Then the robber made the mistake that ultimately landed him in the hospital — he went for the laptop. According to Botsios, he said “Dude, no — please, no! I have all my case notes…that’s four months of work!” Saucedo, obviously underestimating the fury of an overstressed, overworked first-year, was unsympathetic. That’s when Botsios could take no more.

Wrestling Saucdeo to the floor, Botsios separated the bat from the thief and repeatedly punched him in the face. When it was all over, police had to get Saucedo stitched up before charging him with armed robbery and kidnapping, while Botsios only suffered some scrapes and a bruised knuckle. Most importantly, at least to the student, is that his laptop, which he called “his baby,” escaped unharmed.

Of course, if Mr. Botsios had backed up his laptop somewhere remotely (hint, hint), he might not have worried so much about it getting stolen.

This is the second in an occasional series of audio interviews we’re doing with tech gurus and alpha geeks. We’ll be talking to them about how they manage their digital life, where they store all of their virtual stuff and related geekery. Photo by Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com.

You can listen to the interview, or read the transcription below:

• Interview with Vanessa Fox (17:59, 16.9 MB)

Darren: This is Darren Barefoot talking today for PutPlace about backing up your digital life. Today we’re talking to Vanessa Fox. Hello, Vanessa.

Vanessa: Hi. How’s it going?

Darren: It’s going well. How’s it going with you?

Vanessa: Wonderful.

Darren: Excellent. And tell us who you are.

Vanessa: Oh. My goodness. That’s a very good question. Well, I do a number of things online, I guess. I probably am mostly known for what I’ve done in the search industry. I used to work at Google and built Webmaster Central for them. Now, I’m actually launching a new site called Nine by Blue where I’m going to just try to talk about a lot of different things involved in acquiring more visitors through things such as search and social media.

Darren: And so this is the number nine by blue dot com?

Vanessa: Yes, so I’m going to try and make sure to have both it spelled out and the number redirecting to the same place.

Darren: Yes. That makes sense. And why that domain?

Vanessa: You know, it’s very hard to come up with names. I think people who do naming are very skilled. They have a talent that I don’t have. So I spent a lot of time thinking about it and what I really just sort of wanted to convey was the idea that there actually is a lot of data out there about your customers, about your potential customers, and so you can take all those numbers and sort of turn them into something more, something that’s actually an engagement as opposed to just the numbers. ‘Cause there’s just tons of numbers and it’s hard to find what’s actionable. So, you know, really aggregating that stuff in a useful way. Just sort of, numbers into something else. And I just like blue. I like the water.

Darren: Sure. It could have been any color. You went with blue.

Vanessa: Could have been anything. Yeah.

Darren: Maybe you got a spot in this whole — Hopefully, if you’re really successful you can spawn an imitation site which is “Seven By Indigo” or something like that.

Vanessa: Yes, exactly.

Darren: I’m going to go register actually all the other numbers and all the other colors right now just so I can own –

Vanessa: Oh no!

Darren: So somebody’s like “Oh, what was that website? Nine by pink?” Anyway. Actually, that’s a fun way to slice a bunch of domains is by having colors associated with given, kind of, topic set.

Vanessa: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Darren: Not to use a stereotype, but if you had a blog about gay lifestyle it could be “X By Pink” or something.

Vanessa: Uh-huh.

iPhones, iPods and Smart Phones

Darren: Yeah. Nevertheless, I’m just inventing things on the fly. So, we’re talking about your digital life and how you manage it and how you back it up. Let’s start by asking how many — I haven’t found the right word for this — how many computational devices do you have? Like phones plus computers plus other electronic devices et cetera?

Vanessa: I have gotten much better at this, actually. I was very hopeful that the iPhone would become a convergent device for me, which was part of the appeal for me. It hasn’t gone quite that far but it’s better. I used to have a smartphone and a regular cell phone because the Microsoft smart phone is really good for data but not really for calling. And when I got the iPhone, actually, reduced that down to one phone instead of two. And I can use that for my music now instead of my iPod, as well, which is nice. But, I do have a desktop at home and I have a Mac laptop that I use around and then probably my iPhone are my three primary devices. I mean, don’t ask me how many laptops I actually have in my office but I only really use one of them.

