The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘backup’

You probably remember DARPA’s Grand Challenge, which required autonomous vehicles to navigate from one point to another without human intervention. That’s probably the most well-known example of this kind of research (hundreds of entries and millions of dollars went into it), but just because it’s not going on any more doesn’t mean that research has stopped

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Driverless vehicles begin trek from Italy to China

Short Version : The Clickfree C2N USB drive provides a simple way to back up multiple computers without a NAS. The software is functional and user-friendly, but better network access might have set the device apart a bit more. Features : Includes Clickfree backup software Built in USB cable, as well as a dock Works with both Mac and PC MSRP: $179.99 (500GB) as reviewed Pros : Included software works great Plug the drive into each computer you want to back up once, and then it works over your network, wireless or not Compact size Cons : USB speed makes larger files take a while to back up Backup software is always running in the background Can’t connect to network without a computer Full review : Clickfree’s C2N is a portable USB drive that comes pre-installed with software for both the Mac and the PC.

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Review: Clickfree C2N Portable backup

USB flash drives aren’t the hot product that they used to be, but there’s still something cool about having 32GB of data dangling nonchalantly from your keys. Edge Tech seem to understand this, with their latest flash drives ticking both the 32GB and the key-ring-compatible boxes

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32GB flash drive from Edge Tech is as big as a quarter

You’re looking at one of the finest do-it-yourself projects ever to grace the Internet.

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Video: Say hello to the 100 percent real DIY iPad Arcade

Following Sharp last week , TDK is the second company that announces [JP] Blu-ray discs with 100GB capacity. The discs are compatible to the new BDXL format, allowing you to store 33.4GB on each of their three layers (conventional Blu-ray hold 50GB max.).

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TDK second company to announce 100GB Blu-ray discs

Note: Our MobileCrunch readers will be horrified by this post. But lately I’ve been on a rant about using simple technologies that just work, instead of always trying to make at least the basic features of the newest and greatest product we’ve ever seen do something spectacularly awesome, like make a phone call that doesn’t end from a carrier drop or a dead battery.

A week ago I found myself in a difficult position mobile-phone wise. My two go to phones – the Motorola Droid on Verizon and the Nexus One on T-Mobile – were history. The Nexus One mysteriously disappeared during my move to Seattle. And the Droid, my backup phone when I needed rock solid Verizon coverage, came to an untimely and violent end during extended “testing” on my rock slate tile floor. I was without a working mobile phone of any kind.

Normally I’d remedy that situation by buying a new phone. But I wasn’t about to shell out a few hundred dollars for a phone with the HTC EVO coming just around the corner. I needed something to get me to June 4 when Sprint will sell me that phone.

That’s when I became immersed in the pre-paid phone world. Based on watching The Wire, I knew pre-paid phones were important tools of the drug dealing trade – if you are careful enough and switch phones often, it’s extremely hard for the Baltimore police department to get a solid wire tap on your pre-paid phone, for example. Other than that, I could not speak intelligently about what they had to offer.

So I walked into my friendly neighborhood Radio Shack and took a look at what they had to offer. These aren’t exciting phones, unless it was 1999 again, in which case the tiny color screen would be very cool. But they’re small and, importantly, they make phone calls.

And wow are they affordable. For $25 I walked out of the store with a Net10 LG 100 phone that had 300 minutes of talk time included over a 60 day period. As long as you buy more minutes all the minutes keep rolling over to new months. And there is no contract and no termination fee. I pointed my Google Voice phone number at the phone, and everyone that calls my normal number gets through just like they did on my old smartphones.

The phone has features such as making calls, receiving calls, a speakerphone that’s better than any smartphone I’ve had, and a battery that seems to last forever. It also does text messaging and has a variety of cheesy ring tones to choose from.

That’s it. And five days later after heavy usage I’m not sure I’m going to stop using it. The call quality, despite the fact that it uses the AT&T network, is five stars. Calls fail to be dropped. I consistently am able to hear what the person I’m talking to is saying. All of these things are new experiences to me, or at least new in the last few years.

I tend to carry my iPad around everywhere with me, which does browsing and apps a lot better than any smartphone anyway (although the Google Voice website is a mess on the iPad). I haven’t been using the data connection on my other phones that much since the iPad, so losing those features doesn’t matter much.

