We’ve Moved!
June 12, 2009
I have decided to make an honest blog out of Web2 and More and to give it its own domain so I can make it into more of an overall resource.
The new URL is http://web2andmore.net/blog
Cloudberry Leverages Amazon’s Cloud Power
June 7, 2009
If you hover around the fringes of the Web2 environment you may know that Amazon has and is continuing to develop its Web2 cloud base infrastructure. The Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is widely available but not widely known about, but anyone who has bought books or any other service from Amazon is already part way there to being able to use Amazon’s substantial cloud storage facilities.
The Big Question of how to access this storage vault is answered by new start up Cloudberry which has developed a simple but powerful client that interfaces with Amazon’s S3 service to back up files from your PC or server. Cloudberry is currently in beta and free for bloggers, education and non profit organisations.
Once you download the 3mb file and get it installed you see that Cloudberry works in a very different manner to the likes of Dropbox, box, etc because you need to set up your own Amazon S3 account – and for the faint hearted this is demonstrated by a handy “how to” video at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=create-amazon-s3-video.
The process is not complex and and if you already have an Amazon account (is there anyone out there that hasn’t?) you are taken through easy steps to generate access and secret keys which are placed into Cloudberry Explorer and then you are walked through setting up a bucket – god knows why it is called that! – and then asked to name the backup set. So far, so very easy.
Next comes the obvious choice of what to back up and a simple folder and checkbox interface allows you to choose from full folders to specific files on your hard drive with the option to back up – or not to back up – by file types, to set personalised encryption and compression, scheduling and comprehensive purge options. Once the backup set is established you are ready to roll and there is a button to activate a manual backup if you opt out of scheduled backups.
So, what sets Cloudberry apart from other services? Cloudberry is ideal for the advanced IT person who will sniff at the off-the-shelf offerings from Dropbox, Box, Mozy etc. and who wants more control over a bespoke backup service. A summary of what Cloudberry offers the more technical individual or company includes:
- Register and connect to any number of Amazon S3 accounts
- Work with any number of Amazon S3 accounts simultaneously
- Fast copy files between your S3 accounts
- Share buckets and files located on Amazon S3 with other users
- Create, browse, and delete S3 buckets
- Copy and move files between Amazon S3 and your local computer
- Set up file access permissions
- Automate common tasks with Microsoft Powershell
- Generate external URLs
- Copy/Move in background
- Support for MD5 to ensure files are not corrupted while transferred to S3
- Copy files from Windows Explorer
- Support for Amazon CloudFront service
- Support for CNAMEs
- Support for time limited or signed URLs
- Apply ACL list to child objects (files inside a bucket)
- Remember user settings
- Rename objects in S3
- Support for Requester Pays Option for Amazon S3
- Support for streamingcloud.com FLV encoder for Amazon S3
- Built-in feedback form
A key factor in using Cloudberry will be the charges from Amazon and these are:
$0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
$0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB
Data Transfer
$0.030 per GB – all data transfer in April 1, 2009 through June 30, 2009 – 3rd Anniversary Celebration!
(Note: data transfer in will return to its normal price of $0.100 per GB on July 1)
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
*There is no charge for delete requests
Storage
$0.180 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.170 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.160 per GB – next 400 TB / month of storage used
$0.150 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB
Data Transfer
$0.030 per GB – all data transfer in April 1, 2009 through June 30, 2009 – 3rd Anniversary Celebration!
(Note: data transfer in will return to its normal price of $0.100 per GB on July 1)
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Requests
$0.012 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
$0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
Addendum:
Andrey from Cloudberry has emailed me these comments on the above piece:
I t is going to become a commercial product and currently in beta. It
will target less sophisticated users who want to employ Amazon S3 only
as a secure backup storage.”
Tungle Launches Tungle.me Add On
June 4, 2009
A brief note about a new service from the folks at Tungle. Apologies for the cut and paste job and for not being a fuller update but hands full elsewhere …
Today, Tungle has released Tungle.me – the simplest way to make meetings happen.
