Posts Tagged ‘storage’

Comparing 1 GB of Storage

Side by side view of 1 GB 20 years ago and 1 GB today.

Must Have Application for Thumb Drives

It’s a sign of the time, you can buy a thumb drive almost anywhere.  I have even seen them in Gas Sta­tions in the Omaha area.

There are many rea­sons to use these dri­ves: size, por­ta­bi­lity con­ve­nience, and sto­rage space, all come to mind quickly.  A lot of my exter­nal users do not even take their lap­tops to mee­tings any­more because they can keep all their pre­sen­ta­tions and such on a thumb drive and just plug into any machines.

On the other side of the coin, there are some inhe­rent risks to the trans­por­ta­tion of these devi­ces.  You may for­get them on site, lose them while get­ting something from your poc­ket, so on and so forth.  No mat­ter the rea­son, if you lose your drive, all of that data is now avai­la­ble to the per­son that finds it.

Here are some exam­ples of the type of data that can be lost by anyone:

Firm ‘broke rules’ over data loss

Home Sec­re­tary Jac­qui Smith has bla­med a pri­vate con­trac­tor for losing the details of thou­sands of cri­mi­nals, held on a com­pu­ter memory stick.

Tax web­site shut down as memory stick with sec­ret per­so­nal data of 12million is found in a pub car park

Minis­ters have been for­ced to order an emer­gency shut­down of a key Govern­ment com­pu­ter sys­tem to pro­tect millions of people’s pri­vate details.

The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park con­tai­ning con­fi­den­tial pass­co­des to the online Govern­ment Gate­way sys­tem, which covers everything from tax returns to par­king tickets.

Two exam­ples may not seem like a large amount, but if you look at the amount of data that was lost in these two exam­ples you will rea­lize how much data is at stake.

With that being said, I have found a free appli­ca­tion that will help with this.  Rohos Mini Drive Encryp­tion.  This app has a very small foot­print and once your drive is setup, you don’t have to ins­tall soft­ware on any other com­pu­ter to access that encryp­ted file.

Accor­ding to the deve­lo­pers web­site they list the fea­tu­res as:

• Crea­tes a vir­tual encryp­ted par­ti­tion volume (disk) within a USB flash drive free space
• Auto­ma­ti­cally detects your USB stick con­fig and crea­tes encryp­ted partition
• Pro­gram does not require ins­ta­lla­tion to work with encryp­ted par­ti­ton on a guest com­pu­ter. You can start it right from USB drive
• Encryp­ted par­ti­tion is pro­tec­ted by password
• Encryp­tion is auto­ma­tic and on-the-fly
• Encryp­tion algo­rithm: AES 256 bit key length. NIST approved.
• Rohos Disk Brow­ser to open encryp­ted par­ti­tion without having Admin rights
• Vir­tual Key­board — to pro­tect your encryp­ted disk pass­word from a key logger
• Auto­run Fol­der. Saved program’s/file’s short­cut will auto­ma­ti­cally start/open up upon disk connection
• The limit of encryp­ted par­ti­tion size is 2 GB

I find the soft­ware very easy to use and intui­tive.  In no time, I had car­ved 500 megs on one of my dri­ves and was moving files over to the encryp­ted por­tion.  To try out the func­tio­na­lity I han­ded the disk to my co-worker and watched as they put it in and sure enough none of the data sho­wed.  Just an exe­cu­ta­ble.  When run, the pass­word cha­llenge screen comes up.  I really do like the idea of a vir­tual key­board, par­ti­cu­larly if you are on a com­pu­ter that you do not know.  Bet­ter safe then sorry in this world.  Once the correct pass­word is ente­red and accep­ted an explo­rer win­dow is ope­ned and all your files are acces­si­ble.  It did take a few moments for me to see how to add new files to the encryp­ted volume.  Just so you know, in the explo­rer win­dow you can right click and import file.

As I said before, in this world, encrypt everything.  I highly recom­mend this pro­gram to anyone with a thumb drive.

Online Backup

A few days ago, I dis­cus­sed a bac­kup tool named Cobian and I pro­mi­sed to look into online space for off­site storage.

While loo­king around a I found quite a few, but focu­sed on three.  I will go over some of my ini­tial impres­sions, and direct links to the site (so the FTC doesn’t chase me down for get­ting something for giving my opinion).

The three I will be tal­king about are iDrive.com, Mozy.com, and Humyo.com.  Now the first thing that’s impor­tant to ever­yone is, how much space do I get.  iDrive and Mozy both have 2 gigs for free, but this link (I pro­mise I get nothing) will get you a 250 MB upgrade on Mozy.  Humyo might as well be called Humon­gous giving you a whop­ping 10 GB online sto­rage.  Now this is all FREE.