Darren: And how about — actually, I should have also asked about cameras. How many cameras do you have?

Vanessa: So I have a digital camera. Again, I tend to just use the iPhone now a lot. But probably on the trip I’m going to be going on, I try to throw the digital camera in there. Also, I have this little bag where I sort of keep the camera, an extra charger, and all that and I kind of always have that ready to throw in my bag when I travel.

Darren: I see. Military people call that “the go-bag”.

Vanessa: Yes. Exactly.

Windows, Mac and Dueling Monitors

Darren: Yes. And so is your desktop a Windows machine or an Apple?

Vanessa: My desktop is a windows machine. My Mac is, of course, a Mac. But, I actually have a dual-boot. So I have a Windows side and a Mac side.

Darren: I see. Does that still cause you pain? I have a Macbook laptop and then a Windows desktop. And it’s ninety percent problem solved. But there’s still ten percent agony around file formats or versions or opening something in something. Does that –

Vanessa: Yeah, I tend not to have too many problems with that. I have Office 2007 on the Mac side as well. Although, of course, it doesn’t work anything like the Windows version. So sometimes I’ll be using PowerPoint or something and it’s like “Where is all that stuff?” ’cause it’s in a different place. But, I don’t really have a lot of trouble with file formats. I actually got the desktop — I’m kind of envious now of the new Macs that are coming out because you can do a dual monitor output. Part of the reason I got the desktop at home rather than just having the laptop was that I like having the two monitors when I’m working at home and it’s kind of hard to do that with a laptop normally.

Darren: Let me ask you something. I’ve been asking lots of people about this, about the dual monitors. So, do you have them lined up so that you use them both equally or do you have a primary and secondary model? And if you have them lined up so that you use them equally side-by-side, you’re staring at the gap in the middle of them, aren’t you?

Vanessa: So, I do have them lined up side-by-side. Although, there’s not really a gap ’cause I have them right next to each other. And I think I do tend to have one in front of me and one over to the side a little bit, so I am looking at one. I think for me — I know a lot of people use two monitors now but I think for me I got into the habit of it years and years ago when I was a tech writer and you might have had the same experience where I would have, say, the interface or the code of something that I was documenting on one monitor and then I was writing about it on the other monitor, so it is just nice to be able to go back and forth and so I think I got into the habit back then and now it is kind of hard for me not to have both, I am such a multi-tasker, it seems like I always have multiple things open.  You know whether I am doing a blog post or a technical site review or that kind of thing, I just like the model of having what I am talking about or writing about on one side and then knock out the other.

Darren: Yeah, I definitely agree.  We are building a house and so we are kind of planning out our home office and obviously I have never actually had a two-monitor setup, but I have been trying to, because I have always had one enormous monitor, but I have been trying to get my head around that.

Vanessa: Oh you will love it.

Darren: Yeah, that’s what everyone says.  So I just need to jump in and they are so much cheaper than they used to be.

Vanessa: Yeah.

Keeping PowerPoint Presentations Safe

Darren: So you have a bunch of devices, you have a desktop, a laptop, iPhone, camera, what is your current kind of backup strategy?

Vanessa: So, it is interesting you ask that because I have been looking over the last few months for a good backup strategy because I don’t really have one.  I thought it might be nice to find an online backup system because then instead of having a hard drive where I keep all my storage, I could keep…the dream would be that I could keep everything in the cloud and then whether I am on my desktop or my laptop, some where I always have access to everything, you know that would be kind of a nice idea.  I haven’t really found that yet.  I have tried a few things like I tried maths-dot-me and I tried some other things like that but I haven’t really found anything that works very well.  So what I tend to do, I also bought this wireless backup storage device for home because I figured well at least I could keep everything there and then access things at home, but that is proving problematic.  Actually that’s the one thing I can’t seem to get that hooked on the Mac side, it seems to only work with Windows.

Darren: Is that a Seagate thing?

Vanessa: It is a Netgear I think.

Darren: Oh yeah, okay.

