I am in search of a good automated backup solution for my personal computer(s). Previously, I’ve just uploaded important files I want to keep onto my slice or some web hosting site. I also use a 250GB Western Digital External HD to backup pictures and mp3s.
But now, I want an online solution. I want a service where I can “set it and forget it” to back up any or all the files on my multiple computers. My first stop was at Mozy.com. I downloaded their Mac installer, which had the BETA description next to the download link.
The install and setting up it to start backing up some files was easy. The free 2 gigs for MozyHome is great. But when I really got into customizing what I wanted to back up, I was disappointed. I could not easily place rules to ignore certain files and folders. It was all or nothing. Also, Mozy takes the term “backup” very literally. If you delete the file off your local machine, Mozy will delete the file from their backup servers in 30 days. It is not intended to be used as a file repository. You can’t easily share your backup files either.
For $4.99/month, I can get unlimited backup space. But without being to easily exclude certain files and folders like .DS_Store and .svn folders, Mozy is a no go for me.If anyone can recommend something better, that would be super.
The Open Geospatial Consortium just announced that KML has been adopted as an open standard. KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language, originally designed by Keyhole who was acquired by Google back in 2004. Keyhole’s Earth Viewer product was reborn as what we know today as Google Earth. I first came across KML when I was working on some data visualization using Google Earth. I found it to be very expressive and easy to use. You can do neat things like stream dynamic KML to animate the map or add overlays on the map.
It’s interesting to see how Google Earth/Maps’s popularity has allowed KML to become the international standard. It will be even more interesting to see how quickly the standard is adopted by many of the geo-visualization products out there. While I don’t think it will be “the HTML of geographic content“, I do think this standardization will open up the market for new products that build/support KML, pushing KML to its limits as we have done with HTML.
Google App Engine, which acts a Google-hosted application platform powered by Google technologies like BigTable and GFS. You can read more about it here. I was lucky enough to get an invite to try it out. Right now it only supports Python, but they say they plan on expanding this to other programming languages. I hope that’s true. I never really played with Python but this might give me more incentive to take a closer look at it.
Anyways, going through their Getting Started documentation took about 10 minutes. All of the apps are hosted at the appspot.com domain but from the Admin console, it looks like you can have your use your Google Apps domain which is pretty cool.
