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LaCie's LaPlug turns your USB HDD into a network storage device, for LaPrice of $75 (video)
LaCie has always taken an understated approach to its lineup of boxy network storage devices, and the LaPlug is no different. With this little guy sitting in your living room, you can wirelessly share and access data across your home network, while streaming USB drive-stored multimedia content to any UPnP/DLNA-certified devices, including the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 or any compatible smartphones and tablets. With a quartet of USB 2.0 ports, along with gigabit ethernet and WiFi b/g/n capabilities, the LaPlug also allows you to back up your files in a centralized and remotely accessible location. You can grab one now for $75 at the source link below, or breeze past the break for more details in the full PR and accompanying video.
G-Tech G-Drive slim: stylish storage in a small package
I've been trying out the G-Tech G Drive slim portable hard drive for a few days and I'm quite impressed with it. The unit I tried was the 320 GB version, and in my "everyday user" tests, the drive performed remarkably well. Design The first thing you notice about the G Drive is that it looks like it was designed by Apple. As usual, that's a very good thing. And as a matter of fact, the G Drive website says that the external hard drive was made to mimic the look and feel of the MacBook Air. Perhaps it's the design of the G Drive that made Apple give this external their unofficial blessing. In a retail setting it's sold exclusively at Apple Stores and can usually be found hooked up to one of the MacBook Pros on display. The G Drive slim is made of a lightweight compact aluminum enclosure with a black rubber trim around the edges and features a single USB 2.0 port. The size of the enclosure is roughly 5"x3.2" and only 9.9mm thick. Best of all, it weighs only 0.33 pounds, so throwing it into your backpack, laptop case, or even a jacket pocket hardly adds any noticeable weight to your baggage. Usage Inside the G Drive slim you'll find a 2.5" 5400RPM Hitachi hard drive. Since the G Drive slim uses a USB interface, you've got a theoretical data transfer rate of 480 MB/s. But as to be expected, real-world usage is always slower. Still, transferring a 1 GB folder full of photos from my Mac to the drive took only about 38 seconds. That's not too bad for a consumer drive where design is clearly the most important element. Out of the box the G Drive slim is Mac-ready. It ships formatted for any Mac running OS X 10.5 of later. The drive is also Time Machine-compatible right out of the box. Also, for those of you with a Mac and PC household, though the drive is Mac-inspired and ready, you can still use it with any PC running Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7. Conclusion Nowadays a 320 GB USB drive doesn't sound like much, especially one that costs US$99. However, the target audience for this drive isn't one who wants to back up dozens and dozens of HD video files or use the drive as a scratch disk for video editing. It's for those people who want a quick, stylish, and easy way to store and transfer their photos, documents, and music. And most of the people in that group (including me) care more about design and portability than having the latest and greatest Thunderbolt devices. The 320 GB G Drive slim is available for US$99 at Apple retail stores, Apple Online, and on Amazon.com.
Google Takeout comes to Voice, get your SMS and voicemail to go (video)
Those militant leftists at the Data Liberation Front are at it again, bringing their tool for fomenting revolution, Google Takeout, to Google Voice. With the information emancipating service, users will be able to download their call history, voicemail and text messages, recorded calls, and even greetings. All audio is delivered in MP3 format, while SMS is spit out as an HTML file. Check out the video below for a brief, if not entirely informative, announcement from the guerrilla data warriors.
IBM developing largest data drive ever, with 120 petabytes of bliss
So, this is pretty... big. At this very moment, researchers at IBM are building the largest data drive ever -- a 120 petabyte beast comprised of some 200,000 normal HDDs working in concert. To put that into perspective, 120 petabytes is the equivalent of 120 million gigabytes, (or enough space to hold about 24 billion, average-sized MP3's), and significantly more spacious than the 15 petabyte capacity found in the biggest arrays currently in use. To achieve this, IBM aligned individual drives in horizontal drawers, as in most data centers, but made these spaces even wider, in order to accommodate more disks within smaller confines. Engineers also implemented a new data backup mechanism, whereby information from dying disks is slowly reproduced on a replacement drive, allowing the system to continue running without any slowdown. A system called GPFS, meanwhile, spreads stored files over multiple disks, allowing the machine to read or write different parts of a given file at once, while indexing its entire collection at breakneck speeds. The company developed this particular system for an unnamed client looking to conduct complex simulations, but Bruce Hillsberg, IBM's director of storage research, says it may be only a matter of time before all cloud computing systems sport similar architectures. For the moment, however, he admits that his creation is still "on the lunatic fringe."
