iTwin Private Cloud

Storing information on the Internet makes some people nervous. It makes us nervous too. So how about having a private cloud?

A “cloud” in computer talk is a storage place for information. Commercial ones for corporations and government tend to be huge. The “my-Ditto” is a book-sized box that can act as your own private cloud. It can handle up to four terabytes of storage if you pay $370 for the maximum capacity. Less capacity costs appropriately less. It has its own Internet address, which means you can access it from any device that can connect to the Internet.

Four terabytes is a lot of storage, more than 4,000 gigabytes. For comparison, our laptop holds 219 gigabytes which is less than a fourth of a terabyte, and we’ve never filled it up. The my-Ditto storage drive comes with a coded USB key. Instead of taking the box with you, which would be fairly heavy and mildly bulky, just take the key. When you plug that key into another computer it provides access to the box back home. Or use the my-Ditto iPhone/iPad app. You set your own user name and password.

My-Ditto, works with Windows or Mac and won an award at MacWorld 2011. If you supply the disk drives, my-Ditto sells for $110, otherwise, it starts at $150 for 500 gigabytes. (Note: In nearly any remote storage device of this type, you can supply your own disk drives to go inside it; they should be SATA drives.)
A similar device is called the iTwin, and won an award from Popular Science magazine. It can set up a connection between two computers, wherever they are, when a coded USB key is plugged into each one and they’re both connected to the Internet.

As files move between the two computers, they are encrypted. The iTwin is $99 and can access whatever you have on two computer hard drives plus any attached extra storage. However, unlike my-Ditto, both computers must be on. Another difference (which strikes us as minor), is that iTwin can’t stream data to an Xbox or Playstation, but my-Ditto can.

The other day Joy had to help a featured speaker connect a computer to a projector at her woman’s club. The computer was missing Windows 7 menu options like: “connect to a projector.” The speaker said she couldn’t understand this because her computer was practically brand new. So how come it still had Windows XP on it? The likely answer: Windows 7 was probably overwritten when she did a “backup and restore.”

Overwriting Windows 7 can happen when you make a clone of your old computer, upgrade to Windows 7, and then restore the old system. The way around it is to use PCmover Professional, $60 from Laplink.com. It moves programs and files over to a new machine and leaves the new operating system in place. It’s handy for people who have lost the installation disks or the serial numbers for programs they want transferred to a new computer.

Out of 18 programs we tried to move, 12 transferred and six didn’t. There was no pattern to the hits and misses. Camtasia Studio, for instance, a $299 program, transferred easily. That alone was worth the price of PCmover. Our PrintMaster greeting card program, however, which you can get for $2 at Amazon, showed nothing but the title screen and wouldn’t open. But when we used the Window’s “task manager” and clicked “end program,” the rest of it was all there behind the title screen. Apparently, the title was a program in its own right. Expensive programs like Adobe Photoshop didn’t transfer. SmartDraw, which costs $200, also did not transfer.

You can save $20 by buying the less powerful “PCMover, Image Assistant.” The only drawback is that you have to make a clone of your old machine’s disk drive first, using the included DiskImage or Windows own imaging routine. For us the cloning process took three hours, so it may be worth getting the professional version to save time and trouble. If you’re moving programs from PC to Mac, Laplink has a $40 product called “Switch and Sync.”

In just a few years, these products may become curiosities for most users because of the growing use of smart phones, tablets and other devices that connect to the Internet. People will “Tap the app,” as they say. The programs will reside in the so-called “Cloud” a huge collection of storage drives you access from the Internet. Time-consuming PC transfers will be a distant memory.

Our friend Carol has an old printer-scanner combo with the worst scanning software we’ve ever seen. It was enough to tick off the Good Humor man. Carol’s solution was to go out and buy a new Canon scanner. A cheaper and better way is to spend $50 and get some good scanning software, like the new PaperPort 14.

This is version 14 of the handiest program we ever saw for organizing scanned documents and digital files. It’s great for organizing tax returns, receipts, letters, etc. You can select documents that go together and combine them into appropriate PDF stacks for emailing. This beats creating a zip file, because the recipient doesn’t have to have all the programs that created those separate files, and the pages stay in the right order.

