Dropbox

Box offers 50GB free for life

Last night Box released an updated iOS app for their sync service. Whoever downloads and logs into his Box account in the next 29 days will get 50GB for free, for life. That is a very good deal compared to that only offers 2GB free or other services that have switched to a trial-only mode only.

Despite not being one of the fastest or less energy consuming apps for Mac, Box is a valid alternative to Dropbox. It is also potentially more secure, thanks to Box’s experience with enterprise customers. It remains to be seen if this business model is sustainable, although I believe that Box executives have done the math already.

You can download the new .

Energy Impact for the most common sync services

In OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the Energy tab of is a nifty tool that I’ve played with a lot since the introduction of the new operating system.

In this post I’ll show you the peak Energy Impact and and Average Energy Impact for five of the most common sync services on the market: , , SkyDrive, Box and .

I have striven to set up the experiment so as to guarantee equal conditions for all services. I made sure that:

  • All four sync services contained the same files before starting the test
  • The services were idle
  • The same files/bundles/folders were uploaded to each service via Finder
  • New files were uploaded only after the previous ones finished syncing

To better simulate a real world scenario, between the tests I also performed some copy/pastes and file deletes, both from the web interface of each service and from the sync folder.

I tend to believe that this test has only academic value and somehow suspect that different users might get different results. It’s likely that the values I have collected are function of the processor my Mac uses, how many processes were running during the tests and some other parameter that I haven’t taken into account.

Nevertheless, you might find the results useful if you care about the energy consumption of the applications you use or suspect that something is not right in your Mac.

Results

The Average Energy Impact was simply retrieved from Activity Monitor within 8 hours of the end of the tests.

The Peak Energy Impact was retrieved by reading the maximum value of the Energy Impact column for each single sync service while uploading a specific file.

These are the results:

and as graph:

Activity Monitor Average Energy Impact Dropbox SkyDrive Google Drive Box Amazon Cloud Drive

As you can see I have also plotted the Time To Start Syncing, which is – with enormous approximations – the measured time to see the sync service icon in the menubar to become active. To avoid adding useless digits, I approximated the time to the nearest second:

Somehow I thought that the Average Energy Impact was correlated to the Time To Start Syncing. That is, I though that the energy consumed was inversely proportional of the polling period (i.e. the interval at which each sync service checks the sync folder and remote server for changes). That is not really the case, at least in my tests. Obviously other factors affect the energy consumption.

What I found really peculiar was Dropbox’s behaviour. The peak Energy Impact was very high in all my tests, as if the service was doing something straight after adding a file to its sync folder. I don’t have proof of it but this might be related to the fact that Dropbox splits each file into chunks and calculates its hash before uploading it to its cloud service.

The case of OmniPresence

I’d like to dedicate a short paragraph to OmniPresence, the sync service created by OmniGroup for its applications (OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, OmniGraffle etc.). I use OmniGroup applications constantly, with frequent file changes and synchronizations from my Mac, iPad and iPhone. What I have never realized is how incredibly well optimized and low energy impact this sync service is.

On my Mac, the Average Energy Impact for OmniPresence is a low 0.10. Incredible. These guys know what they’re doing and the existing applications are there to prove it.

Conclusions

None of the sync services I have tested use Power Nap, which would dramatically reduce the energy impact on our Macs. I think that for a sync service Power Nap is not an option. That would likely impact negatively the sync times and responsiveness of the service.

As I suspected the most popular services also show lower energy impacts. This is good news for us because we all rely on them during our normal working day. Comparing the results of these sync services with other applications I normally use, I realized how low impact they actually are.

That is also reflected in the battery life of my MacBook Air. In non-scientific tests, I’ve never actually seen an appreciable decrease in battery life with one of the sync services running.

Does Tim Cook use Dropbox?

Does Tim Cook actually use ?:

It’s certainly true that there’s no way to share an mp3 file if you use iCloud. The easiest way to share something these days is through Dropbox thanks to its endless flexibility.

Interesting tweet…

Backup Strategies

Today I’ll show you the backup strategy I employ for my Apple devices.

Having a backup strategy should be part of your computer maintenance. If you don’t have one, stop whatever you’re doing, look at the diagram on top of this post and start planning how to protect your data.

These are some ideas that can help you.

Dropbox

Early last year, I moved all files stored in my home folder to Dropbox, which is now my de-facto home folder for everything but iTunes, Aperture and iPhoto libraries.

Bear in mind that Dropbox is not a backup system and should not replace one. Nevertheless, it’s reassuring to know that my data is stored both on my internal hard drive and replicated to the cloud.

Dropbox also makes all my documents availablr wherever I go and whatever device I use.

Time Capsule

At home, Time Machine graciously backs up my Mac to Time Capsule every hour. It’s a handy and automatic backup system that all Mac users should setup.

Amazon Glacier

After trying Backblaze, Carbonite and Crashplan (all with paying accounts) and for months in a row, I came up to the conclusion that cloud backup solutions are far from being mature.

Two factors played a role in my conclusion:

  • The companies I mentioned above could get out of business anytime bringing with them my data.
  • The client applications are far from being stable resulting in high CPU utilization or sudden crashes.

My perception of cloud backups has changed when I discovered .

