Subscribe Feed (RSS)Geekery Time: Vista-ish look and Backups
January 29th, 2008 by eyal | Filed under Techie. |
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It’s been a long time since I posted anything techie here. I had some time to play around with my laptop end of last week and set up a few things, all a la cheap, i.e. only using free stuff. Maybe this will be useful to someone.
1. Visual – I had a chance to use Vista when I was in Israel, it looked quite nice. I actually prefer the Vista look to the Mac OS X, I hardly log on to the OS X anymore (please don’t shoot me Mac fanboys..) I’m still on XP since I want a relatively lean OS and complete backward compatibility and reliability for work and gaming so I dressed my XP like a vista instead using the Vista Transformation Pack and VistaStartMenu, both using just the free versions. I was slightly worried about performance and stability but it’s all been working fine the last few days. As a matter of fact the interface seem to be even faster now than with the Windows Classic theme I was using before that.
2. Backup – I always used a mishmash of different backup solutions, mostly because I don’t want to pay for premium products or services. I use an old external drive, a thumbdrive and GMail. I still don’t want to pay (too much) but I want the peace of mind that I’ve got stuff backed up properly. My first choice for backup is always online, I prefer to forget all about physical devices, their whereabouts, lugging them around when I relocate, maintenance, electricity etc. So I was looking for some free online solution that will be better than just storing files in GMail. I settled for iDrive, a close second was Mozy. A full review is outside the scope of this post and I haven’t used it enough to do that, so maybe another time (i.e. probably never lol).
I signed up for just the 2GB free account as that’s all I need. My photos are loaded up full size to Flickr (Pro, one of few paid services I use). My music is on my laptop as well as the iPod (80Gb Classic Video). My emails are all in Gmail. Web bookmarks are of course in Delicious.
Besides selecting normal data files to backup I’m also backing up other backups. I use FEBE extension (I don’t think I’ll ever call these Add Ons) to backup my Firefox profile, including bookmark shortcuts and more importantly usernames and passwords. I’m also backing up QuoteTracker‘s auto backup folder and IB’s TWS folder with its settings. So all my work stuff is backed up nightly.
3. Scheduling – I’ve got iDrive to continuously backup my important files as well as a Windows scheduler set up to start up the program if I shut it down and don’t restart it. I also scheduled FEBE to backup Firefox daily before this, and Avira’s free antivirus to scan everything at night.
What would be nice to have is some malware/spyware protection but I’ve not found anything free that I liked that runs well automatically on a schedule or has a small signature resident guard in the background. So for now I’m still with a combination of SpyBot, Ad-Aware and just plain common sense and caution with downloads.
just curious: why iDrive, and not Mozy?
as to malware/spyware protection: what about AVG?avg?
Jeff: why not Mozy – mainly because if you delete a file from your system they will only keep a version for up to 30 days. So basically their backup is a sync type only. Also the iDrive tool looks more powerful to me (I installed mozy as well but admittedly did not do a complete 1 to 1 comparison).
AVG – I’ve not tried their malware protection but I’m not a big fan of their products. In my experience and from comparative tests their antivirus underperforms.
good stuff Eyal.
Dare I say it, I use MS Anti-Spyware/Defender along with Ad-Aware, and never had a problem. Also, to clean up the system every now and then CCleaner does a great job.
: )
thank you very much
Caravaggio: I used to use the Defender when it was a Giant product. After a while it looked to me (maybe erroneously) as if MS didn’t really continue to work on it?
CCLeaner is indeed great I use it very often.
Jeff: I did a bit more research and found out that Mozy also didn’t have continuous backup – which means probably less load on the system but less frequent backups. Mozy also doesn’t have web based restore capability and lastly the Mozy utility that nests in the taskbar doesn’t have an Exit option when you right-click it, I had to kill the process. On the other hand Mozy’s paid service offers true Unlimited backup while iDrive’s “unlimited” means 150GB. Some people may not like that. What do you use?