I've gone mad......

Hi again,

Well, had the new PC four weeks now...and I've finally gone mad..that is backup mad. Read on...

I've always meant to do this, and now with the new PC in place I've found some time to set it up, and yes it is all a little "anal".

For Backup, I'm using Crashplan - which for a cost gives you:

• offsite backup, to Crashplan Central - minimum cost is $5 p/mnth for 50GB.
• local backup to another PC, in my case my work laptop - one off licence key, min $20 USD.

I'm also hosting backup for my Dad's PC, meaning he backs up to my PC over the net (effectively local backup for him) as well as to my crashplan central account. Between the two of us, we've used under 14GB.

Yes, there is a cost, but it's totally transparent and automatic. The data is encrypted before leaving your PC (Blowfish), then transmitted via SSL, so no worries about anyone seeing your data. I'm not backing up the whole PC, that would be crazy - just (my) documents and my separate Picasa album (another great free piece of software) with >5k of our photos.

I've also found a solution to my other pet hate...syncing documents between two (or more) PC's. I'm using a free service from microsoft called FolderShare. So far so good. though had a minor issue with my Vista Home PC folder "documents" structure not matching my work XP Laptop "my documents" structure. Anyway, after "googling it", found a work around.

So now, my documents folder is sync'd across my two PC's automatically. I'll have to monitor this over the next few weeks as I've seen a few strange things occur (luckily I have backups :)), but I think it's okay now and was maybe the "beta" jitters thing. I'll keep you posted.

To keep my personal documents away from work eyes, I'm using another free piece of software - truecrypt. This has many functions, but I use it to mount as a virtual volume when I run the exe to see my personal files. Works very nicely. It's very powerful, you could even encrypt your system partition.

To backup mine and Rochelle's blog, I'm using backupblogonline. Seems to do the job.

So, with all this is place - I can sleep easy at night.... or can I??

I have placed a lot of trust in these companies :$. Too much?? well, local backups abound as well - but that's a whole other post.

Our Dell XPS420 christened...and F1

Hi anyone,

Been a busy few weeks for us. Two weeks ago, our new Dell XPS420 arrived. I must say, I'm impressed with the Dell experience - much easier than building my own. The PC arrived 7 days after order, everything nicely packed up and in it's place. Installation was a breeze (well it should be hey :)) and it all fired up 1st go. The order, 100% correct!

I've since spent my nights since transferring data, setting up Flight Sim X (which runs very nicely on this beast) and coming to grips with Vista. Obviously, the whole UAC thing in Vista is a little painful, but reading up on it you can see it has it's purpose. The other prob I encountered was the Windows Easy Transfer thing - it don't work - so ended up mapping folders and transferring over the local network. Don't waste your time troubleshooting, no useful logs/errors - trust me.

Luca and Marco's christening was Sunday week ago, have uploaded some pics so check out the Album if interested. Another two Catholics in the world hey!

Uploaded this video of Aimee on a skateboard with her cousin Ryan taken at the start of March on our now broken :( Canon IXUS 75 , just a test really, it was an 88MB upload, not sure how big now as blogger did some post processing on it Don't play it if you don't have the bandwidth.

Watched the Melbourne F1 over the w/e. Only 7 cars of 22 finished. Hmmm. Plenty of carbon Fibre flying. Hopefully race 1 is not an indication of how the season will go for Webber. Good to see the Honda's back to midfield pace. Looks like the removal of driver aids like traction control and engine braking is a good move, might be interesting to watch this year to see how things pan out. As they say ... somewhere..."bring it on..."

New PC..soon

Hi again,

We all went to the city today to go shopping. Aimee is proving a little handful to ..um handle. I'm afraid Aimee is turning into one of those uncontrollable kids screaming at the top of his/her lungs while lying on the floor in the middle of the department store. I hope the terrible 2's don't go into the terrible 3's. Don't know how to manage her at times, guess that's just one of the joys of parenthood.

Finally got around to updating our 5.5yr old PC. Ordered a slightly customized Dell XPS420 last Monday...and guess what, it arrives this Monday...2 days away. Quite happy with the spec and am now just getting my head around what needs to be moved to the new PC (like Roses iTunes library etc.). I guess the only thing I'm not too happy about is the move to Vista, but I too am hoping that with the imminent release of SP1 there might be an improvement in peoples opinions and of course usability.

Have posted some more pics from Joan and Greg's camera of the 50th anniversary lunch, so if you're interested family, go have a look.