Dolly Drive brings the Time Machine cloud closer to European customers
Everyone's favorite sheep-shaped online backup point, Dolly Drive, has opened a data center in Rome, Italy to give European Mac users faster Time Machine backups to the cloud. The new facility is part of a planned grid of data centers for the relatively new (less than a year old) and fast-growing backup company, which uses the built-in Time Machine capabilities of Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 to perform remote cloud backups. It's expected that the new data center will speed up initial and incremental backups for European users. Those current Dolly Drive customers will be notified by the company soon to have their data migrated to the military grade data storage facility. For those who aren't familiar with Dolly Drive, the company debuted at Macworld Expo 2011 and was a huge hit with those in attendance. Subscriptions are available starting at $5 per month for 50 GB of storage, climbing to $55 monthly for a whopping 2 TB of backups in the cloud. The Dolly Drive app can also be used to create a bootable clone on a local external disk drive.
Build your own Lion install USB thumb drive for cheap
Why pay Apple $69.99 when you can build your own Lion install drive for the App Store purchase price of $29.99 -- plus the cost of an inexpensive thumb drive. Here's how to create a full install on a drive, not just the recovery disk that we recently posted about. You'll need a copy of the OS X Lion installer. If you saved a copy when you first installed Lion, great. If not, you'll need to re-download it from the Mac App Store. To do so, launch the App Store and option-click the Purchases tab. An "Install" button should appear next to Lion. Click it to re-download the installer. You can use this option-click-Purchases trick to re-download any purchase, not just Lion. Once the 3.74-GB installer finishes downloading, go to your Applications folder to find the installer itself. It is called Install Mac OS X Lion. Right-click (or Control-click) the installer and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual pop-up. A new Finder browser window opens, showing the normally hidden material inside the installer bundle. Navigate to Contents > SharedSupport. There you'll find a disk image called InstallESD.dmg. Open a new Finder window with Command-N (File > New Finder Window). Navigate to /Applications/Utilities and launch DiskUtility. Attach a thumb drive to your Mac that is at least 4GB 8GB in size. (Update: some readers say 4GB isn't enough. As you can see, I used a 16GB drive) Prepare it for use by creating a single HFS+ partition. Select the drive (e.g. SanDisk Ultra) in the left hand column. Drives are listed first with their partitions listed after them, each partition indented slightly. With this drive selected, click the Partition tab and choose Partition Layout > 1 Partition. Choose Format > Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Click the Options button at the bottom-right of the partition layout. Select GUID Partition Table. Click Apply. Disk Utility asks you to confirm. Click Partition. Wait as it unmounts, partitions, and remounts your disk. Next, select the new partition (Untitled 1 by default). Click the Restore tab. Click Install next to the source field. Drag InstallESD.dmg into the file-open window and click Open. Drag Untitled 1 from the left column to the destination field. Click Restore and agree to Erase the drive and replace it with the contents of InstallESD.dmg. You may have to authenticate as an administrator. Wait. It will take some time for the drive to be written. Once it's done, eject it, label it clearly, and put it away for a rainy day. Meanwhile, go out and spend the $40 you just saved wisely.