And really, for certain social situations, like dinners, all this phone activity needs to stop anyway. If you can’t check into Foursquare or Gowalla with your phone, you definitely won’t be. I found I was having actual conversations with people instead. While my tiny prepaid phone sat lightly in my pocket, humming on a full battery charge.

So there you have it. A one time Cult of iPhone charter member, who abandoned Apple for the promise of Android and Google Voice, is now a hard core LG 100 prepaid phone fanatic.

And I’m going to stay that way until June 4, when my failing sense of self control will walk me into a Sprint store and purchase a HTC EVO. I’ll probably forget all about the LG and leave it at the checkout or something. Because love is fleeting, and shiny stuff, after all, is cool.

But until then, if you see me at TechCrunch Disrupt next week, ask to see my phone. You’ll want one, too.

According to this blog post, Google has acquired online travel guide and community Ruba. Ruba is a visual travel guide and tour review site that provides travelers with visual guides written by other travelers. The blog post is embedded below. Google has confirmed the acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ruba offer users a way to visually browse through cities and their attractions around the world, offering photo-rich guides and an emphasis on making it easy to quickly discover new locations. The site is headed by Mike Cassidy, who has founded a number of successful companies, including Xfire, which sold to Viacom in 2006 for $102 million.

Guides are all written and submitted by users, with Ruba pulling from Google and Flickr APIs to help pinpoint locations and provide some sample photos (users can submit their own, too). The site, which is similar in some ways to TripAdvisor, features integration with Twitter and Facebook Connect, allowing users to broadcast where they’re headed and ask friends for input.

Google says that Ruba will be integrated in iGoogle, Google’s personalized home page product. Google has been reportedly making a significant move to enter the online travel business, integrating hotel links into Maps and listing hotels with room rates. The search giant is also supposedly in talks to buy fare shopping software ITA software, according to the USA Today.

Hi friends, fans, and Ruba community members – exciting news from the Ruba team. We are thrilled to announce our team will be joining Google! As of Monday, May 24, we’ll be moving into the Google headquarters. We are totally excited to be joining such an amazing company.

For the past 15 months, we’ve worked to create a unique and fun visual travel site and community focused on guides, photos, maps, and interactive tour listings to improve the online travel research experience. The Ruba community has written amazing travel reviews which have inspired our own journeys and hopefully yours as well.

We want to thank the entire Ruba community (guide writers, local experts, bloggers, and more) for all you’ve done along the way. We’d also like to thank our tour operator partners for sharing their tours on our site. Thank you for sharing your feedback, ideas, and of course your travel tips and experiences with our community.

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It’s an endless battle: a new transport protocol replaces an old one and all of the drives based on the older system are completely obsolete. Well, Seagate thought long and hard and created the GoFlex system, a drive with removable transport hardware that can turn a standard SATA drive into a USB 2.0/3.0 drive, a Firewire storage device, or even a powered eSATA device.

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Quick Look: Seagate launches the FreeAgent GoFlex system

Druva Software, a company that provides continuous data protection and disaster recovery products, has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and the Indian Angel Network (IAN).

Druva, which is profitable, will use the capital to fuel international expansion. Druva offers two products:, Druva inSync, for laptops in an enterprise environment and Druva Phoenix, for remote servers. InSync, which boasts 10x faster data backup while reducing 90% of the bandwidth and storage utilization, uses Druva’s Send Unique technology to create a fingerprint for each file to prevent duplication.

SendUnique uses a Single Instance File System on the backup server, and compares the file fingerprints during the backup to the files already on the server to determine if it’s unique data. There is also a timeline-based system to track changes to existing files in order to restore point-in-time data from any specific time.

Druva faces competition from Symantec, EMC and others in the data protection and recovery space.

According to research sponsored by Toshiba, more Americans are afraid of losing digital data — photos, documents, etc — than they are about losing their wallet or an audit by the IRS. This is probably because more people have suffered a digital loss than have been audited by the IRS — we all say “It can’t happen to me!” until it actually does happen, and only then do we change our behaviors. But the reality is, backing up data has historically been tedious, if not actually challenging.

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Toshiba Canvio portable hard drives