Vanessa: But similar, right, it is kind of like this little wireless storage device.  So I have been having some problems and so what I do particularly to go between the two is I’ll either email myself or put things on like a USB, but then of course I always find if I’m say in London and I really need something that’s not on my desktop that I didn’t expect and then that gets to be kind of frustrating.  In terms of sheer backup like having a copy in case things go wrong, that’s probably the smart thing that I should start trying.

Darren: Well it is funny actually, I was using recently and this I suppose is contrary to put places average user hopefully but, I actually have very little concern about backup because so much of our work, we use Gmail and then Google Docs for collaboration and then all my MP3’s are stored on a service, they have been up there for a year called MP3Tunes.com.  So really the kind of precious stuff that I need to worry about and all photos, the only copy of all our photos are up on Flickr.

Vanessa: That’s where mine are as well.

Darren: Yeah and the only precious stuff is kind of old, old files.  So that’s about … yeah.

Vanessa: You know I find that too because I use Google Docs a lot also and then for client stuff I have started uploading it to a password area on my site that people can have access, so that stuff is still there I think.  The only thing I would really lose are all my PowerPoints from over the years because I kind of keep all my slide decks and I have tons of those.  And I tend to … I don’t reuse slide sets very often, but I tend to use like individual slides, like I will pull something out of old presentations.  And I haven’t really found a good online thing to use instead of PowerPoint, like I have tried the Google stuff, but it just isn’t robust enough yet to replace PowerPoint.

Darren: Sure, yeah.  Me too, I have a similar model, every new slide set seems to be some variation on the previous slide set, so I find it highly iterative process.

Vanessa: Yep, exactly.

Living Data Disaster Free

Darren: So in your lifetime of computer use, have you ever had like a major disaster in terms of losing valuable email or data or files or anything like that?

Vanessa: So, not really, I did have one time when I worked at Google when my laptop just completely died and would not come back, but fortunately they have a pretty good backup system where, you know, when you plug in to the network, they automatically back your stuff up.  So I was able to get most of that stuff back when I got a new laptop.

I tried this idea, it was like maybe a year or so ago, I was really telling, you know, I should be smarter about backing things up and all this and so I bought this little drive that you hook up via a USB, I got as a prize or something and it was like a 500 gig drive and so I started putting stuff on there and then I got kind of lazy about having things on my desktop also, so it turned into less of a backup device and more of a primary storage device and then that drive stopped working.  Now when you plug it in, it just clicks at you and then it is like completely dead.  And so I haven’t gone back to try to see if I can resurrect it, I am not even really sure what’s on it at this point.  It is probably a lot of my old PowerPoints, but that was kind of depressing.

Darren: Yes, yes, I would imagine.  Yeah it is funny, because when I talk to people about this data loss stuff, most people actually haven’t had any tragedies.  This stuff mostly works mostly of the time and that made … an answer to my next question which is like the fact that most people don’t backup unless if they have a geek who is harassing them a lot, why do you think that is, why do you think most people don’t backup?

Vanessa: A couple of things, one is probably the fact that things generally don’t go wrong, so if you haven’t had things go wrong in the past, you like assume your life will always be happy and carefree until something, you know, awful happens that makes you bitter and cynical.

But I think the other thing is probably that we probably don’t have a lot of stuff that would be so awful if we lost it.  When I think, at least for me, I think at this point if you look at all my old laptops and hard drives that I have and all the stuff that I have, I probably have tons of things stored, but it is not like I use them a lot.

I mean it is kind of like I just went through and gave away a bunch of old clothes to like the Salvation Army and it has always been hard for me to give up clothes, you know for some reason I think I am going to need them.  And so what I did this time is, I just put them all into boxes and put them in storage and then a year later, I was like OK I didn’t any of those clothes, so I am just going to give them all away.  But I think the same thing is with a lot of our like digital stuff we think it is really important, but maybe a lot of it we never really go back to.

I think the exceptions would be like pictures, which like you say, most of us I think just keep on Flickr now and there is probably a few things like that that if we really thought about it, it would be bad to lose them.  But mostly, for me it is like old projects I worked on years go or something like that.