Iomega's SuperHero for iPhone provides an iTunes-free backup solution
Personally, I have no issue with plugging my iPhone into my Mac every evening before I head to bed, recharging it, backing up my contacts and photos, and syncing my podcasts and music when I want it to. But I've heard before that a surprising number of iPhone (and iPod touch) users don't ever connect their devices to iTunes, and that theory is supported by Apple's big drive to go "PC Free" in iOS 5, leaving a PC or Mac connection out of the equation completely. For those not interested in connecting their iPhones to an actual computer every evening, Iomega is there with its SuperHero dock system, which I saw earlier this year at CES and tried out recently. The device is basically just a dock which plugs into the wall, and has only a power cord input and an SD card slot on it. Combined with an app you can pick up free from the App Store (and in fact, you're prompted to download the app the first time you plug in), the dock automatically backs up photos and contacts onto an SD card, and charges your device. The device was $69.99 at launch, but is now available for as low as $39.99, and at that price, I can see a lot of good uses for it beyond just the most basic of someone who might not understand iTunes or deal with a full sync every time they plug an iPhone in. This could be a good solution for an office or school backup system, where you might not be able to install iTunes and run a full sync on a work PC. Or it might just be a good way to offload your contacts and photos, keeping them in yet another location. The actual setup runs smoothly -- it really is designed for newbies, as it only takes about three taps to install the app early on, and afterward the app runs without any prompting. Plug your iPhone into the dock and let it go. Backup of contacts is quick, though photos takes significantly longer. I just got back from a trip, and loading the 17 photos I took with my iPhone took around 30 minutes. Still, this kind of "set it and forget it" backup is very useful, and of course there are options to not run contact or photos backup if you don't want to. You can also restore contacts and photos directly from the dock itself, so if you ever need to replace your phone, that's all very easy to do, even without a computer. Unfortunately, I don't have multiple iPhones for testing, but presumably, you might be able to use this system to copy contacts over across multiple iPhones -- each backup file is named separately on the SD card (controlled by another option), but it might be possible to plug in a different iPhone, and restore the contacts from there. One issue I had is that there's no way of pausing or cancelling a backup in progress, short of just pulling your iPhone out of the dock. But then again, that works all right, and the sync will just pick up where it left off when you replace the phone, so it's probably better not to have the extra UI anyway. Finally, there's one more option to encrypt contacts with a password if you like, providing a layer of security (which might be important if you set this up at your workplace). That's easy enough to do, though you have to remember that the security is only as good as your password, which you re-enter every time you run a restore. Iomega's SuperHero is a solid little device with quite a few different uses. Originally, I thought it was meant more as a dummy-proof way to get your iPhone backed up, but after using it, I can see quite a few places where a PC free way to get your iPhone's contacts and photos saved on an SD card could come in handy. It also works with the iPod touch. Even in Apple's brand new world of iCloud, where all of this information will be automatically saved on their servers, I can see reasons why the especially careful or paranoid might still want that extra backup functionality built into a charger, and especially after the drops in the SuperHero's price since launch, the SuperHero is a good deal. Iomega's made a weird little creature here with this dock, but it seems destined to be the platypus of iOS backup, sticking to old ways even when normal evolution might have deemed otherwise.
Seagate's GoFlex Turbo portable hard drive touts USB 3.0, built-in SafetyNet
Another week, another external HDD from the folks at Seagate. This go 'round, it's the GoFlex Turbo taking the stage, positioned somewhere between the GoFlex Slim and Satellite in terms of depth. It's the outfit's first drive to ship with two free years of SafetyNet, which nets you a single data recovery attempt should something go haywire during the honeymoon period. Tucked within, you'll find a 500GB / 750GB drive (7200RPM), a USB 3.0 port and support for eSATA / FireWire 800 connectors via an optional interface adapter. Per usual, it'll hum along just fine on both Windows and OS X, and can be snapped up today at Best Buy for $119.99 / $139.99, respectively. Full release is after the break, and if you're curious, we managed to see consistent USB 2.0 rates of 30MBps to 40MBps (read / write) during our brief time with it. %Gallery-129709%
Verbatim Store 'n' Go USB 3.0 hard drives add color to your otherwise drab storage needs
Our parents always taught us that it's what's on the inside that counts -- and that's why we don't ever take them hard drive shopping with us. Sure these Store 'n' Go drives are pretty standard 500GB HDDs, but hey, they come in Caribbean blue and hot pink, so they should fit in nicely with that neon fanny pack we just picked up to haul around our computer peripherals. The drives sport USB 3.0 and come loaded with Nero BackItUp software. You can pick them up for $100 from Verbatim's site -- they shouldn't be too hard to spot. Decidedly less colorful press information after the break.
