Online backup with CloudBerry Online Backup

Everyone needs to backup their own personal data. The question is more how to take good backups. Many people I know just copy their data to a second harddrive and find that suffient enough for them.

I know there are many online backup solutions. Most of them stores your backup in their own “cloud”. But there is a new breed of backup software now that lets you backup to the cloud of your choice.

What is CloudBerry Online Backup?

In short terms this is a Windows software that backs up your computer, placing the backup in a storage of your choice. It can be a local filesystem (like a secondary drive) but it can also be your favourite cloud like Amazon AWS(both S3 and Glacier), Google Storage or Azure.

You have all the features you expect to find in a backup software like versioning, point-in-time restore and so on.

How does it perform?

I have it running on two computers myself, backing up about 500GB in total. It does not slow down my computers. I have decided to keep a daily backup (as opposed to real-time backup).

Complexity

Is it more complex to set up this type backup? Compared to many online backup solutions (like Jotta, Mozy and Crashplan) it is as you will need to create and maintain an account with your cloud-provider. For me the benefits of this backup configuration makes it worthwhile.

Technorati Tags: Glacier,Cloudberry

Amazon Glacier

Amazon announced Glacier some time ago. Glacier is a very cheap backup storage in the “cloud”. You pay (in Ireland) $0,011 per gigabyte per month.

For a terabyte of backup storage this currently will cost you $11 per month.

If you choose to use Glacier keep in mind that they also charge you for per request and also for restores. Read their terms carefully.

I have chosen to use Glacier for my own backup.

Technorati Tags: Glacier,AWS

USB to serial port–use FTDI

Finding a USB to serial converter that works for me has been a challenging task. For a long time I have used a converter with a Prolific PL-2303 chipset. (I think it is the an end-of-life chip version though.)

For noe apparent reason to me the driver suddenly started to give me lots of bluescreens on my Win7 x64 machine. It also stopped working when receiving lots of data from my switch – like “show ver”.

So I had to search for a new converter. A friend of mine had one with a FTDI/FT232R chipset. So I gave it a try. It works like a charm and the driver is also included with Windows Update.

Technorati Tags: Prolific,FTDI,USB-to-serial