Tungle.me gives you a personalised URL where contacts can see your availability and quickly schedule a meeting by proposing multiple meeting times without ever having to sign up to Tungle.
They don’t have to sign up to do it, and you can easily reply to meeting invitations, even from your iPhone, BlackBerry or smartphone.
Tungle has also released Tungle,me Facebook and Web Widgets to bring the power of Tungle.me to your Facebook profile and favourite web page!
Summary of Online Backup and Collaboration Tools
May 24, 2009
A brief summary of the four online backup and collaboration services that I have reviewed over the last week:
Mozy: Purely a back up service without the collaboration tools of the others featured here. However, as a backup tool it is excellent. My wife says I’d forget my balls if they weren’t in a sack and Mozy automatically protects my vital files and documents by running quietly in the background and kicking into life at 18:00 each day to do any incremental backups that are needed. Provides 2gb free and well priced upgrade option. A five star program I would not be without.
Dropbox: A slick interface with greased lightning syncing between the desktop and the server, Dropbox offers 2gb free of charge but the paid for upgrades are good value for money. Each main folder, Business, Personal, Share etc can have sub-folders so you can fine tune Dropbox to work as you want it to. Flexible collaborative facilities allows you to share holidays photographs or work on business files with colleagues.
iDrive: I strong suspect that iDrive caused major problems on my desktop which necessitated having to using Acronis True Image to reinstate everything. Support team failed to answer an email asking for assistance so I assume this is a known problem they don’t want to admit to. iDrive gets my “take it down a dark alley and give it a good kicking” award of the week!
Box: The heavyweight of the offerings looked at this week and aimed unashamedly at the coirporater and business end of the market. Box provides a plethora of value added services such as photo-editing, document signing and faxing (what’s a fax!). If box were a girlfriend you’d happily take it home to meet your mother!
Box – the choice for corporate online collaboration
May 23, 2009
This is the last in the short series of reviews looking at online storage and backup facilities.
Box is one of the more established providers of online storage and sharing facilities and its interface shows this in its slick and easy to use appearance. The almost Zen Minimalist look shows Box’s confidence in the way the back office features work and integrate with each other and there are no fancy bells and whistles, just good, honest services that everyone will find useful, from the lone hobbyist to the biggest corporation.
That said, Box unashamedly aims itself at the business market with the Business Option providing the ability to brand your Box stuff with a corporate logo. The full list of features is so long I won’t even bother to list them all but you can catch them on the Box web page here.
Like Dropbox which is reviewed here, Box makes online collaboration easy with the ability to share files up to 1gb with colleagues and external partners. You can even timeline documents and links to expire at set times and install powerful password protection. Heavyweight features here include the ability to create workspaces which goes beyond simple file sharing and builds in file commenting, an update option and group discussions, albeit at an extra price.
Other “pick and mix” options include OpenBox which creates a collaborative sharing with third party services that allow you to add extra features such as electronic signing of documents, editing of word processing documents and spreadsheets, photo editing, sending a fax (what’s a fax!!!!!) and linking up to the corporate Facebook account. Oh, and it also provides a direct link to Zoho which rivals Google for the provision of word processing, spreadsheets and presentation services.
While more expensive than other offerings in this sector, Box isn’t going to break the bank at corporate level. For $15 an end user a month you get unlimited collaboration folders, 30gb of online storage 24/7 phone support, custom branding, an admin console and more. If you are wary of putting up money up fron there is a free seven day trial.
There’s an individual pricing and for $7.95 a month you get five collaborative folders, 5gb of storage and 24/7 email support.
There is also a free version which provides 1gb of storage but might be good enough as a teaser so wary enterprises or SMEs (small to medium size enterprises) can dip their toe in the water and try out the basic concept of file sharing and storage.
Box has been around since 2005 and currently handles a quarter billion files every year for two million customers.
I will do a summary of the four services I have looked at this week, but to be honest if I was an SME or corporate entity looking at this sector I would happily whip out my gold card and plump for Box. It has the infrastructure, pedigree and credibility than oozes confidence that would provide me as an end user with the warm, cuddling feeling that comes from knowing I made the right choice.