Backblaze supports Lion, updates Storage Pod project
A couple of years ago, the folks at cloud backup provider Backblaze made their Backblaze Storage Pod design an open source project. For around US$7900, you could make your own 67 TB RAID 6 array, and combining 15 of the arrays would give you about a petabyte of storage at a cost of around $117,000. Now Backblaze has updated their project for even more storage at a lower cost. In a post on the Backblaze blog, the company has announced version 2.0 of the Storage Pod. It now provides 135 TB of storage for only $7384, making a petabyte of storage a relative bargain at only $56,696. Add in the space and power for the pods for three years, and you're still looking at less than $95,000 per petabyte. Sounds like a fun weekend project, doesn't it? It may be time to put in those racks in my basement and take out a loan... In other Backblaze news, the company has a Lion-compatible update available. Version 1.5.5.402 is downloadable from the Backblaze website now. Competitor Carbonite sent users an email alerting them that a Lion-compatible version of its backup tool is coming soon.
Clickfree trots out C6 Easy Imaging backup hard drives, takes 'em to 2TB
Your favorite no-touch backup company's coming back around again, this time with yet another HDD to tempt your paranoia. Clickfree's newest backup solution is the C6 Easy Imaging, capable of holding backups for as many PCs as necessary (provided there's enough space). It'll work seamlessly with Windows 7, Vista and XP, and it'll get all the juice it needs from a spare USB port. As with the outfit's prior products, this one's also designed for those who aren't exactly "hip" with technical lingo, which means that power users will likely be flustered with the inability to really control too much of what's happening just as soon as this thing's plugged in. That said, the drive does allow users to categorize which files they want backed up, and it'll enable users to restore only personal files should the need arise. The full spiel is hosted up after the break, and you can catch the portable version right now in the US and Canada for $140 (500GB) / $180 (1TB), while the desktop model goes for $150 (1TB) / $180 (2TB).
Google Takeout promises radical left wing-themed data extraction for Circles, more (video)
A team of khaki-clad Google engineers, calling itself the Data Liberation Front, has taken up the cause of freeing your data from the restrictive confines of El Goog's servers. Google Takeout, as the program has been billed, rips your various stashes of data from Buzz, Circles, Picasa, Contacts, and your Google Profile, and quickly bundles them in a zip file for download. The resulting booty is yours to do with as you choose. Takeout was announced the same day Google's latest social initiative sprung to life, offering an alternative to the notoriously hard to transfer data of its obvious competitor. But we're sure that was just a coincidence. Right? A hilariously nerdy promo video awaits you after the break.
Updated Time Capsule opened, server-grade hard drive nowhere to be found?
Well, fancy that -- a teardown of last week's refreshed Time Capsule has revealed a regular, non-enterprise drive lurking within. Curious, as Cupertino's website lists a "Serial ATA server-grade hard disk" as standard equipment on the device's official spec sheet. It's generally assumed that for a drive model to be qualified as "enterprise," it must sustain a mean time between failure -- MTBF for short -- in excess of one million hours. So what's the MTBF for the Western Digital's WD20EARS (Caviar Green) in HardMac's Time Capsule? Conveniently, the hard drive maker wouldn't say. Of course, we guess the definition here is up for interpretation, but given past experiences with the wireless backup gizmo, we'd certainly hope this improved revision fares better.
