Dear Acronis® Customer, We would like to invite you to participate in the beta testing of our newest product, Acronis® True Image Home 2011 that provides the following new functionality: New User Interface that simplifies all backup and recovery operations and consolidates all information about backups. Better support for Windows 7. You can start, edit, explore or recover backups from Windows 7 Control Panel without starting Acronis® True Image Home 2011. Right-click on a file, folder or volume and see all versions available for recovery. Protect all your Documents, Music, Video, and Pictures in Windows 7 Libraries. Acronis Nonstop Backup™ now protects individual folders and files and supports Acronis® Secure Zone® as a location for Nonstop backups. Content search is now available for Nonstop backups as well. We are looking for feedback from both experienced and novice users about this beta and hope that you will be part of this important program. As a small token of our appreciation, we will award free licenses of Acronis® True Image Home 2011 (when released) to 10 best testers. After beta is complete, on this forum we will announce 10 beta testers who provided feedback that helped us the most to improve the product. If you’d like to join in our current beta program and try our new product, you will need to register first at: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/beta.html In case you are already registered in our beta program you will need to log in to your existing account at: https://www.acronis.com/my/beta/atih/ We hope you will find the Acronis® True Image Home 2011 product useful. We are constantly working to improve our software functions and ease of use. Please send us your feedback through the beta forum. At the forum, you may also review all issues and questions regarding this beta submitted by other beta testers to the Acronis Beta Test Team. Dmitri Joukovski Vice President, Product Management Acronis, Inc.
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Now playing: Grateful Dead – Fire On The Mountain
via FoxyTunes

http://www.nixtutor.com/linux/off-site-encrypted-backups-using-rsync-and-aes/

Good article, even if he is behind on his WP security

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Now playing: Primus – Sinister Exaggerator
via FoxyTunes

Good stuff, me hearties, err, techies : Duplicity http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ & Unison http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Yarrrr !

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Now playing: The Doors – Gloria
via FoxyTunes

Based upon the statements on their page at http://www.rsync.net/ they have a company philosophy that is awfully hard to argue with.

True tech support by fellow engineers, options on single or multiple site data, urging you to encrypt before transmission, and especially the canary.

Very, very nice.  And a ton of options, for the less technical all the way to API writers.

The EFF would approve I bet !

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Now playing: Generation X – Ready Steady Go
via FoxyTunes

Pretty nifty.  Via https://www.sugarsync.com/downloads/android.html

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Now playing: Dave Matthews;Tim Reynolds – Crash Into Me
via FoxyTunes

Hi-Rely RAIDFrame: External Disk-To-Disk Backup Via eSATA

“Are we ready for high-capacity RAID solutions for our backup needs? Today we’re looking at an external device from Highly Reliable Systems that connects to your machine through a single eSATA interface and supports up to 15 drives in a 3U enclosure.”

The full article is at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Raidframe-Server,2449.html

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Now playing: Neil Diamond – Chelsae Morning
via FoxyTunes

As recently noted, I have decided to give Carbonite another shot.

click to enlarge

I am pursuing the strategy of only using it for the more critical files, that I may want to retrieve over the internet. There is no way that you are uploading 3tb of data to them even over a top-level broadband connection (I know now from experience – was just curious to see the speed) let alone getting them back, either, in any sort of timely manner.

So I’ve got just under 16 gigabytes of documents, spreadsheets, source code, etc. up there. A few treasured family pictures, etc.  The rest resides on multiple local drives, which are not hooked up when not needed (see top 3 items here). This also allows me to off-site a few spare drives, to a reasonably flood / fire / etc. resistant spot. Again, as anyone who’s ever had a drive fail can avow the data lost is often worth many times the cost of the drive itself.

And my timing was spot-on. (yes, failure bites . . .)

click to enlarge

SMART errors are impending doom. A number of years ago, I got a bad batch of drives and they’ve been slowly dying off, with a horrible clicking noise as the final symptom upon power-up. The manufacturer replaced them under warranty, but they are old 500g drives anyway : not something I care to keep about, if not reliable.

I have simulated a bare metal restore, and then deactivated Carbonite on my desktop, and activated it on my “new” desktop (laptop) and restored data successfully. It does keep a couple of generations of data (two back revisions of that pesky spreadsheet, etc.) but by default it only backs it up once per 24 hour period. You can override this behavior, but only on a per file basis, not globally.

I chose to keep control of my own encryption keys : the .pem keyfile is stored on multiple other drives, and keys as well as on a couple of remote servers. This still presupposes trusting the manufacturer of your crypto, in this case the Carbonite folks. (though in their proverbial shoes, I’d just as soon be able to tell anyone that it’s not physically possible to give them the data, they need to bother that individual customer . . .)

Carbonite has worked well in the couple of weeks I’ve been using it. While they also have a Mac version, I’ve not tested it out.

click to enlarge

All in all, keeping realistic expectations about what you are going to get, I would say this is a good data file backup system for a secondary backup.  Just realize it is not designed to do bare metal restores, it is for specific data files that you choose, such as “My Documents” etc.  For all of my local home backups, I’m using old sata drives via this esata dock and I also have a couple HD’s off site in town, and a limited amount of data rsync’ed remotely as well.

Once you’ve had data failure that costs a lot in hassle, grief, or dollars, you tend to get better prepared

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Now playing: The Beach Boys – Wouldn’t It Be Nice
via FoxyTunes

Time to get the local  / on-site backup system upgraded   I’ve been relying on the Sabrent USB-DSC5 Serial ATA or IDE 2.5-/3.5-Inch to USB 2.0 Cable Converter Adapter with Power Supply for some time, but of course it is slow and rather manual. It’s a great thing to have on hand for when you need to interface with a bare laptop or desktop drive, but it’s got a number of cables hung all over, and of course it’s only running at USB2 speeds (not so good to back up lots of data)

A small step in the right direction was to go for the following :

eSATA USB to SATA External HDD Dock for Dual 2.5 or 3.5in Hard Drive

37 inches Round External eSATA Data Cable , I-Type Red, (94 cm)

Syba SD-SA2PEX-2E PCIe 2x e-SATA Ports with SIL3132 Chipset

I figured it was also time to go for a sale item : Acer Aspire AS1410-8414 11.6-Inch Sapphire Blue Laptop – 6 Hour Battery Life This was at 299.99 shipped during the “Black Friday” things at Amazon.

This “notebook” will get a full review later, but essentially it is a little bigger than the EEE PC’s I’ve used, yet still pretty portable, and with quite a bit more processor (64 bit) & memory capability (4 gigabytes) on board. I consider that pretty important before loading Windows 7 x64 on board.

For the sake of convenience I also ordered another D-Link DUB-H7 High Speed USB 2.0 7-Port Hub and some additional flash drives : SanDisk Cruzer Micro 16 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive SDCZ6-016G-A11

The hub because I can always use the additional powered channels, and the flash drives as quick / portable backup devices. I also like to keep a copy of Windows 7 on each, set to install from flash (much faster than DVD install) : 32 bit on one, and 64 bit on another.

Alas, this is going to be a challenging Tech week, I can tell. All I can report for now is that the current revision of Acronis Trueimage Home 2010 (version number 13.0.6053) doesn’t seem to work well with my TrueCrypt’d boot partition setup, under Windows 7 x64 [Version 6.1.7600].

Back to the drawing board – I’d really like to upgrade from DriveImage XML at some point [ahem] but at least it works!

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Now playing: Eric Cartman – Come Sail Away
via FoxyTunes

Yes, for the “second tier” backup of only the more critical files, off-site.

More to follow.    http://nanotechnopolis.com/2009/08/18/carbonite-online-backup/