In the past I’ve taught you ways on how to protect yourself by creating a portable, encrypted desktop to run off of a USB stick, and went on at length on the perils of traveling with electronic components ensuring that your memories and personal information are safe. This time we’re going to kick it up a notch and take advantage of the services that are available to you on the internet to safely backup, and replicate your data so that in the event of hardware failure, theft, or inadvertently deleting important files you can rest easy at night knowing that all is not lost and it can be easily recovered. Best of all, with a bit of creativity most of these options are low cost or even free.
Let me introduce you to the concept of ‘Cloud Computing’ – A rather catchy marketing term, that has gained ground recently, it is by no means anything new – in fact it is likely you are already taking advantage of it in some ways or another. Cloud computing is a systems architecture model for Internet-based computing. It is the development and use of computer technology on the Internet. The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet based on how the internet is described in computer network diagrams; which means it is an abstraction hiding the complex infrastructure of the internet. It is a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the internet (“in the cloud”) without knowledge of, or control over the technologies behind these servers. If we were to relate this to a utility, say electricity -users can simply use it. They do not need to worry where the electricity is from, how it is generated, or transported. At the end of the month, they will get a bill for the amount of electricity they consumed. The idea behind cloud computing is similar: The user can simply use storage, computing power, or specially crafted development environments, without having to worry how these work internally.
Scientists can now harness the power of 1,000 computers to run specially crafted programs to perform calculations for research, corporations can allow their mobile sales force to share documents and access internal corporate files, and small businesses that create the ‘next big thing’ can scale their new offering on the internet to grow as popularity increases without having to invest in costly infrastructure, a team of dedicated support professionals for maintenance and upkeep, and provide a faster experience for anyone using these services as they are not tied to one single geographical location serving the content. All of the most popular sites on the internet maintain presence in multiple locations around the world so that they can access their data efficiently without delay.
OK – so what does this have to do you with you? And why would you want to start using yet another service that can potentially confuse you, further complicating your life with the many pieces of technology and services you already use? The answer is simple: Unification. Have you ever been faced with any of these situations?
- You need to access a file on a friends/public computer that is not with you?
- You want to share photos and other media with friends you meet but find that sending things by email is slow and unreliable?
- You have multiple devices (computers, phone, tablet) that you wish to have things like your contact list, email, passwords, website bookmarks synchronized?
- You want to backup your files (media, photos, documents, etc.) automatically because you always forget to do it manually?
- You have limited space available and need to offload the massive amount of data collected to be used later on down the road?
Likely you’ve said yes to at least one or all of the above. So lets take advantage of what is out there! Taking advantage of services in the cloud has one drawback, you need reliable internet access that can support the upload and download of this data. While the internet can be found in some of the most remote places, the speed at which data can be accessed is the major limiting factor. Worse, some internet service providers in parts of the world charge usage fees, which can result in a costly surprise at the end of the day if you were to store or retrieve all of your data. Using cloud services paired with other methodologies that I explained in my “Data Protection while Traveling” articles provides a reasonable balance of accessibility, reliability, and confidentiality.
Let’s touch upon some of the more common uses:
Keeping Browser Data Synchronized:
Technology exists today for your internet web browser of choice to synchronize settings such as favourites and any plugins that you may use to enhance your experience. With a few clicks one can ensure that data is the same between each of your devices, including mobile devices such as your IPhone or Tablet.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer offers Bookmark synchronization by means of its “Live Mesh” service, a part of the free “Live Essentials” software package which contains a fantastic photo gallery, movie editor, web journal writer, and instant messager.
Mozilla Firefox has the capabilities to synchronize not only your bookmarks, but your browsing history, and passwords in between devices (even between disparate operating systems such as Windows and Mac OSX and your phone!) You simply need to activate the “Sync” extension or you may find it in your Options Menu under the tab ‘Sync’.
