Category: backup

  • Living in the future, Apple style, some day

    Tech journalist Harry McCracken has an excellent post up about the implications of the latest Macbook Air line. He noticed a bit in Apple’s press release that I had overlooked: Apple® today unveiled an all new MacBook Air®, the first of a next generation of notebooks which will replace mechanical hard disks and optical drives…

  • Assembling a network storage server from spare bits

    I have a pile of old hard drives sitting in an attic closet gathering dust — but out of the hands of identity thieves, not polluting the water supply and generally staying out of trouble. So when I saw a diskless version of the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ super-cheap, I decided to buy it and conduct…

  • Google slashes price of online storage vs. Apple, others

    (Update April, 2012: Google finally opened its GDrive service and promptly raised the price of storage. Doh!) In a much-commented-upon announcement today that I first saw on Rex Hammock’s blog, Google said it would start selling online storage space for keeping any kinds of files. Previously, the company’s cloud-based storage was limited for use with…

  • Mac users should stick with online backup Mozy

    For more than two years, I’ve been quite happily using the Mozy online backup service. Now owned by storage giant EMC, Mozy offers unlimited backup space for under $5 a month per computer and a slick Mac program that automatically uploads new files in the background (there’s also a Windows version but I don’t use…

  • Apple makes deleting a Boot Camp partition super easy

    A couple of years back, when I upgraded the hard drive on my then-new Macbook Pro, I used Apple’s incredible Boot Camp software to install Windows Vista. Using Boot Camp, you’re not just simulating running Windows under Mac OS X — you can actually boot up into “pure” Windows on your Apple hardware. The only…

  • Switching Time Machine drives easy but not quick

    Back in December, 2007, when I upgraded my super-duper 24″ iMac to Mac OS X 10.5, I immediately turned on the Time Machine automatic backup program. Seeing as how I had a less-than-half-full 500 GB hard drive in the iMac, I figured I’d be fine using a 500 GB Western Digital MyBook Pro external drive…

  • An update on online backup: Mozy’s still good

    I just posted a lengthy comment at MacIntouch about using Mozy for online backup, so I thought it might be worth re-posting here: I have been using Mozy since April 2007 on both my iMac and Powerbook Pro. It is fast and reliable, working in the middle of the night to upload new or changed…

  • PCMag review misses Mozy’s greatness

    PC Magazine has posted a bunch of reviews of online back-up service, including Pressman household favorite, Mozy. I use Mozy on two computers to automatically back up almost 120 GB of data — that’s everything I care about: music, movies, photos, documents, email, the kitchen sink. It’s an unlimited service that cost $208 for 24…

  • Apple’s Time Capsule plays nice with Verizon’s FIOS

    Wow, that was easy. Sometimes Apple’s auto-magic, self-configuring stuff works just as advertised. Sometimes, it’s Apple’s penchant for knowing how to simplify the front-end to hide the wacky back-end that carries the day. In the case of the new Time Capsule wireless base station with hard drive, it’s both. Phew. I’ve been using OS X…

  • Zenfolio, Lightroom and the art of digital picture maintenance

    The intersection of everything with magical, behind-the-scenes connections continues to blow me away. Today, I’ve been admiring the photo archiving and display site Zenfolio along with a nifty, high-powered plug-in for Adobe Lightroom written by software consultant Jeffrey Friedl that makes uploading photos a snap. The cool thing about Lightroom’s export system it that can…