Another handy feature is the ability to send scanned documents or files directly to any of a dozen different programs, like Microsoft Outlook, PowerPoint or Evernote, a free note-taking program. We scanned a few newspaper articles, and clicked on the Evernote icon from within PaperPort. Now they will show up on any computer that has Evernote, by going on the Internet and entering your password. If an article in a newspaper or magazine is on the web, don’t bother to scan the paper version, just copy it.

To save any Web page, document or picture as a PDF, choose “print” as you normally would, then select “Scansoft PDF Create.” The article is then saved as a PDF, a “portable document format” that keeps the original formatting. (If you use the Google Chrome web browser, you don’t need PaperPort to do this trick on web pages. From the print menu, simply choose “Print to PDF.”)

Scanned documents normally can’t be edited, because after all, what the scanner is doing is simply taking a picture of a document, not actually reading the words. If it needs to be edited, the document will have to be scanned using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This OCR feature is only in the professional version, which unfortunately lists for $200.

A new feature is “PaperPort Anywhere,” which gives you access to your PaperPort files from the Internet using a PC, Mac, tablet or smartphone. Unfortunately, they only give you one gigabyte of storage for free; after that it’s $10 a month for 10 gigabytes. Another new feature is the right-click menu. Right-click a file and you get options to edit it, duplicate it as a PDF, and so on.

The standard version of PaperPort costs $50 at Nuance.com. When you go the website, it looks like it’s on sale for $99, but click the link that says “more” or click on “buy now,” and the price changes to $50. Weird: Why not just get right to the point? Bet ya, they held a dozen meetings until they messed it up.

Automatic online backups have saved our bacon more than once. You’re out of town, you need a file from home, and Viola! as we say in fractured French, there it is in your personal online account, ready to download to whatever computer you’re using.

There are several free services that will do this for you, including Dropbox and SugarSync. But our new favorite is “Syncplicity,” which is tough to pronounce but easy to use. It’s free for personal use up to two gigabytes of storage and works with PCs, Macs and the iPhone.

Instead of having to upload stuff whenever you remember to do it, any file or folder you designate is continually backed up and encrypted to your own private space online. A green check mark next to a file or folder name tells you it’s been backed up.

Syncplicity links with Google Docs, so that all the stuff you’re storing online in Google’s free word processor, called “Docs,” is also transferred to your desktop or phone and available offline, if you check off that option during setup.

To start, click the “download free” link under “personal edition” at syncplicity.com; it’s right at the top of their home page. Install the program and choose whatever files you want to keep backed up. If you later decide you chose too many folders, you can right-click and un-sync them. That’s helpful if you’re running up against the two gigabyte limit in the free version.

We had a bit of trouble with the new iPhone version when we tried it out on an iPad; by a lot of trouble, we mean it just wouldn’t load. So we did a little searching and discovered if we went to the mobile version of their website, which is m.syncp.com and logged in there, all our files were then available for download.

The business version lets you keep your stuff in sync with other online services, such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint. While the two-gigabyte version for personal use is free, the business version starts at $45 a month for three users.

GogoBeans works on iPhones, iPads, and Android devices and is coming soon to Blackberry and Windows. They call it “shake to bounce” because your photos, music and files bounce from one device to another.

Start by uploading your files to an online storage locker. Then share them by shaking your device near your friend’s. GogoBeans was recently rated the best entertainment app at the CTIA Wireless convention. More info at bu.mp and gogobeans.com.

Bob recalls reading that Gay Talese of the New York Times would sometimes tape his stories to a wall before he turned them in. He would then read them through binoculars from the other end of the news room. He felt this would literally give him perspective. So here’s our perspective (sans binoculars):

Like most things, there are two way to look at this. You can back up your files and some programs to an external hard drive sitting on your desk, or you can back them up to a drive out there in the cosmic ether. The advantage of backing up to your own hard drive is that it’s right there in the office. It’s also cheaper. The disadvantage is if a disaster destroys the office, it’s likely to get the backup drive too. If you leave the office and leave the backup drive, you’re out of touch.

Backing up everything to an online service is the probably the safest way to go, even if you also use storage drives. Of course it costs more, and it takes more time — at least the first time: It can take more than 24 hours if you need to store 100 gigabytes.