Overall recommendation. Excellent. If this was a girlfriend you’d happily take her home to meet your mother!
Will iDrive Screw Up Your Net Access?
May 22, 2009
Malodorous solids hit rotating blades on the Sunday night. I noticed that my Mozy automatic online backup, which kicks in at 18:00 came up with an error message saying it could not connect. When trying to access the Mozy site on the web the connection was like treacle and normally my through-the-air broadband link is more reliable than the taxman asking for money. Thinking it was just a temporary glitch – hey, it’s technology, it’s bound to turn up its toes at some stage – I shut down for the night.
Monday afternoon I was unable to access any Google offerings like Calendar etc and anything that required password access was, how can I put this gently, screwed! While I could not access Gmail through Firefox I was picking it up through Thunderbird which told me that the Google empire had not crashed and burned. Curiouser and curiouser!
I fired off an email to my ISP support asking if there was a throttle on the connection and then started to look a little closer at the problem and realised that it appeared that one of my ports – 443 – was not open, hence the inability to connect to password protected sites and Google. I sent an email to IDrive to see if they could throw any light on this as it seemed to me that the problem started when I installed and ran their software.
I had installed the iDrive software on Sunday and started to do a test upload but it was sluggish and, to be honest, I hated the amateurish interface so I shut it down and removed it using Revo Uninstaller. One of the plus points for Revo is that it clears out a stack of garbage from the registry when it uninstalls software but I wasn’t prepared for almost 2500 registry entries that were being nuked from the iDrive uninstall process!
By Wednesday I had not received a reply from iDrive and was unsure how to re-open port 443 so I decided that I had the choice of the nuclear option – reformatting the disk – or restoring it using Acronis True Image which I had installed some months ago. I took the latter course.
Within just over an hour of inserting the Acronis boot disk and nervously following the onscreen instructions I was up and running and accessing all sites that were previously blocked. Okay, some of the software and other stuff was slightly out of date as I had not regularly updated the mirror image of my C Drive but in these instances I adopt a deeply philosophical approach to life – shit happens!
Thanks to Xmarks I brought all my bookmarks up to date, Dropbox had kept important files safe and sound and Google had preserved emails and calendar details. Job done!
Now I cannot say conclusively that iDrive caused the problem but it seems suspicious that the problem, which I had never experienced before, occured when that software was on my system and their support team never replied to my email. All I can say is that it will never go onto my PC again because once bitten, twice shy.
Dropbox Takes The Drag Out Of Cloud Storage
May 17, 2009
In the second of a series of reviews of online storage and backup systems we look at Dropbox.
Dropbox takes the concept of dragging and dropping files from one location to another to a higher plane by creating a Dropbox folder on your hard drive which syncs with the Dropbox server on the Internet. This seamless syncing of files makes Dropbox one of the hottest online storage, syncing, backup and sharing services around.
As ever you sign up to a Dropbox account and download the software which provides the link between your PC and the server. Installation and set up isn’t going to give anyone a headache and is simplicity itself; you will be up and running in a matter of minutes.
By default the Dropbox folder which is created in your My Documents contains Personal, Photos, Public and Shared Stuff sub-folders but there is nothing to stop you creating and adding your own personal folders. For example if I am in the PC based Dropbox folder and create a sub folder called Blog Stuff, it immediately creates a mirror folder on my web-based folders section. Incidentally, you do not have to put the My Dropbox folder in My Documents, you can install it anywhere on your PC folder system. This is important to bear in mind because when I first installed Dropbox and populated it with a stack of photographs for testing, Mozy picked up the new folder and included it into its automatic backup and punched a very large hole in my 2gb limit.
To populate your Dropbox service just drag and drop files, photographs, documents, spreadsheets, etc. into the relevant sub folder on your Dropbox and they are immediately synced with your net based service.
Let’s put theory aside and see how this works on a day to day basis.