Darren: Yeah, companies that are now long gone, the ones like I find looking back, in Vancouver I read about a story in which this young couple, they had a new baby and they had their laptop stolen which was full of photos, it is baby’s first moments in the world, so it is kind of an awful story.

Vanessa: Oh no.  Yeah, see those are the kind of things that you would definitely want to keep and it would be really bad to lose.

Darren: Yes.  And finally, what is the oldest digital file you think you have, like how old is it if you were to go dig around in all your stored stuff?

Vanessa: Oh my goodness.

Darren: I should tell you that mine is a Wordstar 2.0 essay I wrote about adults when I was 12.

Vanessa: Wow, that’s pretty good, that’s probably older than my oldest thing because I didn’t…my first computer was when I was in college and it was a PowerBook and that was probably like 1992.  Probably the oldest thing I have is maybe from ‘95 or ‘96.  I think I have a couple of CDs, CAD-like help documents that I wrote for the application or something lying around somewhere.  But other than that, I probably have a bunch of old drives, but that’s probably the oldest, it’s around ‘95.

Darren: What is sadder than old useless technical documentation, eh?

Vanessa: Oh my goodness I know, I have a whole box of printed stuff, I’m about like toss out, because I am like why in the world do I have this.

Darren: I have a few like huge manuals I worked on years and years and years ago and like this software doesn’t exist anymore like it doesn’t even…this model of software doesn’t even exist anymore, right, like it is all, something else is going on.

Vanessa: Yeah, it is like — I think I remember how much work it was to do, like those huge old manuals, so it is hard to throw them away, but it is like come on this is ridiculous, no one needs this.

Darren: Have you written a book?  Are you planning on writing a book?  Have you thought about writing a book?

Vanessa: I have not written a book, I have been thinking lately about writing a book actually because I never want to get too far away from writing and so it seems like might be a good time.  I have started thinking about a few ideas because I really would like to do something interesting and useful as opposed to a topic that has been done a lot where there would really be no need for my book, so I have been thinking about it.

Darren: Sure.

Vanessa: It takes a lot of time, right, that is the thing.

Darren: Yeah, we are working on a book right now and it is a surprising amount of work to get the 90,000 words.

Vanessa: Yeah, when you are doing, I mean it is not like — well I don’t know, I mean for me, I don’t think I’d be able to stop doing everything else and just write the book.  And I also don’t know if I could do that, I don’t know if I could be as disciplined as that either much less having the time to do it.  So you’d have to really carve it out, is that what you guys do, you like carve out time, you are dedicated?

Darren: Yeah, we have tried that and we had gone away for a couple of weeks to do that too, but it is hard when you are like working full time.  I think co-authoring is an excellent strategy too, right.  Like if you can find somebody who you trust, think is smart and you can work with, then that cuts the problem in half.

Vanessa: Yeah, that was a good point.

Darren: Yeah, but you know, cuts the problem in half, yet doesn’t, whatever reason you are doing it for, you shouldn’t do it for money, that was [xx] not to write a book, but for whatever reason you are doing it, like it doesn’t reduce whatever benefits you get by one-half, right?

Vanessa: Right.  Yeah, that’s a good point, that’s actually an excellent idea.

Darren: Well I appreciate you taking the time out from your very busy schedule to talk to me.

Vanessa: Oh yeah, it was fun, it was nice to talk to you.

Darren: Excellent.  I have already subscribed to the RSS feed at ninebyblue.com.

Vanessa: Excellent and hopefully in like a day or two, just really hoping it is going to be out with much more stuff.

Darren: That soon?

Vanessa: Yeah well, we will see, but that’s you know, this plane thing is going to get in the way, like it is on our plane ride, no internet on the plane.

Darren: Excellent.  We will probably not post this till next week, so hopefully it will be up by then.

Vanessa: Oh yeah, that will be great.

Darren: Very good, have fun and I will send you the email when this is all posted.

Vanessa: Thank you, great.

Darren: All right, well see you later.

Vanessa: Okay, bye.