MiMedia has a postal solution. (The Post Office lives!) First they mail you an encrypted drive which you plug into your computer and choose what you want to store. You mail it back and they put it online for you. Once the first transfer is complete, the software automatically backs up additions without any more trips to the Post Office. It works with smart phones too. There’s a 30-day free trial at MiMedia.com.

Bob doesn’t like the deal. The cost, for instance, is $49 a year to store 25 gigabytes. For $99 a year, they let you store 100 gigabytes. Of course, for $99 you can buy a hard drive that stores five times as much and you only pay once. Our MiMedia online files were painfully slow to load, and we didn’t like how they were organized: Our least-used folders were all on top and we couldn’t find our favorite pictures. A lot of non-video files showed up in the video category

There are several online backup services and a Google search will reveal them all. The most popular right now is Mozy.com. They charge $6 a month to store 50 gigabytes. That’s a little more expensive than MiMedia’s price for 100 gigabytes, and you have to do the uploading yourself — no postal deals. They have discontinued their unlimited storage service, since unlimited these days is way big. You can store 2 GB free if you download a small utility from mozy.com/home/free .They store your files with the same security online banks use during data transfer, if that makes you feel better.

Our favorite backup system is the “Clickfree” drive from GoClickfree.com. They have several sizes, and prices range from $99 for a 250GB small portable size (comes in red) to $250 for a one TB (terabyte) drive that can be used either with a cable or wireless. For $130 they have a 32GB solid state drive the size of a credit card. You can slip that one in your wallet. It’s a high price, but that’s because of the software.

Clickfree starts backing up files as soon as it’s plugged into a computer, Windows or Mac. They also make a tiny cable connector for $80 that turns any external hard drive into a Clickfree system when you connect it to a computer, iPhone or iPod. Web site is goclickfree.com.

We had just about stopped looking at new security programs. There were so many it was like strapping lead weights around our computer to see if we could sink it to the bottom. However, we continue to be very pleased with Avast and Anti-Malware, both of which come in free versions, and we’re impressed with the new BullGuard Internet Security 10. It’s something different.

BullGuard comes with everything but the kitchen sink, and doesn’t slow down our computers. When you first install it, it asks if you want it to run quietly (as in: don’t bug me, just protect me) or whether you want to see what it’s doing at each step. We tried quiet mode on one computer and active mode on another. Both worked fine.

What impressed us were the extras. You get five gigabytes of free online storage for email and files. You get anti-spyware, anti-virus protection, a firewall, safe browsing, social media protection, password protection, a gaming mode and an inspector that identifies outdated software. The inspector found a dozen programs on our test computer that needed updating. These were all free programs, such as Adobe Flash player and Web Ex.  Not updating these programs makes you more vulnerable to hackers.

The program’s anti-virus approach is behavioral: If it looks like a virus and acts like a virus, kill it — even if it doesn’t match anything in the database of known viruses. This approach catches 65% more malware than traditional anti-virus programs.

In several independent studies, BullGuard scored detection rates of 100 percent against known and unknown viruses. That’s great, but it wasn’t 100 percent when it came to spyware. (Spyware is a class of programs that don’t attempt to change anything on your computer but just sit there and watches what you’re doing, then reports it back to the enemy camp.)  We left our regular Anti-Malware and anti-spyware program, from MalwareBytes.org, installed and it continued to catch stuff that BullGuard missed. You can install as many anti-spyware programs as you wish, by the way, but only one anti-virus program, because they can interfere with each other.

BullGuard can also act as an uninstaller, and automatically remove conflicting programs. The program is $60 for a one-year subscription on three computers. There’s a 30-day free trial, and that comes with 100 megabytes of online storage at bullguard.com.

BullGuard offers the Backup program on its own for $25. It gives you 10 gigabytes of online storage, encryption for your files and emails and the easiest file recovery system we’ve ever seen.

It sounded serious to her. A screen prompt told her to install McAfee’s online backup program, which she neither needs nor wants, and then asked her to pay for it. When she didn’t do that, an icon flashed ominously in Windows taskbar, telling her she must take action. This is a gun to the head to someone unfamiliar with the computer.