Let’s say you are working on a pitch document at work and when you get home you come over all conscientious and feel like putting in another hour of work on this. Open the fridge, get out a chilled can of San Miguel, log into your Dropbox account, call down the document, do whatever work you need to do on it, shut it down and the amended document is ready for you when you get in to work the next day. Feel free to miss out the San Miguel step if you want but I don’t recommend it!
In common with other similar services Dropbox allows you to share files with others by placing them in the Shared Stuff folder. So if that pitch document is a joint effort, you can type in your input, email a collabtorator and ask them to make any changes live and online and by the time you get home and crack open that chilled beer you can work on the file with your colleague’s amendments and comments.
If you suffer from senior moments and you arrive somewhere and forgot to pack that USB memory stick with vital documents you can simply log into your Dropbox from any PC and download the relevant documents.
A serious plus point for Dropbox is that it retains versions of whatever you are working on so if you screw up that pitch document you can revert to the previous version and start afresh. Also, if you delete a document Dropbox generously gives you breathing space which allows you to restore the file before it is permanently deleted. To access prior deleted files, simply click the “Show deleted files” link on the file browser at your Dropbox home page. You can find previous revisions of files by right clicking the file from your desktop, clicking the Dropbox submenu, and selecting “Revisions”. You can also access revisions via the “Revisions” submenu on the online file browser.
Security minded individuals will be pleased to see that all transport of file data and file metadata occurs over SSL and all files are encrypted with AES-256 before being stored on the Dropbox backend.
Like Mozy, Dropbox offers you 2gb free of charge but if you need more space you have buy into the Pro service at $9.99 a month which nets you 50gb or the premium offering at $19.99 a month and this buys you an eye watering 100gb of space. This isn’t the cheapest service around. iDrive, which I will also be reviewing, gives you 150GB for $4.99 a month but its a personal choice and for reasons I will explain later I think I would prefer to opt for Dropbox over iDrive’s cheaper alternatives.
Unlike Mozy there is no timed or scheduled backup of files, but Dropbox will argue there is no need as all syncing is carried out in real time.
The more I played with Dropbox the more I liked its slick interface and simplicity. In the time it has been on my PC I have been revising the hierarchy of my desktop based folders so that a lot more of my stuff is synced with Dropbox and it looks as though the generous 2gb of free space will be quickly consumed and I’ll need to go for the Pro option.
Don’t just take my word for it, Brendan Dawes likes Dropbox, too!
Overall recommendation: Easy to use with a lovely slick interface. *****
Safeguard Your Data Assets With Mozy
May 16, 2009
Faster broadband connections have opened up a complete new world on the
Internet, none more so than in online storage and backup facilities.
There seems little point in buying external hard drives, no matter how
cheap they have become, when you can simply transfer documents,
photographs, music, etc. to nest in the cloud.
There are probably hundreds of services offering online storage in one form or another. Some offer a simple £/$ per gigabyte facility, others offer so much free space and then a simple fee based package for everything over that. Some offered stacks of free storage while in beta and then landed users with a “lose your data or pay the fee” option when they went live in the wild.
For this series of articles I shall concentrate on five offerings and start with one that I consider the best – Mozy – and then look at Dropbox, Box.net, Livedrive and iDrive.
Mozy is an online backup facility pure and simple. It doesn’t pretend to offer file sharing but what it does is provide is a five star service to protect your PC based assets. Simply sign up, download and install the software and that is almost all you have to do. Mozy Home offers 2gb of free space and unlimited backups for $4.95 a month thereafter. There is also an industrial strength version for commercial enterprises, but for the sake of this feature, I’ll concentrate on Mozy Home.
The features that Mozy boasts are:
- Open/locked file support: Mozy will back up your documents whether they’re open or closed.
- 128-bit SSL encryption: The same technology used by banks secures your data during the backup process.
- 448-bit Blowfish encryption: Secures your files while in storage, providing peace of mind that your private data is safe from hackers.
- Automatic: Schedule the times to back up and MozyHome does the rest.
- New and changed file detection: MozyHome finds and saves the smallest changes.
- Backs up Outlook files: Disaster-proof email protection.
