On June 6, Apple announced the latest incarnation of its OS X operating system: 10.7, more commonly known as Lion. Also announced were the imminent release of iOS 5 for Apple’s mobile devices and, hand-in-hand with that, the iCloud.

Folks who’ve been handy with Apple’s products for a few years now might recognize the source of this “new” service as MobileMe (née .Mac), the yearly membership with an email address, online storage, and push syncing for your mobile devices.

But iCloud is more than just a name change. Apple is revamping the service to expand its offerings and its reach. MobileMe used to cost $99 a year to subscribe. iCloud will be free to anyone using iOS 5, that is to say, anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch capable of running the new software when it comes out this fall.

continue

This Thursday, March 31st is World Backup Day, a day to make sure your data is being backed up correctly, your backups are in good shape and that you can restore from backup if and when it’s needed.

It’s not a question of if your hard drive will fail, it’s a question of *when* it will fail. Hard drive life is rated in MTBF or mean time between failures which basically means that your hard drive will only run for so long before mechanical breakdown or physical damage will render your computer and your data unusable. Professional data recovery companies can charge several thousands of dollars to recover data from a failed drive and even if you make sure to use new drives and replace them frequently a fire, flood or theft can wipe all your data out in a heartbeat.  What can you do about this?

continue

Sooner or later disaster strikes, it is inevitable. If you work on computers, at some point you will lose data. The best way to get around this is to have backups. I’m a bit more paranoid about certain things ( like my pictures) that I can not replace. Those aforementioned things are backed up in 3 places, and one of the places also has redundancy built in. Recovery of data off of drives in not cheap, we are talking $1000 just to start. The prices can easily double.

So how do I get started backing up my stuff? Here are 3 programs that I recommend.

Bonkey
JaBackup
NasBackup

continue

Are you backed up?

This is a question that we ask and far too often the answer is “no”. There’s really no reason not to be backing up all your important information using automated software. Whether you rely on DVDs, USB thumb drives, external hard drives or online storage there are a multitude of choices to keep all your files safe.  Today we’re looking at a couple different choices for online storage.

Free, totally free!

http://mozy.com (PC and Mac 2GB storage free, $4.95/mo per computer for unlimited storage.)

Although 2GB isn’t very much space these days, you’ll be able to get all your important word docs, excel sheets and a handful of photos protected for free.  They have free software that automates the process of backing up so you don’t have to think about it once it’s set up.  After you max out the 2GB of free storage their $4.95/mo for unlimited space is a great deal.

http://www.getdropbox.com (PC and Mac 2GB storage free, 50GB for $9.99/mo) continue