A relative newcomer to the browser world, Google’s Chrome offers a fast and streamlined web browsing experience. In addition to providing the same synchronization features as Mozilla Firefox, Chrome allows you to synchronize your extensions/plugins from device to device. It’s easy to enable by heading to the Options and ‘Personal Stuff’ tab.
Apples default browser installed on any new Mac device Safari requires you to have a Mobile Me account to synchronize your browser favourites and settings across devices.
Finally, Opera, a browser that has been around since 1995 yet doesn’t have the same market share as the previously mentioned browsers offers synchronization using it’s “Link” feature, activated inside the browser options page. Opera has mobile versions available for the IPhone and Android devices.
Other services exist which let you view your bookmarks online and optionally share them with others such as Xmarks and Delico.us. If you want to synchronize your passwords LastPass seems to fill the void for all major browsers and many mobile devices.
Storing, Backing up, and Sharing your Media:
Many services have popped up in the past 10 years to allow you to upload your content to a central server for safe storage, but also to share the memories with other people! You can set who you wish to share your content with, or leave it to the public to stumbleupon your archived memories. These services allow you to gain more exposure to your work, receive critique and comments, and potentially open new doors to sell your work if you wish. Many people on the internet have become overnight celebrities quite by accident using this methodology, and content can be downloaded back to your computer when necessary if you have any concerns of the longevity of the service.
Photos – A favourite of mine is Flickr.com – offering the ability to upload your photos onto their central servers for later viewing or integration into your website or other online services. Their free offering imposes limits on the size of the photo and the amount you can upload per month, where as the subscription based offering drops any limits allowing you to upload the original files as you took them to the service. Other well known services that provide similar functionality are Google’s Picasa, Smugmug, and Windows Live Gallery. Facebook is another popular service if you’d like to share memories between groups of people. Many programs such as Apple’s IPhoto and Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery offer a conduit to easily upload photos to these services without having to login to each separate site. Most services are FREE.
Videos – Surely one must be living under a rock if one hasn’t heard of YouTube, a popular video sharing website that allows the whole world to see what sort of escapades one can get up to. While the raw videos you upload to the service get converted to a smaller, optimized format you could use another popular service which is gaining ground with professional filmmakers at Vimeo.com. Videos can be embedded on your website or shared with friends on social networking services like Facebook or Twitter. It is FREE to upload to YouTube.
Audio –While some people have taken to using YouTube to distribute their audio recordings, a new service has popped up over the past few years. Soundcloud is an online service where musicians and those interested in sound recordings can store and archive their material, while allowing others to review and comment on the material. You can then choose to allow them to download a copy for their own use offline. Tyler at Goingslowly.com has captured field recordings of sounds along the way of his cycle journey across Europe, Russia and Asia, even becoming a featured artist on their website. Soundcloud is FREEto use, but if you want more space they would require a subscription to their service.
Saving everything else (including media):
This is where things get good. All of the above services work with specific types of media. What if you don’t want to participate in the social networking craze, keeping your media protected from public eyes? What about private documents and files that don’t fit into the above categories? Luckily, storage providers have become quite popular over the past few years, and many offer access to their network for free offering a small amount of storage space with options to upgrade to a paid subscription model if you ever run out.
Typically, if you wanted to use one of these services you would register on the website, and either upload your files via their web interface, or download an application that runs on your computer in the background, which is set to synchronize files to and from the cloud whenever they are updated. Some of these services even offer snapshots/versions of the files, should you ever delete a file and not realize it until much later, and wish to revert back to old changes. While the files are mostly meant to be private, some services offer a “’Public” shared folder that you can allow people to download these files without registration.
While there are many services available, here are some free online storage offerings I’ve had great success with based on the ease of use to register, transfer files and who have also to value users privacy and stick to what they advertise (A much more comprehensive list exists here)
Dropbox – offers you 2GB of free storage that you can expand to a full 16GB by referring others to the service. Because Dropbox also syncs files to your other computers and makes your files easily accessible on your mobile devices, it’s a good candidate for important frequently used documents. You can even use it to serve pieces of your website if you so wish! This is my favourite so far. You can get 2.25GB of storage immediately by joining via this link.
