My Tools: CrashPlan

Posted on 19/01/2012 by Graham Chastney

Like many families the Chastney’s are producing data at a formidable rate. I have a son who edits music and a daughter who is into photography, add to that a reasonably sized music collection, my photographs and a bucket load of other documents and there’s over 150GB of important stuff. (Did I tell you about the days when we used to argue about people wanting 20MB hard disks (yes I did mean Mega Bytes)).

That’s where CrashPlan comes in by creating a safe remote continuous backup.

Getting all of this data copied to a location away from the house has always been an aim for a number of reasons. The main reason being that there are so many situations where a backup solution in the house wouldn’t be sufficient to protect it – fire, flood, etc.. There’s also the added advantage of being able to access data that you haven’t taken with you if you need to. CrashPlan Central provides a remote backup location that is always there to write to and to read from.

Another great thing about CrashPlan is that it doesn’t matter where the devices are. My son is at university and living away from home during term time. Because he has internet access all of his work is still backed-up and protected whether he’s at home or at university.

The CrashPlan agent runs all of the time on all of the devices and is continuously backing up the data. This means that we don’t really think about it making a backup it just happens.

We’ve had need to recover some files too and that works a treat also.

There are a number of other features of CrashPlan that are really good, but I don’t really use them.

The pricing is pretty good to. I use the CrashPlan+ Unlimited Family which covers the household for a few pounds a month.

Comparing Apples and Apple

Posted on 10/01/2012 by Graham Chastney

I promise I’ll write something more thought provoking soon, but I couldn’t resist this infographic:

Thank Mashable

Seasonal Gratitude

Posted on 21/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

It’s been a great year for infographics, almost too good (they’re starting to become a bit formulaic). At this seasonal time I thought I would highlight one to make us grateful:

(I’d link back to original, but I don’t know where it came from originally. I got it from here)

Email is broken (and my embarrassment)

Posted on 07/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

I thought I would connect together two things that are in the news this week:

Symantec highlight that SPAM has fallen to 70% of all emails.
Atos boss Thierry Breton feels the need to defend his internal email ban.

I’m not going to give much more comment than to point out that if in any other arena 70% of something was clear rubbish (and much of the other 30% was less than valuable) we would be up in arms.

If 70% of the music I listened to was hiss – I wouldn’t listen.
If 70% of the TV that I watched was white blur – I wouldn’t watch.
If 70% of the post coming through my door went straight in the bin – I would ask the post office to stop delivering.
If 70% of all of the words in all of the documents I read where rubbish – I’d throw the document back to the author (something I do have to do from time to time).

And that’s not even accounting for all of the inappropriate use of email.

This is the point where I have to admit to a classic email mistake last week which, to a certain extent, just demonstrates the brokenness of email.

We run relaxation days at work where someone comes into the building, takes over a meeting room, and provides massage and other relaxation services. We get invited to these events via email.

For some reason I clicked on reply-to-all rather than just reply.

This resulted in me sending an email to the whole of the building, several hundred people, with the immortal words:

"have you got any slots left for back, neck and shoulder massage?"

You can imagine my embarrassment.

I’m with Thierry, let’s find better ways of communicating.

Because it’s Friday: Wind Powered Cheese

Posted on 11/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

There’s a famous cheese in these parts called Garstang Blue.

It’s described like this:

A unique, rich, mellow and indulgent blue cheese with an open body and a velvety, smooth and creamy texture.
Creamy white in colour with blue vein radiating from the rind. It is best served at room temperature.

What it doesn’t say in the description is that the main source of power for the production of this cheese is a huge wind turbine right next to the factory.

The turbine has become a bit of a landmark because it sits in the middle of what is quite a flat area stretching for miles around.

Anyway, the purpose of the post, I love to see ‘how it was made’ videos and here’s the one for the turbine:

Dewlay Turbine

So that’s how you get wind powered cheese.

(If you’re wondering where I sit on the Wind Turbine debate – I like them!)

Are tablets already changing the workplace?

Posted on 07/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

I regularly have people telling me that tablets are already radically changing the workplace.

I’m a sceptic about the speed of change.

I am absolutely convinced that the workplace will change radically over the next 10 years, and that tablet type devices will have a significant part to play in enabling that new way of working.

Where I’m not convinced is in the rate of change.

I get particularly sceptical when people’s starting evidence is the number of these devices that have been sold. My retort is that games consoles have also sold millions, so why wouldn’t they be having an even bigger impact on the workplace? I’m not really being serious when I say that, but sometimes I just like to be provocative.

A recent study, does suggest that my scepticism might have some grounding:

A much greater number of tablet owners are using these devices at home rather than on the move, a new European study has found.
CCS Insight, the research firm, polled 4,500 people who had already purchased a slate such as Apple’s iPad in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
When looking at home usage, 79% of consumers used their tablet in the living room, reaching 60% for the bedroom, rising to 70% in France and the UK. Another 38% did so in the kitchen and 39% did so elsewhere in the house.

In other words, the tablet is a convenient home entertainment device for most people, a role, at which, they excel. They are used in this role a lot as well:

In all, the study discovered that more than 90% of the sample used their slate for at least an hour a day, hitting 95% in the UK.
More specifically, the British panel posted the largest average usage time, on 2.8 hours a day, and 11% utilised the web via this route for over five hours on a daily basis.

That’s a lot of usage for a device that is being used in ‘spare time’. So the people who should be worried are the other people making their money out of home entertainment. There impact on the workplace is limited by their lack of usage outside the home.

Just to be clear though, I’m not saying that the tablet isn’t going to enable a radical change to the way we work, I’m just sceptical about the rate of change.

In the words of Bill Gates:

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."

Microsoft Future Vision 2011

Posted on 31/10/2011 by Graham Chastney

Lots of people posted about this last week. I was on holiday so didn’t, but thought I would for anyone who hasn’t seen this.

The video shows a Microsoft perspective on the 5-10 year future of how "people get things done at work, at home and on the go".

It’s an update to a concept video that I posted about back in 2009, so is as interesting as a comparison as it is for it’s current content.

The interesting part for me is the view of how many people will still be working within an office at a desk, and how many people will still be travelling the globe to get work done.

I was also interested by the limited use of gestures, but judge for yourself: