Technology Tool – File Storage/Backup

I thought I would share with you a few tools I have found that make file storage and backup easier. There are 2 options available: physical backup or cloud storage. Within the cloud storage option there are services that will sync files in specific folders across all devices or backup files to the cloud which can also be access remotely.

Physical Backup

This means using an external hard drive to backup your files or entire PC. Many come with software that will do automatic backups for you as long as the device is connected. Drives are cheap now and you can pick up a 750GB drive for about $100. As prices are dropping all the time you can even get 1TB
drives for not much more. Look for devices that are self powered rather than needing an external power hookup – makes them more portable. As drives increase in size there is some concern about whether you should put all your eggs in one basket with a single large drive or diversify with a couple of smaller drives.

The main issue with these are remembering to make the backups – even if you remember to always keep it connected, and if you do keep it connected it won’t help if there is a fire or other disaster at your location. Another problem is that you don’t have any remote access – you have to carry the device with you.

Cloud Backup

www.carbonite.com
A really useful and cost effective option to keeping your important files, music, video backed up is using a service by Carbonite. For a whopping $55 a year you get unlimited online storage in a really safe service. Initially all your files will be backed up and this could take a while even on a DSL connection, but once this is completed the software runs in the background and just uploads new or changed files.

The great advantage to this kind of service is that you can access your files from any web connection – PC, iPhone, smartphone, etc. Restoring your files, it’s all about this really, is simple too with an easy interface that walks you through the process. Your files are kept secure through the use of double encryption transfers.

The individual user service only enables a single computer to be backed up. The Pro version that can be used by companies is priced based on gigabyte storage per month, but you can have unlimited devices setup to backup. Pricing is reasonable with up to 99GB for $50 a month.

Cloud File Syncing

There are a couple of nice services that let you sync files to the cloud and across all your mobile devices.

www.dropbox.com

Dropbox is my favorite giving you 2GB free storage. What’s great about this service is that it installs on your computer and mounts like a new folder in your My Documents area. This way you can just drag and drop files into it like any other folder on your PC. There is an iPhone/iPad and android apps for your mobile devices. You can also access your files via the Dropbox website from any Internet connection. You can work on your files files while offline and changes will sync when you get an Internet connection back.

After you have modified or added files the service syncs to the web and updates all devices when they connect to the Internet. The service also keeps older versions of files for 30 days in case you want to revert to an earlier version. Additionally, deleted files are also kept for a while for those who
like the delete button too much.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a commercial version of this available, but additional storage space is reasonably priced: $9.99 a month for 50GB storage. Syncing is fast because only the changes to a file are updated, not the entire file – well, unless it is a new file!

For team projects you can share folders/files and invite people to access those files. I really wish I could find some team collaboration software that would allow multiple people to collaborate on a document and show what changes each person makes! When sharing the files an email is sent to the person and they have to either have an account or create a Dropbox account. There is another option though where you can put files in your Public folder and then share a link with anyone. You can use this to create photo galleries to share with people. The file is accessible to anyone with the link, so to unshare a
file you would need to remove it from the Public folder.

www.box.net
Box.net is a similar service, but you only get 1GB free storage and doesn’t give you file syncing unless you have a business account. This service does seem more directed to commercial applications giving the file syncing, document versioning and password sharing options. A Business account is $15 a month for 3+ users, 15GB per user and 2GB max file limit. Interesting to note, the free account only gives a user a max file upload size of 25MB. There is also an Enterprise option that gives unlimited storage and finally includes the file encryption security. I wouldn’t really recommend this service for personal usage for documents because it will not be using encryption for transfers – use it to backup your music or photos.

Summary
I decided to use Carbonite to backup my work PC and then use Dropbox to keep all my other files on other computers backed up. As you can specify the folders Carbonite backs up, I have it backup my Dropbox folder too – double security!  Carbonite by default does not backup your applications or Windows settings files, although you can manually specify them. Instead, I used my portable hard drive to make a full backup of my entire drive which will cover the applications too and then Carbonite will take care of keeping my other files up to date in the background.

Technology Tool – Evernote

Continuing on my series of posts on technology tools to help you work and live, this next tool is great:  www.Evernote.com

What does it do?

Kind of like a notebook that lives in the cloud, but also has web, desktop, Android and iPhone apps. Take notes, clip webpages, upload photos from the apps and it will sync contents to the web so that no matter where you next access Evernote, all your notes are up to date.

The great part is that you can save notes in to different folders (notebooks) so that you can keep everything relevant together. Planning a bathroom makeover? Keep everything related to that in one notebook. You can have a note with the room dimensions, keep notes on design ideas, clip screenshots or photos of things you see and like. Everything altogether and accessible were ever you are.

In a meeting where the team has been brainstorming ideas on a whiteboard? Take a photo of the whiteboard, upload it and Evernote makes the text searchable – right from the photo! Recorded the meeting too? Upload the recording to Evernote and you have the entire meeting saved. At a conference and getting business card? Take photos of them or scan them later, upload it to a notebook and all that text is searchable.

Another great feature is the ability to tag all your notes. Sometimes a note could be relevant to more than one notebook, so give it more than one tag. You can sort notes by notebook, date, tags or search through them all.