Key takeaways for me from listening to the other speakers were,

• Using Amazon doesn’t insulate you from failures
• Lots of people using S3 and EC2, not so many on SimpleDB and SQS
• The per-transaction fees can really start to hurt if you start to get traction
• SimpleDB is a cool place to store your grid topology dynamically especially if you use another provider alongside Amazon
• EC2 nodes come up really quickly compared to other grid providers
• Lots of people use Nagios with EC2 for monitoring

The Amazon guys (Simone and Adam with a later appearance by Werner) gave strong hints that we would see all the following features in 2009,

• EC2 hosting in Europe
• An Amazon supported Content Distribution Network
• Integrated Load balancing and Monitoring

Thieves got into the car and nabbed a backpack. Inside was a white Apple MacBook laptop loaded with all Rykr’s photos. “I kept on thinking, ‘I should get that backed up,’ but we knew we were going to make a photo album,” said Jimmy. “It was dumb that we didn’t have a backup.”

Theirs is a cautionary tale. We’re hoping the thief has a heart, and that they get their baby photos back. Don’t let this happen to you–back up today.

You can listen to the interview, or read the transcription below:

• Interview with Chris Pirillo (14:33, 27 MB)
  

Darren: So we’re talking today for PutPlace. We’re recording a series of conversations with tech gurus and productivity types about how they backup and manage their digital life and tonight we have Chris Pirillo. Chris, tell us who you are and what you do.

Chris: Well I think the easiest way to explain it is if you go to Google and you type in the word “Chris” I should be the first one there at least at this moment in time. I’ve been online since 1992 in one sense, well, except when I sleep but that’s not very often. So, I enjoy the world of psychology and creating content and sharing information with the world.

Darren: And we can watch you right now at Live.Pirillo.com, right?

Chris: Yeah, it’s kinda scary, I’m doing life-casting so all the time it’s always on and I’ve set it up so that even if I’m there I’ve got chat room, and the chat room’s always lively and interactive and you know just a bunch of geeks hanging out.

Darren: Aren’t you ever worried that someone might see you picking your nose?

Chris: Uh, no, although they definitely caught some interesting moments.

(Darren laughs.)

Chris: Uh, yeah… uh, yeah (Chris laughs.)

A Very Complicated Digital Life

Darren: Uh, OK, well uh, we wanted to talk you obviously because I know you and you’ve obviously been online for a long time and have alot of technology and you have probably a very complicated digital life– (Following overlaps with Chris’ comment below:] so… how many computers do you currently - have?

Chris: - No, not really…

Darren: — No…? How many computers do you currently have?

Chris: Well I do have alot of computers but, you know, I tend to be a minimalist as far as my digital lifestyle is concerned. I don’t want to you know be overwhelmed and that’s what can happen really easily. So if you ask me how many computers I have I don’t know if I can name them all. For me it’s been trying to find the right grooves so that everything integrates and it’s been difficult. Especially in relation to content, whether it’s my own content or consuming other people’s content. For years I had to rely on tradition media means and mechanism and I don’t really want to rely on tradition channels and delivery anymore so I‘ve been looking for ways to integrate that older type of consumer lifestyle with the digital world with whether I am today and the way content is distributed today. So… it’s… when you ask how many computers I have… I think I’ve got alot but they wouldn’t necessarily be termed as PC or Mac but anything that could be connected to the internet I would consider a computer these days.

Darren: Right.

Chris: Because if it doesn’t connect to the Internet, it’s not a computer.

Darren: So how many do you think you touch in a day, like, how many is in your active network of electronic devices.

Chris: Oh, 2 or 3. There’s some that are run pretty regularly but any moment in my office I’ve got access to 3 computers and it ebbs and flows but I do try to keep it at a minimum just to give, I don’t want to clutter my life with things that I’m not using on a regular basis.

Darren: Right, right. OK. So, how do you backup right now? How do you backup all your content?

