
• Wuala
• Mozy
• Spideroak
• Box
• Sugarsync
• Cubby
• Livekive
• Insync

As many as they have listed here, there are still many out there that are still missing.

Buffalo Ships the Revolutionary CloudStor Device

Looking for an easy solution to accessing your files located at home or at your office? A new product from Buffalo Technologies a leader in storage appliances that are both useful and affordable. Available in 1 and 2TB capacities this NAS storage device adds some cloud services to it for no extra cost.

Click to read more ...

So what is Microsoft’s Office 365?

Microsoft's Office 365, the next piece of a broader play by Microsoft to bring its suite of Office server tools and collaboration work flows onto the cloud, is expected to launch sometime next year.

The company is already in the stages of testing it with small businesses and has a list of some 60,000 organizations, which are waiting to get access. In the meantime, Microsoft is continuing to fine-tune the product and expand its testing group--both in scale and the size of the companies that are being allowed in.

CNET reports: CNET was lucky enough to get early access to Office 365, which has been designed to work on a number of Web browsers, including Firefox and Safari--though not yet Chrome, which will work when the product is finalized. Office 365 is also cross-platform, so it works with both Macs and PCs. The good news is that in our brief testing, everything worked as advertised. The bad news is that you can't get it right now, and it's still a long ways off from something that lets you every feature out of the Office ecosystem without installing software.

So what is Office 365? This is a service that takes several server based applications and hosts them for you on the internet. These applications include hosted versions of Exchange (Outlook), SharePoint and Lync (replacement for Microsoft’s Communication Server) without having to host these services on your own network and never having to worry about maintenance updates. The service is going to run between $2 and $27 per user per month depending on your company size and which services your subscribe to.

Office 365 is available on a limited testing basis only and has a waiting list of over 40,000 but Microsoft is adding new subscribers daily as they test their server loads and functions. According to CNET they had absolutely no problem with their initial use of the product and they felt the system response was very good.

There is still a heavy reliance on local Office Applications and part of your subscription can include Microsoft Office for your local machine. Otherwise you have to rely on the consumer site for Office Web Apps for accessing Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you are using Office on your local computer then one of your options with this subscription will be to save your documents to the Team Site (SharePoint) so you can share your files with others or with yourself from other locations.

You no longer need to have Outlook on your local machine in that the interface to the hosted Exchange Server is the new version of Outlook OWA that looks just like the packaged version. It has stronger links back to the Team Site (SharePoint) so that you can open documents into a pop-up browser window right from Outlook. This is quite useful in cases where your local computer doesn’t have Office installed on it. Outlook takes full advantage of keyboard shortcuts which helps you to quickly maneuver through your email.

Lync has some interesting connection to some of Windows Phone 7 and iPhone connections. This is something that I am going to look forward in testing myself to see if it is really useful or not. It provides other features like instant messaging, audio and video conferencing and voice call service. This version is based out of a web browser so it doesn’t have all of the capabilities of the full blown product but I can’t comment on that as of yet since I haven’t used it.

It is nice to have SharePoint on the system so that you can manage its capabilities on a team basis. Between simple list management, communication and file storage this is a great product to enhance how you do things and control workflow in your office.

All in all I would suggest keeping an eye on how this product progresses and when it becomes readily available might be a great addition to your company’s needs. It certainly will be something to look at to see if the pricing can fit within a budget that you can afford for the extra services that you can take advantage of.

How to Stay Connected

I talked a little bit about how I pick the devices that I use, in this post I want to talk about the what I am using to accomplish this. First, let’s go down the list of devices that I use both for the office and my own entertainment. At the office I have an i7 Workstation with dual 19 inch monitors in the traditional square or 4:3 format. At home my primary system is again an i7 but I am using a 32 inch TV/Monitor as my secondary monitor and a 22 inch widescreen for my primary screen. I also have three mobile devices, an 10.1 inch Acer NetBook, an iPhone 3gs, and my newest acquisition an Apple iPad.

Click to read more ...

Are you doing proper backups of your precious data?

  It is so important to do proper backups of you data but sometimes our best attempts fall short of what is necessary.

In the diagram to the left I have put together what I consider as the best configuration for protecting your data. First Remember that your data isn’t backed up unless it is saved in at least two places. If you move you data to your network storage and remove it off of you local drive then it is stored in just one place, on your network storage.  In the first drawing, I have the data being backed up to the NAS storage device that is connected to the router. Additionally, data would be stored to an online backup service to give you another redundant backup off-site. I will discuss some of your online storage options later.

In the second drawing, I have included a second backup source for your local network. There are several companies that make a NAS drive/USB Drive duo to allow a backup locally of this data. If you decide to go this direction, then the NAS device can be your primary storage area, which would make more sense if you have multiple computers in your home or small business environment. This allows for centralized storage and gives everyone access to your stored files.

Online backup services do differ. In a home environment you want to have a good source to back up to but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg. Mozy and Carbonite are priced very closely for the home consumer. Jungle Disk has more flexibility and can be more cost effective especially for someone that has multiple computers in multiple locations. There are no limitations from where you can backup from with Jungle Disk, they charge based on the amount of data that you are storing offline. Carbonite and Mozy have fixed costs for home users but Mozy charges a storage fee as well for commercial clients. Carbonite will only backup files on the computer that has the software installed on it. Mozy will let you backup from any drive source, network, shared or locally connected. If you are backing up with the software on different machines, you will need a license for each machine so it pays to put all your data on a central device and then have a single computer controlling the backup of that data.

	Pricing	Pros/Cons
Carbonite	$59.95 unlimited file storage	Least Expensive of the three we services that we are showing here. Won’t back up attached or network storage devices. Need a separate license for each machine you want to back up
Mozy	Mozy Home: $4.95 per license/workstation unlimited storage. Mozy Pro: ($3.95/Desktop, $6.95/Server plus $.50) /gb/month	Doesn’t have the individual file size limitation that Jungle Disk has. Can back up NAS and USB Attached Storage Devices. For larger storage needs this service can be more expensive for Mozy Pro (commercial) subscription. If you are storing 100GB’s from a single desktop you cost would be $53.95/month compared to Jungle Disk that would cost $17.25. Mozy would be my choice for home storage of if I have files that exceed 5gb’s in file size.
Jungle Disk	Personal Storage Simply Backup: $2/month includes 5GB free. $.15/gb/month for storage above 5GB’s. Personal Storage Desktop Edition: $3/month includes 5GB free. $.15/gb/month for storage above 5GB’s. Workgroup Storage: $4/user/month + storage fees. First 10GB free. Additional storage $.15/gb/month. Supports groups from 2-100 users. Server Edition Storage: $5/server/month + storage fees. First 10GB free. Additional storage $.15/gb/month.	If you have less than 25gb’s to store offsite the Simply Basic subscription is less expensive than Carbonite or Mozy. If you have multiple computers to backup use the Desktop Storage version. This will give you another network “CLOUD” drive that can be accessed by any of your computers that you have installed the software on. Workgroup Storage gives you the ability to limit what can be accessed by members of your group while providing centralized backup for all the members of your group. If you have people located in different places this gives everyone in the group easy central access through the internet of your data/documents. One big problem though is that files sizes that can be backed up are limited to 5gb’s per file. If you need or want the flexibility this service provides, this is the most cost effective method to store large file capacities from multiple systems and/or locations.