So how much does this cost?
How does FREE suit you? There is the premium version too for a whopping $5 a month, or $45 for a year. The free account gives you unlimited notes, but max of 40mb of uploads a month, premium ups that limit to 500mb a month. Free allows certain file extensions like images and PDF, premium enables them all. Going premium also gives you some nice features like secure encryption, ability to share notes with others for editing and PDF searching.

I haven’t gone premium just yet, but probably will soon. Right now I am writing this blog in Evernote so that I can add to it whenever the mood strikes. Now that I have a smartphone I am playing with the photo taking of receipts, whiteboards, etc and uploading them and testing out how good the text recognition is. Happy to report that it is damn fine for free!

A new feature I just noticed they have available form premium accounts is the ability to add Microsoft Office documents. Then you could access and edit(?) them from anywhere too. That in itself is almost worth the $5!

Not always got wifi when you need to access a note? On the Touch app you can favorite a note and that makes it available offline. The iPad caches all notes visited so they are always available. This was great for me when I was traveling – could keep my itinery, boarding passes, luggage tags and maps of visiting areas all as a favorite in my Touch. Even took scans of my passport and credit cards in case they got stolen. Even if my Touch was to have got stolen, I could access these documents from any Internet cafe by logging into the Evernote website.

Last month I cleared the clutter out of my filing drawer and scanned all those car service invoices. Now they are all in a notebook, tagged by the year of the service.

I installed the firefox clip tool which let’s you automatically add a note of either the whole webpage you are on or just the text you have highlighted. It can connect to your Facebook and Twitter accounts so that you can save information from your streams. Like RSS feeds? There is a connection for that too so that you can save the feed and edit to keep just the important links.

When you signup for an account you will get an Evernote email address to use so that you can automatically add notes via email. Looking in the user forums there also looks liken there is a way the automatically sync a local folder to upload new files automatically to Evernote. However, it does seem to involve a little scripting, so may not be ideal for a new user.

How stable is the company?
Seem to be doing well and they are always developing new extensions or adding to the apps that will work with them. Don’t really see a downside to it, even at $5 a month.

Is this what CRM is used for?

I have been ruminating for a while about how to remove the data silos of customer information that are at work. In theory it should be reasonably straightforward, but as with most things it is not. I wouldn’t have thought our company system was that unique – surely other people have solved this issue….

We use SalesForce. com for the sales people to track prospects and customer information. SF is only used by Sales though, because the rest of us don’t trust what is in it. Sales people have a tendency of not getting the customer order details correct or the shipping address. So when an order is approved, the details are passed to another team in the Production side who verify that the order details are correct – not ordering a Windows application and mainframe add ons!

Production then enters the order and customer details into our Heat system. Heat is really a helpdesk application and I kind of fudged pieces of it to enable to recording of the customer order details.

Benefits of Heat:

• All information used by both Production and Support is visible – Support can see if a customer is calling for a product they are not licensed for;
• Customer information is maintained in single system;
• Heat has a familiar UI and can be customized to our specific needs;
• Can publish sets of data to web for client or employee review.

Drawback of using Heat:

• System designed as helpdesk and works well for that. Production use is more clunky;
• Not a true relational database making keys alphabetic rather than system generated numeric – user errors;
• Difficult integration with other systems because it is not a true relational DB with proper keys;
• Reporting is done through Access DB queries reading in MSSQL Heat tables – maintainability!
• Sales and Technology groups have different views of customers – each thinks theirs is best.

I have been looking at other helpdesk solutions, but again I am seeing limitations with capturing/editing/viewing customer purchases. We don’t need an accounting package because the sales order part is taking care of in the accounting group – completely different system!

How do other companies manage the support and order history of their customers? Is this what people mean by using a CRM system? What if you don’t trust your Sales people to keep information accurate?

I don’t know. Guess I will just keep looking at systems out there and see if anything looks good. Maybe Heat has more to offer in the newer releases….

My ZooLoo blog

Hmmm, I seem to have endless accounts I have created for all these free social media/online backup type sites. I never use them hardly, can’t even remember I have them usually. I think I have close to 6 free 2 gig online storage accounts that I signed up for cause they looked interesting. I don’t really need them though, so they just sit there.

ZooLoo was just sitting there unused too, until they sent me a reminder email. Couldn’t even remember what ZooLoo was to be honest, so I clicked on the link and explored again. I can see this being useful for the student or heavy socially active person, but I have neither time nor energy to be doing more than Twitter and Facebook updates – and the occasional blog posting.

Course, having read that something like 55% of companies block employee social media access, site like this might be a nice workaround. Be on ZooLoo, but really you are also able to access Facebook and Twitter from here. Sure the company dictators will spot this and block it too though!

I just downloaded dropbox app for the iPhone a couple of days ago. I like the premise of being able to sync files from any computer and easy to use. I still will be unlikely to remember about it though. I use Evernote for keeping things synced and TeamViewer to remote desktop into any of my computers.

Ah well, as long as they keep offering free stuff, I will likely keep signing up for it in case I might miss out on something REALLY useful!

Update: I posted this on my ZooLoo account under the blog feature and tweeted out the link. Someone said it came back as a spammy page. So I moved the blog back to good old WordPress – at least this works without me having to figure out what setting I screwed up on ZooLoo!