Of course, if you find you are run­ning out of space, you can pay for upgra­des.  For $4.95 a month you get expand to 150 GB on iDrive, Mozy gets to be a bit more expen­sive, using the pay as you go model at $3.95 a month per 500 MB.  My opi­nion on that is if you are paying that, pay for hos­ting.  In the odd case that you will need more then 10 GB for bac­king up your most cri­ti­cal data on Humyo it will run you $6.99 a month to get 100 GB.

So besi­des space, I am sure there are pro­bably other things to con­si­der.  Let me think…

How do I get my data from my com­pu­ter to my sto­rage place.  Well all three have a client that you can ins­tall on your com­pu­ter.  Though Humyo requi­res you have a paid account to use the client.  It does, howe­ver, have a web con­sole you can drag and drop into a java upload client.

The clients are nice and small, quick easy down­loads, so I won’t get into that.  Some of the things that I noti­ced on the client.

For the Mozy client, it auto­ma­ti­cally gives you a recom­men­ded bac­kup set, inc­lu­ding Thun­der­bird data.  Since I use Thun­der­bird, that is handy to have.  It also gives you two options of data encryp­tion.  If you push have VoIP pho­nes, or band­width issues in gene­ral, you can throttle the appli­ca­tion as well as sche­dule your bac­kups for slow net­work times.

iDri­ves’ client is not as fully fea­tu­red (at least not to the naked eye).  The ini­tial bac­kup set is your docu­ments and set­tings fol­der.  With some dig­ging around you can setup band­width thrott­ling also.  But it does have a synch option (quick delete if you erase a fol­der and want it pulled out of your bac­kup) and con­ti­nuous bac­kup.  Though I am not sure how often it checks.

Since you have to have a paid account for the Humyo client, I will not review it.

Ok.  We have now bac­ked up all the data and sure enough, we have to refor­mat or our machine, boooo.  Or we just got a new com­pu­ter and we want to get our docu­ments back, yeah!

How do we get it back.  Of course for both iDrive and Mozy you can use the client and res­tore. But… I want more.  It’s free, I want it all.

For Mozy you have a two options: You can use a vir­tual drive (crea­ted when the client is ins­ta­lled) and drag and drop or pay for a DVD to be crea­ted and FedEx to deli­ver the disk.

With iDrive, you can go to the site and login.  Going into the res­tore area you can use a Java applet to down­load your files.  Or you can get a second down­load to create a vir­tual drive and go through your Win­dows Explorer.

Well Folks.  I hope that helps a bit.  Remem­ber, bac­kups are important…Before the sys­tem crashes.

Cobian Backup Utility

A few posts ago I made a ton­gue in cheek com­ment to bac­king up.  It did get me thin­king a little bit about good FREE, and you will notice I like free, bac­kup uti­li­ties that offe­red a good variety of bac­kup options (loca­tion, span­ning, archi­ving, and so on).

I came across Cobian.  This uti­lity has everything I believe the stan­dard user will need.  It can back up to net­work, FTP or disc.  The FTP is a great func­tion I think as it keeps your data sto­red off­site.  The one draw­back to that option is that you have to have FTP ser­ver to upload to, which can cost some money, though I will look for free data storage.

As I pla­yed with the appli­ca­tion it had a lot of fea­tu­res I would not have expec­ted, inc­lu­ding being able to sche­dule full or inc­re­men­tal upda­tes.  It will even send you an email follo­wing the bac­kup so that you can set it and for get it.

Set­ting up a sche­du­led run is easy as pie.  In the main inter­face you will create a new sche­dule and then select the tasks.  In the options of the task you can make selec­tions inc­lu­ding volume sha­dow copy, that is a great option so that sys­tem files will back up and you will not get the in use error.

You will be able to select the loca­tion of the files to back up: all dri­ves, just a spe­ci­fic fol­der, even exc­lu­sions of files or fol­der (do you really need to bac­kup your win­dows direc­tory when you truly just want per­so­nal stuff bac­ked up?).  You can even have the files archi­ved in either 7zip or win­zip, or just bac­ked up without com­pres­sion.  I would recom­mend using the com­pres­sion since it does save space on disc or FTP upload.  The one bene­fit to not doing that is you don’t have to open a span­ned archive (over mul­ti­ple disc) or down­load the full archive to get one sin­gle file.

Please try it out.  Hope­fully soon I will find out more about about free, repu­ta­ble online storage.

Direct Down­load:

  Cobian Bac­kup (9.8 MiB, 125 hits)