ADrive – The ‘Basic’ service gives you 50GB of data on their servers to use how you wish. They don’t offer file revisions or a fancy client to automatically synchronize your data, but this is an excellent way to store large media files.
IDrive – 5GB of storage is offered using their feature filled client which allows for scheduled backups, searching for content in your backup store and synchronization.
Cloud Xperience – The free usage tier provides 10GB of storage on their networks. Like Dropbox they offer a rich client to synchronize your data eliminating the requirement to always manually back up your files
Amazon Cloud Drive – Amazon recently jumped into the Cloud Storage foray for the general public even though they are one of the leaders in cloud processing and storage for business and enterprise customers. They offer 5GB of free storage immediately, however provide 20GB of storage should you purchase a song through their online music store. This is as little as .69 cents!
Hacks:
Many other cloud services exist, but force you to use a cumbersome web interface to upload and download your media, which can be frustrating at times. In the past few years a product Gladinet Cloud Desktop has appeared which aims to solve some of these woes. Gladinet Cloud Desktop installs an application that runs in the background on your system and allows you to mount these web based services as Virtual Drives on your system, making the transfer of files easier and seamless. It’s lightweight, and runs without a fuss. Those who use a development environment for web development will have to make an adjustment as Gladinet Cloud Desktop also uses Port 80 – commonly used for web serving. I contacted the developers at Gladinet regarding this article and they were nice enough to offer 2 FREE LICENSES for activation of their Professional Edition which retails at $39 USD. Their free offering limits the amount of files you can synchronize in one task (1000) but this is more than enough for most users, and they also limit the available storage types. Gladinet Cloud Desktop can connect and synchronize to Amazon S3, Synaptic Storage as a ServiceSM, Box.net, Caringo CAStor, EMC Atmos Online, FTP, File Server Share, Google Docs, Google Storage, Internap XIPCloud Storage, Mezeo, Nirvanix, OpenStack, Peer1 CloudOne, Rackspace CloudFiles, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Azure, and WebDav.
With Gladinet Cloud Desktop you can take advantage of the 7+ GB of Storage that Google provides to each of their users for mail storage purposes. What most people don’t know is that you can also access a Document Storage facility under the same email account. With Google Apps Standard you can take advantage of hosting your own custom domain name (like tiredofit.ca) for custom email services, while still maintaining the simplicity of the Google Gmail user interface, synchronization of your calendar and contacts to your Email Client and Mobile Device, and also host a free website. It’s a free service, and they allow you to create 10 accounts each with a storage amount of 7GB+ (and always rising) of storage. Gladinet Desktop can connect to all 10 accounts giving you 70GB of FREE STORAGE using their system alone. If you connected your Amazon Cloud Drive to the program you would gain another 25GB of FREE STORAGE. Finally, Microsoft’s SkyDrive gives users 25GB of FREE STORAGE. I don’t know anyone who would want to turn down 120GB of FREE STORAGE for Backing up your Important Files, Media, Photos, and Videos.
I can’t speak highly enough of Gladinet and its ability to merge all the various storage services together onto my system, and I feel safe while traveling that my data is secure and available when I need it. Did you want to give it a go? Send a comment in the form below and in 15 days I’ll randomly choose winners for your free copy of Gladinet Cloud Desktop.
We’ve covered the entire range in the past few technical articles to keeping your data safe and protected. There really is no reason for anyone to suffer any data loss with the ability to use portable disk drives, online backup services. Please let me know your results and if these articles were able to help you in any way!
Dave,
Great to meet you the other night at the CBC in Cambridge. Great advise with cloud storage. I’ve taken advantage of DropBox and Amazon Sound Cloud, but the rest of the ones you mention are great. Thanks for the info!
-Yair
Hey I like your mobile site. Never visited on my phone before now.