Backup had a been one of those concern that is well known but yet not well addressed. Since musing about the process of brainstorming for a backup strategy, I have yet to find a solution that I felt was easy and simple for a non-technical small business owner to setup and use.
As mentioned before, since I’m now using Ubuntu, my focus would be tools that should runs on Linux. But keeping in mind that many non-technical users are on Windows and I also uses MacOSX, the perfect backup solution is indeed one that runs on the 3 major platforms – Linux, Mac and Windows.
As with most solution search these day, the first stop is to visit the seach engine and generate a few alternatives as the starting point.
With the increasing popularity of using the “cloud”, the other alternative is to backup to one of those online backup services. A few that I had tried come to mind – Mozy, Carbonite, Wuala and here is a list with comparison.
So far none had led me to sustained use.
Now that Google is providing space to upload any file, perhaps someone will soon come up with a way backup files to Google. The price for additional space is pretty attractive too.
Do you have any other recommendation?
Since I never quite got back on the post on alternative disk/partition cloning tools after a few days, it might be appropriate to at least close it after a year.
I actually did got something out of that exercise but things began to turn really busy after that. In fact using that same tool, I cloned and deployed more than 30 Ubuntu desktop.
So which is it? Clonezilla.
Halfway throght the list, Clonezilla fit the bill so well that it wasn’t necessary to try the other.
So far clonezilla has worked for me on Windows XP and Ubuntu system. It has even worked on virtual machine on VirtualBox.
How does it work?
Continue reading ‘Revisiting Alternative Disk/Partition Cloning Tools’
My question today is ‘What are the open source/free alternatives to disk/partition cloning tools like Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image or Paragon Drive Backup.”
The selection has certainly improved and matured since I research this topic more than 2 years ago. Back then a few alternatives (including SystemRescueCD and PartD, Partition Saving) was tested but none gives the comfort that the restore would be fail-proof should the need suddenly appears. The main problem I remembered was NTFS wasn’t well supported at that time. In the end I stuck to Norton Ghost.
Now it is time to return to this topic after installing 2 PCs in 2 days and potentially having to provision 100 more PCs to come.
Let me list the alternatives and I will get back with the result in a few days. In the meantime, if you have any experience, good or bad, with open source/free disk clone utilities, please leave a comment.
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UBCD – Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
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FOG – Free, Ghost-like Cloning Solution
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PING – Partimage is Not Ghost
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Wikipedia has a good article to learn more about disk cloning.
As a small business owner, we often have our heads filled with more immediate concerns. Backup is not one of those immediate concern. In fact, backing up data is one of the often stressed but seldom carried out activities.
I have to confess that I had been thinking about backup since day-one and have yet to do any concrete about it. So I sat down today and did a mind map (using FreeMind) for a backup strategy.
So the next steps are
- Figure out and decide on what strategy to use
- Find the right softwares (free/open source preferred)
- Implement
- Train users
- Monitor and manage
I will be posting the progress and any related softwares that I find. Hope this helps you too.
Tor is one of those application that you most likely don’t need but useful to know that it exist when you need it.
Tor’s website describe it as “an anonymous Internet communication system“. Which doesn’t really helps to understand what it is.
The normal business user would not need to know how Tor works (read this overview if you want to know), only what it does.
One of Tor usage is to get pass blocked website. Which is what I am going to describe in this article.
If you work in some countries (no name here to protect this site) that filters web traffic you may want to read on.
Continue reading ‘Punch through web filter with Tor’
Imagine this, you have two CDs and you need to alternately access data or you need to run program from the CD. You have only one CD drive.
Frustrating? Not anymore. DAEMONS Tools comes to the rescue.
Daemon-Tools is a virtual CD emulator or sometime known as CD image mounter.
Sounds techy, what does it do? Well, it does a two things that might be very interesting to you as a user.
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It allows reading a CD without a CD drive
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It allows reading multiple CDs at the same time
Effectively, Daemon Tools emulate (or “pretend to be”) a CD or DVD drive. So you can read the content of a CD/DVD without a drive. The mounted CD image will appears as a drive letter just like a normal CD. Normal file operations can be perform on it just like any CD.
Continue reading ‘Read CD/DVD without a drive using Daemon Tools’
Filezilla has nothing to do with Mozilla or the numerous “-zilla” out there. It is an FTP (and SFTP) client (there is also a Filezilla FTP server).
Beside web browser and email client, FTP client is probably one of the most used net-applications.
But unlike web browser and email, there are far more choices for FTP programs around. Commercial, sharewares, freewares/open source, some with really long history. Do you remember WS_FTP? A quick search shows that it is still around. It was very popular once but not many people seems to be using it now. And there were CuteFTP, SmartFTP, just to name a few.-
Personally I had not try alot of FTP clients. There might be another good Open Source FTP client around that I am not aware. However Filezilla had served me well for a few years now and I will gladly recommend it.
If you are using an unregistered or cracked copy of shareware FTP client, give your conscience a break. consider switching to Filezilla, an opensource alternative.
Continue reading ‘Filezilla FTP client’
Still using WinZip, WinRAR or some commercial archive? Try 7-Zip. It is opensource and free.
Do not be deceived by the name which may make it sounds like it is yet another Zip clone and only read zip file. 7-Zip introduces a new format called 7z and also supports ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB format.
The 7z format produces very good compression ratio. Compression ratio is the ratio of the difference between the compressed file size and the uncompressed file size to the uncompressed file size. I had been using 7-zip for a good few years now and the format consistently beat other format like zip (worst), rar or even tar.bz2.
The one drawback of 7z is that not many people know or use the format. So I cannot, for example, email a .7z file to a friend. My friend probably get an “Unknown file type” error. But this should change soon. Expect to see more programs supporting the 7z format. WinRAR already support it and so does a number of compression utilities.
Continue reading ‘Still zipping? 7-zip it’
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