Time Machine, Rhapsody and Moxy Fruvous

Chris: Well I’ve been very, very lucky in the sense that Mac OS 10 has Time Machine and I’ve had that running on my primary system but I’ve also have, at least right now, one [network attached] storage [mass] device and I’m likely going to be switching to another one here in the near future. It’s local but I know that I’m just looking for an easier way to get it online without having to worry about it. I know that there are a variety of programs and services out there. My fear about using them is that I’ll have to pay for them indefinitely and never know whether it’s going to be there or not. And the ease of access - and when I say that I mean like completely ubiquitous the more platform neutral a service is, the happier I am because I never know how I’m going to be accessing that data. Especially if it’s platform neutral data like PDFs or JPGs, MP4, just stuff that I’ve had collecting in my documents directory for the past God-knows-how-long…

Darren: One of the concerns I have about online backup is I have like 50 GBs of music and I want those close at hand, right? It’s no use having the only copy in the cloud somewhere certainly

Chris: See, to me, I stopped tracking music a few years ago. I mean, I did have and I still do have a collection and a lot of my MP3s are on the network but I’ve kind of gotten away from that just because I’d much rather consume my music “a la carte”, well I guess, in the subscription format “a la carte” so I subscribe to a variety subscription services. I was with Napster for awhile then I went to Urge and have now been with Rhapsody. I’m pretty happy with the Rhapsody service, by and large. I’d see no true reason to switch away. It’s pretty good. Because that the way I consume music. Why would I want to keep track of an album digitally? [ ] It’s taking up space and I have to administer. I’d rather have it sitting in the cloud because it’s the same album.

Darren: Yes—

Chris: –Unless that, you know — go ahead…

Darren: I was gonna say that : except if you’re driving in your car

Chris: Uh, that’s the exception to the rule. There are very few occasions where I’m in the car and I say: “oh - I’ve really got to listen to Moxy Fruvous right now!”

(Darren laughs)

Chris: And, yes, I’m a Moxy Fruvous fan.

Darren: Oh, that’s funny.

Chris: But there’s a clear cut case of the MP3 that I had to track for awhile. Moxy Fruvous was recording songs for their fans - apparently they had these Fruvous points or something, where if you went to a certain amount of their concerts they make the MP3. Well I saved those MP3 because they really haven’t been updated on their web site and I think the band has pretty much disbanded which is pretty unfortunate in some ways for me.

But those are the MP3s that I still do have to track, it’s just the music that I don’t have to track, I don’t want to. It’s getting to the point where I’ve got an iPhone and I’m taking to you over the iPhone and with a service like Pandora, Last.fm, AOL Radio, I can get access to just about any music I want beyond my satellite radio subscriptions. Unfortunately with the car is not on demand. I would long for a day where Rhapsody type service in conjunction with satellite connectivity could bring me on-demand content. Until then it’s an absolute kludge - and that’s where we are with content so the less I have to track, the happier I am.

A Data Disaster-Free Life

Darren: I wanted to ask you can you tell us about a disaster where you lost some data, like a hard drive meltdown or something along those lines - have you ever experienced that?

Chris: No… I’ve been lucky, I’d say. Over the years I’ve had some failures, but nothing where my data was absolutely just … I couldn’t get to it. And it’s largely because of redundancy, local redundancy. Just copying, backing up and having these copies floating around whether they’re in a safety deposit box or on an older hard drive I have. And so having that there has been a, sort of, a saving grace. But I haven’t had too many hard drive failures.

The only time I remember losing a lot of my emails, some of the first emails I ever sent I lost them to a think it was a catastrophic mistake with Outlook. It had nothing to do with hard drive, it had to do with the limitations of Microsoft Outlook which I’ve since abandoned for alot of good reasons. I’m still using an exchange server but I’m using Mac OS 10 mail app to connect to that and I’ve been really happy with it. And that’s another thing, I can’t really think of one that’s happened to me personally - certainly to my parents and they were a little dismayed - but, you know, for me, I look for redundancy, and as much as I can push out to this cloud of data, I will. So my email sits on an Exchange server, I don’t have to worry about it anymore: I have a copy of it, indefinitely, from all angles. It’s not quite that way with all my digital photos and all my documents but, over time I’m sure it will, with all the right means and mechanisms in place, and again, the right pricing. So disaster for data, it’s going to become… it’s still a worry today… but it should become less of a worry over time.