- Block-level incremental backup:
After the initial backup, MozyHome only backs up files that have been
added or changed, making subsequent backups lightning fast.
Mozy, once installed, scans your My Documents folder and looks for the most likely candidates for backup, documents, spreadsheets, photographs and makes a backup list from them. This “backup for dummies” option is not to be recommended. If you are on the 2gb freebie you don’t want Mozy to upload the contents of your My Music folder which will ensure you crash right through your storage limit one day one!
It will pay dividends to spend a little time configuring Mozy to work just how you want it to. Right click the Mozy icon in the taskbar.
The first option is to create a backup set and tell Mozy which files and folders you want backing up. This is basic and there’s no real problems here, just be wary that you ensure the folders you don’t want backed up.
Next, set the schedule. I have Mozy back up my sets every day at 6pm but there is a host of other options including an instruction not to backup if the CPU is chuntering away over a pre-set percentage and it will alert you if backups haven’t been performed at preset days. The options tag provides you with the ability to warn you when you go over limit, provide support for EFS encrypted files, support for backing up open files and stacks more.
Understandably the first back up will take some time depending on how much you are blasting up into the ether but subsequent backups using incremental backups will be lightning fast.
So far, so simple and it gets even better when you need to restore your files when malodorous solids hit rotating blades – and I speak from painful, first hand experience! So when crap does hit the fan, log into your account on Mozy, click on restore and from the log there choose which stuff you want to bring back to your PC. Once this has been done Mozy goes away and collates all these files into a compressed file and when completed fires off an email to you with the location of the compressed file to download.
Again, it you are doing a complete download of all your data this might take a couple of hours so go out and have a beer or something and relax knowing that all is going to be well in the end. Once you have downloaded the file onto your PC just decompress the file and restore your precious data to wherever you want. That is all there is to it.
I have had to use the Mozy restore facility on a couple of occasions for a small number of downloads but it has handled everything impeccably and although I have an external hard drive it is nothing more than someone to put my MP3 collection – everything else goes to Mozy.
Overall Recommendation: Easy to use and highly reliable. *****
A Quick Vox Pop On Google
May 9, 2009
Track Your Time And Fees Online
May 9, 2009
Keeping track of time spent on projects needs to be effectively managed or you run the risk of undercharging clients for work done. This is great for clients but bad for your bank balance and what in pre credit crunch times used to be called a bank manager!
One of the more usable is 88 Miles which features:
- Punch in and punch out of your projects as you work on them. Don’t bother trying to remember when you started or stopped a job – let 88 Miles do the heavy lifting. You can enter time manually afterwards though, so don’t fret if you forget to punch in. It’s so simple, it should be illegal.
- Real time, on screen timers. 88 Miles has on screen timers that update in real-time, so no more second guessing how much time you have spent on a job. See how long you have spent in the current session and how long you have spent overall. There is even a daily summary page, so you can see what you have done during the day.
- Time Budgeting. Set time limits for projects and be notified when a project is over budget.
- Project and Shift tagging. Find and group projects and shifts easily with the tagging engine. You can use the tags as a filter for all your reports and your timesheets.
- Simple, yet powerful reporting Get the information you need quickly. Run graphical reports on projects and staff members — the filters are simple enough that you will use them, but powerful enough to be useful.
- Instant invoicing with Saasu | the web finance engine. 88 Miles has partnered with Saasu | the web finance engine to provide integration with their invoicing application: NetAccounts, enabling you to generate invoices from your timesheets quickly and easily. We make your time tracking simple — they make your accounts simple.
- Print off itemised timesheets. Does your client want to see where their money is going? 88 Miles can print nicely formatted itemised time sheets, as well as export XML and CSV files, so you can drop them in to your own documents. Do you charge in blocks of time? The time sheets support rounding — why do the work that a computer do for you?
- Punch in when you are on the road. With the mobile version of 88 Miles, you can punch in and out out of your active projects via your mobile phone or PDA.
Alternatives include Harvest or one of my favourites TimeXchange.
I will review TimeXchange in greater detail later.
