backup

Want: Transporter drive

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I’m taking my time over this because I want to get a storage system that suits me best and that suits me enough that I can forget about it for years and years and years. Right now, I suspect that it’s going to involve a Transporter and I am so taken with this product range that I want you to know about them too.

Oh, does that not sound like a sales pitch? Seriously, I won’t get any money for you buying one – wait, hang on, I can change that just a teeny bit. If you bought a Transporter drive through these links to Amazon UK or Amazon US, I would be quids in. Or pennies, really. But pennies-in isn’t a phrase. And anyway, I think I’m more likely to directly profit from this if someone who really likes me sees this sometime nearer Christmas.

So.

Transporter by a firm called Connected Data (here’s the official site) is like having your own personal cloud. Just as an aside, isn’t that still a deeply strange kind of sentence? But it’s true. Where I currently use Backblaze to backup our Macs to their servers somewhere in the world and I currently use the hell out of Dropbox for getting me quick access to my files wherever I am, I could use a Transporter. It would work exactly the same. But instead of my documents being on Backblaze’s servers or on Dropbox’s servers, they’d be on mine.

And unlike Backblaze and Dropbox and all there rest, there wouldn’t be any monthly charges. Buy a Transporter and you’re done.

It’s not so much the lack of ongoing fees that I think is appealing, it’s the convenience and maybe the security of it all. Intellectually I do like that it’s got to be more secure having your own cloud than using everyone else’s but in practice I’m probably not that fussed. Since I do have our Macs backed up online all the time, the problem I really want to solve is that I have a lot of data. A lot. I’m writing to you from a 3Tb iMac and it is near-as-dammit full.

Computers slow down dramatically when the drive is full and I am seeing that even with this fairly new iMac. So the idea of having a Transporter in the loft or at my sister-in-law’s house and keeping all my films and music on there, that appeals. It appeals so much that I’m not sure why I haven’t already done it or at least tried out one Transporter.

I think you should try one. In the UK, you can buy a 1Tb Transporter today for £188.12 and in the States it’s $259.99. Spend that, plug it in somewhere, off you go to the races and back again.

I suspect my hesitation is that I would need a lot more than 1Tb to make this worthwhile. Connected Data sells a 2Tb version and it also sells a no-terabyte version: an empty Transporter shell into which you can add a drive of any capacity you can find, if it’ll fit. So the odds are that I could fit a 3Tb drive fairly easily. I’m just not sure that 3Tb is enough either.

Then the same firm does a device called a Transporter Sync which gives you all of this connected cloud lark but I believe does it to any drive you can connected to it by USB. I’m not very clear on the differences, but I’m pondering.

There. This started out sounding like a sales pitch and now it’s more of a sales plea: if you use one of these things, what do you think of it? And how useful is the 1Tb storage?

It’s not all sunshine when you use the Cloud

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We’re in that nebulous period where we keep hearing about the cloud and if we don’t understand what it is, we feel we should. Soon we won’t think about it at all and that ought to be a good thing. The less we have to piddle about making computers do what we want, the more we can spend time doing what we want and need to do.

Except.

Many years ago, I was in the office of a computer magazine when a power cut hit its network servers. Only the servers wherever they were, the magazine office and its PCs were unaffected. Or at least, they were unaffected by the power cut. They were supremely badly affected by the servers going down.

For this magazine ran all its applications from the server. Each PC had a tiny local hard disk and no applications at all. You started up your PC in the morning and it went on the network, got the applications, started working. It took forever. But during all this, you would go to the kitchen, get the tea and eventually start working. There were myriad advantages to the magazine in doing this but I suspect myriad really reduces to one: it made each individual PC cheaper.

Come the server powercut, then, everybody stopped working because everything stopped working. Except me. Yes, I was on a Mac, but I was reviewing some Apple notebook so I’d loaded the applications I needed. Even if the power had gone out in our office, I wouldn’t have noticed because I had battery power and I had all the software I needed to do my job.

On the plus side, I felt just a tiny bit smug and I also filed this away so that I could tell you about it twenty years later. This feels good.

On the minus side, everybody else got to go home.

We’re in a situation now where we are all relying on servers somewhere else. They’re now just servers somewhere else in the world and we call it all the cloud. The cloud is good. The cloud is very good.

Until it goes wrong and it does go wrong.

Adobe was in the spotlight recently when its Adobe CS cloud service, Creative Cloud, went offline for 48 hours, leaving users in the dark and preventing publication of the mobile edition of Britain’s Daily Mail. This was a disaster for the company and a much bigger disaster for thousands of Creative Cloud users trying to meet urgent deadlines — but in future failure in cloud services could damage the global economy.

Jonny Evans: Adobe CS and the dangerous cloud – Computer World via Macworld (5 June 2014)

Evans has some horror stories and a lot of statistic but he also has advice for us and for cloud service providers in his full piece. It boils down to this, though: rely on the cloud but don’t be dependent on it. There you go.