December « 2009 « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

30Dec/090

Making the move to Cloud backup

My Time Machine Hard disk failed 2 days ago. I lost all my backups! Unfortunately I had reinstalled my system just last week and had not yet fully restored from the latest time machine backup. Fortunately I have recovered everything other than my pictures.

I don't want to experience such loss again, so I'm moving towards Cloud based backup. I gain a few things, but loose some as well. The service I selected is Mozy. They provide unlimited storage at an economical rate. However their backup/restore tool for the Mac does not support Proxies (their windows one apparently does). Moreover, Mozy's tool also does not allow me to browse my backups in a fine-grained fashion as Time Machine does. In Time Machine I can restore individual folders and files and browse my backup history over weeks and months. The Mozy tool does not provide such fine-grained history browsing.

Finally, uploading is such a hassle! It took me more than a day to upload a limited subset of data from my laptop (~60GB). Downloading fortunately is faster.

What do I gain from a cloud based backup solution? Hopefully I will not loose my data again.

However because there are certain advantages to local backups as well, I plan to do daily Time machine backups, on a new 1TB HD and weekly cloud backups. As for my pictures, I have a MobileMe subscription and those albums I shared there with friends and family I still have them. So in future I plan to upload all my new pictures to MobileMe.

Tagged as: backup, data No Comments

7Dec/090

Turing (A Novel about Computation) Review

I just completed reading Turing (A Novel about Computation). Its a post-modern novel around a computer programme named "Turing". It has a captivating story line that guides the reader through centuries of human ingenuity and intellectual achievement. The book also presents a successful fusion of history, economics, mathematics, computer science that is brilliant and original. I would definitely recommend it to people who know little about computing, because the book explains a lot about the core principles behind computer science in a down to earth fashion. However sometimes the explanations are so rudimentary and superficial that they are rendered inaccurate. Nevertheless its a good book and is definitely worth a read.