Web Worker Daily

Backup! Backup! Backup! This should be the mantra of all web workers! Our ability to earn and work is of course dependent on the digital infrastructure around us, but more importantly, the sphere of our personal and professional data that’s our digital DNA.

Today sees the public launch of Paragon Software’s Drive Backup 9.0 Express, designed for novice users to replicate and backup their entire PC – from OS and apps to preferences, settings and data…a little like Apple’s Time Capsule + Time Machine combo, but for Windows PCs and not quite as pretty.

What’s really interesting about Paragon’s software is that users can create emergency bootable media (CD, DVD, Flash drive) to recover an imaged machine quickly…something I could really have done with when I dropped my MacBook in San Diego earlier this year… Oh, Drive Backup 9 Express is also free and users are provided with an upgrade path to more sophisticated Personal and Professional editions that provide backup schedules, the ability to image individual files as well as drives, along with the ability to directly mount a backup image prior to re-installation.

Backup seems to be a perennially failure-ridden activity for most users- wavering between fatalist, zero-backup strategies and replicating data on multiple drives at home as well as at online services.

I have the feeling that no, one service provider is getting this right for users – do we need something with the ease-of use of Time Capsule+Machine, coupled with the distributed resilience of Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service. Come to think of it, why can’t a Time Capsule replicate itself to S3?

Every once in a while, I come across a site that just rocks my world. This week, I found two – Addictomatic.com, a search aggregator with a nifty interface (Mike G. reviewed it) and Spinscape, a site I learned about through a comment on my previous posts about mind mapping. After a flurry of emails to get past the closed beta gates, I was in and mapping away in no time.

If I had to describe Spinscape in one word it would be: Elegant.

From the dramatic dark gray and black backgrounds that makes the colored bubbles or “nodes” pop to the subtle tool buttons placed strategically about, Spinscape looks great. But elegant goes beyond looks. Spinscape functions well, too, with some features that were unexpected and surprisingly useful.

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