Having Time Machine, the Time Capsule in Mac OS 10 Leopard, and I’m sure beyond - it’s been… nice. Just because I don’t have to worry about it – it like “Oh, it’s getting backed up.” Granted it’s a local backup, and I’d be so much happier if it was an offsite backup – but it’s getting backed up. And you just turn it on and you’re done. So for me, the disaster mode has never really happened in a data loss capacity and I count myself very lucky for never having to have been through that

Darren: So lots and lots of people don’t backup. Why do you think that is?

Chris: Yeah… Cause it’s a pain in the neck!

Darren: Yeah…?

Chris: I honestly do not blame people. I mean, I’ll say, “You better backup, you better backup” - I couldn’t tell you the last time I backed up – And I know I need to do it, but it’s one of those things you better do it before you need to do it. You should do it. And I always explain to people that the easiest way to backup is just keep it all in one directory. I say, you don’t need the programs cause those can always be reinstalled - unless you have a certain directory where you download stuff. I’m talking specifically about your data. I always have it in a certain documents directory.

The things that I want to keep and I want to backup and I want to know are there, I keep in that directory and sub-directories - I should say “folder” – no one says directory anymore – shows you my age. The reason why they don’t do it is because software is a pain in the neck, services tend to be overpriced – I’m not saying that they’re all too much, that they’re not worth their money but it’s just storage is becoming a commodity, the prices are going to continue to decrease, it’s going to become easier and easier to backup and that’s where I’ve been really happy.

People are going to label me as a “fan boy” but I’m going to say it again: the reason I wasn’t backing up before was because it was never as easy as it has been with Time Machine on Mac OS 10. And that has made it easier to do it locally – but the bigger concern, and I think the larger concern for most people is, it’s got to be easy, invisible and when I say “invisible” I mean process-wise, you don’t know it’s doing it, and it’s doing it so you don’t need to worry about it until you need to worry about it and then, hey, it’s there. But I think that what trips most people up is that they don’t know where to start and it tends to be a kludge – it tends to be a series of hoops and there’s no degree of understanding that has gone on between the user and the software that they’re trying to use.

Darren: Right, yeah, yeah. I totally agree. One more question, and I’ll let you get back to the debates. This is kind of a fun question, I suppose. What is the oldest digital file you have, you currently own?

Chris: I figured you were going to ask something like that. I have to say that I saw some files that I created when I was in Word Perfect 5.1 in DOS back at – no wait - I think I may even have files older than that. I had a, there’s two programs, I had a doc, there’s a program it’s like a paint type of program for DOS. It was called “Doctor Halo”.

(Darren laughs)

Chris: And it made like three objects in that. I loved that program – oh, that was a great program. And I think I saved some Doctor Halo files and I believe I have also Deluxe Paint files. Deluxe Paint was even more awesome, another DOS program that you could do like, it was rich graphics inside of DOS - it was amazing. And you could do animations and everything. It was so cool, so much fun. I loved that program. Deluxe Paint was the name of that. And I know I’ve got files from that, I’m pretty sure. And then I know I’ve got files from college when I used WordPerfect 5.1 - the blue screen…

Darren: Yes, I remember the blue screen. And you’d hit Scroll Lock and the cursor would get fat – I think, I don’t know… Remember that? There was some button you would hit and the cursor would get fat-

Chris: I…I just barely remember that. I mean, I just remember having these keyboard templates that you had to keep on your keyboard.

Darren: (Laughs) Oh yeah, yeah…

Chris: ..to remind yourself of you know, like, what’s the, what’s the… I think “Save” was F11

Darren: Yup…

Chris: … and don’t know why that, I don’t know why that, sticks out in my mind… And I think, was “Spell Check” like, F7…?

Darren: Uh…? Yeah.

Chris: I know that “Spell Check” in Word now – Microsoft Word, at least in Windows, and I think on Mac OS 10 still has a WordPerfect mode where you can switch the background to blue.

Darren: Right. (Laughs)

Chris: I mean for some people they just can get over that. That’s why it’s there.

Darren: Right.

Chris: Anyway I, that’s, I believe my data would go all the way back to the early 90s.

