Last week, I hit a scary snag when updating my MacBook. I got stuck in an endless loop of “Register with .Mac” requests, which made me worried I’d lost all my profile information. The solution was simple, boot into Safe Mode by holding the shift key down, then reboot. But my concern was raised.

So, I reviewed my backup and recovery plans for my MacBook and my G5 desktop. To be honest, the plans were better than nothing, but not as good and automated as I want. Up to then, my solution was to use Maxtor One-touch external firewire drives, and SuperDuper to make clones of most of my data.

I did this weekly, or pretty much weekly. Because these are powered drives, I feel that it is important to turn them off between backups. That way a lightning strike (I’ve had one before, ugly) wouldn’t destroy the backups. So, it is quite a manual process. I’ve always intended to get a couple more of these cheap drives, and then cycle the backups to some place offsite, or at least to my barn which is quite a ways from the main house.

After reading reviews of the various free online backup services, and the paid remote backup solutions as well, I narrowed my decision down to either Jungle Disk with Amazon S3 (unlinked because Amazon makes it tricky to link for some reason. Just google it.) or Mozy Online Backup.

Both seem quite nice and exactly what I want. Using them as my remote backup solution, I would basically just run a background program, select what I want backed up, and forget about it. The program will back up incrementally in the background.

At first, I was certain I should go with Jungle Disk, since the service is just so geekily great, and almost startlingly cheap. I estimate my full backup set to be about 20G from the laptop. Using Amazon s3, that is about $3 per month. During my test runs, I’m only backing up a couple gigs, so that would only be $0.30! Nice.

But, I decided to go with Mozy Online Backup, at least for now. They offer a free 2 gigs of online storage, which is just perfect for me to test the service and to back up at least the most critical data. So far, I am extremely impressed. The backups are encrypted, so my data isn’t being sent in the clear. Configuring my backup set was trivial, and so far it seems to really be what they claim, “set it and forget it.”

If the first month or two of tests work out, I’ll upgrade to the unlimited plan. $5 per month per computer. It’ll take a long while to get the first set done when I add some of my non-critical-but-I’d-hate-to-lose-it data.

[tags]online backup,backup[/tags]

I’m taking a Spanish language class, in prep for an extended trip next year, and I’ve been wanting a great flashcard program. I found it in Genius (Mac only), which is Freeware and exactly what I wanted.

I had been using iFlash which was good except for the fact that it sometimes chokes on importing accented characters. It was particularly nice to use the integrated flashcard library with thousands of premade flashcard decks. However, it was just a flashcard program. Very straightforward.

Genius uses a spaced repetition system to coax recall. It keeps asking you the same cards, spacing them out longer and longer the more you get them correct. What’s more it uses a “fuzzy” matching system, so you can ignore punctuation and accented characters when you type the responses.

I really see some progress in my language vocabulary acquisition now, in a very short period of practice. This is exactly the program I wanted.

[tags]language,flashcard,icard,genius,mac[/tags]

I’ve been using a Mac as my primary development and personal operating system since OSX 10.1, a few years. In that time, I’ve tried a lot of software, and I’ve developed my own working style. But what is really interesting is how I’ve come to appreciate the services the operating system and its stock apps all work together.

With the glue of Applescript, well defined APIs, and more recently the incredible Quicksilver, my standard working environment has become a cloud of apps that interoperate surprisingly well. Since I realized this was happening a while ago, I’ve been watching and investigating apps that seem to "get" this design ethic.

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