Joy went over to her apartment, looked at the message, and right-clicked “exit” on the flashing icon. She then looked for the online backup program in the “add/remove programs” section of the Windows Control Panel, but couldn’t find it. So she clicked “start” and then “run” from the main desktop screen and typed “msconfig” to view the “startup” tabs. It didn’t appear there either.  She told her handicapped friend that if the flashing icon comes back when she reboots, just click exit again. It is possible to find the programming code that triggers these stupid warnings, but not worth the effort when you can just click exit.

This is nothing less than fear marketing and McAfee is not the only purveyor of free floating anxiety. We used to get if frequently from Symantec’s Norton anti-virus programs, which not only insisted on frequent updates but frequent payments as well. Bob says he will never deal with them again. The word is out that their newest version is light and fast and much better than the old clunky version. But we no longer care; they poisoned the well. On a lesser scale, Rebit’s backup software would tell us every day how many hours it had been since we last backed up our files. It was like we were naughty, naughty. We asked them how to remove these notices and they told us they had no idea how to stop them. So we removed Rebit from the startup menu and that stopped them.

One of our biggest criteria for anti-virus programs and backup software is no-hassle protection. Keep it clean, keep it easy. We don’t want to be nagged to do updates; we don’t even want to be aware of them. We don’t want any esoteric programmers’ messages that say something like “error 43X67-2” has been encountered and this program will be shut down.” Our Avast anti-virus program just presents small box on the screen telling us it has already done an update without asking. In fact it never asks us to do anything. Without any fear marketing from them, we paid to get the pro version for extra protection. Before that we used their free version for a year or more and were quite satisfied.  MalwareBytes.org, has an excellent anti-spyware program, which is also free and we sometimes activate for a double check.

Don’t tolerate bullying market pitches – in any field. There are plenty of competitors to turn to in every area of software. We’re looking at a new security program now, and we’ll get to it below.

The Dying Gaul

One of the most famous sculptures from the classical period is “The Dying Gaul,” done in the early third century. Someday we may get “The Dying Computer.” Till then …

What is to be done?  If your computer dies and you get a new one, what about all those programs that were on the old machine? Are they dead too? Not if you have some good tools.

First you need what’s called a “bootable disk:” If your computer won’t start in the normal fashion, insert the bootable disk into the DVD drive and flip the switch; the operating system will find it and start up.  Joy keeps a bootable disk in her buggiest computer. It used to start up okay around half the time. Now it always starts up. If you don’t have a bootable disk, you can use your computer to make one, and of course you have to do this before the big trouble starts. If you messed up and didn’t do that, you can use a disk containing one of the Linux operating systems, like Ubuntu. These are free and often included in the back of books on the subject.

The second thing you need is the backup you made before the computer died.  With any luck, you stored that on an external disk drive, on a DVD or at an online backup service.

Finally, you need a program that lets you put your whole system back on the old or a new computer. We know of only one program that does this for a new computer. It’s the $30 “Plus Pack” that’s an add-on to the new $50 “Acronis True Image Home 2011” or the older 2010 version. You see, normally you can’t put Windows and all your programs, files and settings, onto a different computer because of hardware conflicts.  With Plus Pack, you can; except in rare instances, it makes the necessary adjustments.

For those who can’t imagine ever needing to restore a dead computer’s files and programs onto different hardware, Acronis True Image Home 2011 without the Plus Pack add-on has another very useful feature; it’s called “nonstop backup.” Nonstop backup saves your whole system every five minutes, so you can then go back and restore everything.

Video by Kenny S

True Image comes with a “Try & Decide” mode. If you activate this mode, you can then click on any web link, open any attachment, or try any program, and it will not make changes to your computer. If you decide you like what you see, you can keep it. Otherwise, use the “undo” button in the program to throw out the new information.

There are several backup and restore programs. But what we liked about Acronis was its ease of use.  Put a bootable disk in the drive, restart the machine, and click the “Acronis” logo. Then click “restore.” That’s it: the whole shebang and the widget in the works that makes the wheels go round.  Acronis True Image Home also comes with online backup, which is free for the first two gigabytes.  And it makes a bootable disk for you. “True Image Home 2011” is $50. The Plus Pack add-on is $30. You can read about both at acronis.com.