Darren: Early 90s. Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you for taking the time to do this, Chris. Please enjoy the rest of the debate and I’ll send you a link to it when we post it.

Chris: So cool.

Darren: OK, take it easy.

Photo by Kris Krug.

PutPlace is delighted to nominated in the category “Best New Web Application/Service“. There are some excellent competitors out there.

The other nominees are,

• Pix.ie
• Locle
• Mortgages and Loans
• Nooked
• Our Memory Of
• BookMeetingRoom.com
• Next Action
• Url.ie
• LouderVoice
• Twitterfone
• Zignals
• eWrite
• Album Shopper
• Edenbee
• PropertySwap.ie
• Poll Daddy
• Decisions For Heroes

I personally use several of these applications so I look forward to finding out the winner.

This particular award is Sponsored by InterTrade Ireland and their Seedcorn Competition.

All the other categories and nominees can be found at the Official Irish Web Awards web site.

Joe

CTO PutPlace.com

We have now fixed this problem, so welcome to PutPlace, Russia.

In Russian (via Google Translate)

Мы получили два хорошо writeups в русском же автор, Александр Plyuschev, которые привели к много регистраций с. Домена Ru. Однако выясняется, наши Unicode обработка ошибок и не надлежащим образом разобрать Российской имена каталогов, когда люди были загрузкой.
Мы сейчас эту проблему фиксированной, так что добро пожаловать в PutPlace, Россия.

I know I said ‘presented without comment’, but this one is too amusing to forego. From this photo’s Flickr page:

My buddy Kidd left his laptop in his oven while away - you know, in case of break-in or fire, it’d be safe. We’re all over after grabbing him from the airport, ready to bake some cookies. Preheat the oven to 375, start mixing the ingredients, about ten minutes later, we notice a pretty awful smell. Open the oven door and, surreally enough, there’s a laptop and a backup harddrive staring me in the face.

The cookies, however, were great.

And, of course, no gallery on the Web these days is complete without a LOLCat:

Photos by, in order, GazH, Miguel García, Andrman, William Krapp, Jon Ross, John, Adrian Black, Jason Matthews, Josh Yellin, Lynn Lopez, Grant Hutchinson, Duane Storey, Jim Ray, estherbester, Michael Beattie, Elizabeth Galle, Scotty Perry, zen Sutherland, Simon Jacquier, Johnathan Warner (two photos), arvind grover, HuubK, Andrew Mager (two photos) and Steve Thomas.

Each EC2 node comes with 250GB of local storage, but that storage springs to life when the node is created and disappears when the node is shutdown or crashes (although we have only had one node die on us in the 12 months we have been using EC2).

This is okay for user data e.g. the files you backup, as we don’t mark those as secure until they have been written to stable storage on the S3 grid. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well for our database (Postgres) which expects to have stable local storage directly attached to the node and visible as a local disk device. So until now we have had to bake in a bunch of safety code to ensure that if the database node crashed we could recover sensibly and quickly.

However this week Amazon has announced Elastic Block Storage. Elastic block storage combines the safety of S3 with the utility of a local disk. You can create an EBS volume of up to 1 terabyte in size and attach it to any Amazon EC2. It just looks like a local disk to that node, but if the EC2 instance dies the disk survives.

So we can now attach two EBS nodes and store our log and data on two stable devices either of which can be used to recover the other.

It gets better though. You can take snapshots of your disk and write them to S3. These snapshots can be used to backup your disk in order to copy it to a new EBS instance. Better still when creating a new instance the snapshot can be loaded lazily into the instance so you don’t have to wait to stream a whole terabyte of data into the EBS instance.

So what’s the catch? why wouldn’t you just EBS for everything and ignore S3? Well for one thing you have to allocate all the space on an EBS disk at once so you pay up front for the storage as opposed to paying for it as you use it in the S3 case.  The other problem is each EBS instance is tied to a single EC2 node so if you want to share content between nodes you need to utilise something like S3 and/or SQS (Simple Queueing Service) to provide shared storage.

A big step in right direction for Amazon though and something we have been asking for for quite a while.