Glacier is a cloud storage solution aimed at people planning to store data on the cloud for decades and not having to retrieve it on a constant basis. In other words, if Amazon S3 resembles a normal backup solution, Amazon Glacier is akin to a self-storage space where you can park the data you are not going to use.

Thanks to its I can store on Glacier more than 200GB of data for less that USD 2.5 per month. The caveat of Amazon Glacier is that if you need to retrieve that data you have to wait about 4–5 hours while the job executes.

I treat this solution as the ultimate safety net if my laptop gets stolen, or my house burns down.

Like most Amazon Cloud solutions, Glacier is targeted at developers but thanks to applications like Arq, backing up to Glacier is as easy as setting up Dropbox.

Amazon is widely recognized as one of the world leaders in cloud computing. Its massive infrastructure, reliability and the fact that Amazon is a publicly traded company reassure me that my data will stay safe for a long time.

iCloud

Usually I don’t backup these collections to Amazon:

  • iTunes library
  • Apps
  • iOS devices

The reason is called iCloud. I use iTunes Match, so my music is safely stored with Apple and accessible from any of my Apple devices. Same thing for the apps.

To backup my three iOS devices I rely on the automatic backup to iCloud that takes place whenever I charge the devices. Maybe I am lucky but in the three or four times I had to restore data from one of these backups I never encountered any problem.

External USB drive

As an additional level of redundancy I also store a bootable copy of my internal SSD drive on a portable 500GB external hard drive. The excellent Carbon Copy Cloner is a software that has saved my bacon a few times.

I’d love to keep that hard drive somewhere off-site but for the moment I just carry it in my backpack wherever I go in case someone breaks into my house when I’m out. Backups on this external hard drive are carried out on a weekly basis.

Let’s hear from you now. Do you have a backup strategy at all? What is yours? Click on the comments button to leave your message.

Create your own private cloud with Transporter

Transporter private cloud

by Connected Data is a solution to create a private cloud.

The target audience of Transporter is users who are concerned of the privacy implications of public clouds (Dropbox, Google Drive etc.) but that at the same time need to be able to access all their data from across the world.

Transporter reaches this goal by using a mini-server that backs up the data on your computer and makes it available through the Internet to any authorized device.

The great idea about Transporter is that you can link more than one storage device to extend the redundancy and capacity of your private cloud. By doing so you can:

  • Extend the capacity of your private cloud
  • Create effective off-site backups of your data.

For example, if you use two storage devices, one located in your home and another one at your sister house, then the data is intelligently mirrored across the two storage devices. If anything happens to the device in your house (theft, damage, etc.) your data remains still be available on the other device.

The company has also released two apps for iPhone and iPad so you can access your data while on the go.

Transporter starts at $ 199.00 and you can buy it .

Scaling Dropbox

Fascinating and a quite technical lesson by a Dropbox developer on Dropbox scaling. It’s also a good video to understand how the service started and what type of architecture it used in the different iterations.

Store all your picture on Amazon with Cloud Drive Photos app for iPhone

Today Amazon is launching , a free app that allows you to upload and view pictures uploaded from your iPhone to Amazon cloud:

Protect and store all of your photos in one place with Amazon Cloud Drive Photos. Access your photos from your iPhone or iPod touch, your computer, or any web browser. Take a picture on your iPhone and save it to the Amazon Cloud to enjoy on your computer. Upload photos from your computer and enjoy them on your iPhone or iPod touch.

If it weren’t that I’m already a user, I would consider Amazon services (that in any case are used by Dropbox as backbone for their storage infrastructure) to store my pictures.

Amazon’s advantage over many other services is the price. You get 5GB free, but you can get 20GB for only $10/year up to 500GB for $250/year.

via .

Picture management without iPhoto

Within two days two of the biggest Apple blogs, 512 Pixels and MacStories have written two good articles on how to move your iPhoto picture library to Dropbox.

That’s a very good advice and I like the way they use Hazel to automate photo organization in folder/sub-folders.

I have always liked iPhoto but since 2002 I’ve always kept a separate archive of my pictures in the filesystem. All pictures are split by year and event just in case the iPhoto library gets corrupted.

More recently I’ve started using Adobe Lightroom, which allows you to have the flexibility of a single library while keeping your pictures organized by a folder structure. You can achieve the same results if you decide to use .

If you haven’t done it yet, follow either 512 Pixel or MacStories advice. Remember: Pictures are probably the only digital data you will never be able to replace if you lost them.

via Dropbox: My New Photo Management App — 512 Pixels.

Byword app updated to version 1.1

Byword app for iOS has been updated to version 1.1. with some important new features:

  • iCloud, Dropbox and device storage can now be all enabled at the same time
  • Support for folders in iCloud, Dropbox and device storage
  • Full text search within documents
  • Improved UI
  • Export to PDF
  • Bug fixes

I’ve been waiting for the iCloud folder implementation for a while and I’m so glad to see it added to the app. A nice surprise to this update is also the addition of an Export to PDF functionality.

Byword has been my default text editor on both iOS and Mac for months now thanks to its complete Markdown implementation, flawless sync between devices, and just the right amount of settings.

It’s a fantastic app that I invite you to try if you are into writing on a Mac/iPhone/iPad.

If you head to the App Store now, you will be able to get the apps at 50% off.