LaCie's CloudBox 'hybrid HDD' doubles your backups in the cloud (video)
Tempted by the allure of the cloud? Still not quite ready to give up that local backup at home? Fret not, as LaCie's new CloudBox gives you a pinch of both. The gizmo pictured above may look similar to the company's Wireless Space NAS, but it's actually a 100GB "hybrid HDD." The device connects to a router exclusively via its single Ethernet port, enabling it to handle local backups while also automatically mirroring an AES encrypted copy to a cloud server daily -- even if your computer is off. Using LaCie's Online Restore software, the offsite copy is accessible by up to ten previous volumes should the box ever become inoperable. The CloudBox comes with a one year subscription for online backups (mum's the word on future fees), and will be available in July priced at $200. You'll find more details in the PR past the break, as well as a video showcasing a variety of unfortunate -- mostly baby induced -- situations it's intended for. %Gallery-127028%
Apple unveils new 3 TB Time Capsule model (Updated)
Just as we were digesting the Final Cut Pro X arrival, word comes that Apple is also unveiling a new Time Capsule model. The 3TB model appears in the image header of the Time Capsule page on Apple's website, but full product details are not yet available. We'll keep you updated as new information is released. The part numbers and FCC IDs of the new units leaked last night, so it was reasonable to expect the actual devices pretty quickly. TUAW first reported that an AirPort/Time Capsule refresh was in the works back on June 1, when retail supplies of the wireless routers began to dry up. Update: The new 3 TB Time Capsule will be priced at $499 and is available now on Apple's web site. The 2TB is $299. Looks like the product got a capacity bump, but that rumored tie-in to iCloud did not materialize. [hat tip MacStories]
Apple unveils updated Time Capsule, bumps storage to 3TB
It's been a good long while since Apple unveiled a new Time Capsule, almost two years since the 2TB model rolled out. At the time that was a volume of storage that you couldn't possibly fill up -- even if you ripped your entire Peter Gabriel collection in lossless. Now, nearly 24 months later, you're out of room for the latest Greatest Hits compilations, never mind Scratch My Back and the subsequent buddy album. Now Apple has your back, releasing an updated Time Capsule offering up to 3TB of storage for all your former Genesis frontman listening needs. Update: The new Time Capsules have finally hit the Apple Store and prices haven't changed -- now you just get more for your money. The 2TB model slides into the $299 slot while the 3TB takes over the $499 position.
Apple's steps toward backup in the cloud tread lightly on third-party developers
Jenna Wortham of the New York Times wrote, "How do you know if you've created a really great, useful iPhone app? Apple tries to put you out of business." That's a pretty common reaction to Monday's WWDC keynote, and the shock and awe was not limited to iPhone apps. On Friday, TUAW mused about what Apple's return to cloud services might mean to backup-in-the-cloud developers. On Monday, Apple introduced iCloud, a way to push your music, photos, calendars and other data to the cloud so that it's "always accessible from your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac or PC," with instant access to that data across all your devices. While it does not appear that this service is any kind of substitute for a comprehensive backup strategy, it does show Apple continuing to move in the direction of taking charge of users' data protection needs. TUAW was curious how third-party cloud developers would react to Apple's entry into an arena that might step on the toes of their current offerings. We talked to the developers of Dolly Drive, CrashPlan and Arq to ascertain their reactions to iCloud. What we found was this: iCloud isn't about to drive Mac backup solutions out of business, the way that the keynote announcements challenged products like Readability, Instapaper and Sparrow. Dolly Drive Dolly Drive provides online backups using Apple's Time Machine technology for Mac OS X. Its cloud storage solutions merge the Mac Time Machine user experience with offsite safety to guard against a calamity that takes down your local backups as well as your computer. TUAW contacted Dolly Drive to see what they had to say about Apple's iCloud. Dolly Drive's spokesperson Leigh Kessler told TUAW, "iCloud is an example of Apple ingenuity and excites us as a solution for sharing among Apple devices. But we hope Mac users are not confused into thinking that iCloud's convenience is a substitute for true data backup and we think Apple would agree. Time Machine is still the most comprehensive way to protect and recover everything on your Mac and Dolly Drive is still the only way to do that in the cloud." Kessler provided the following table to differentiate Dolly Drive from iCloud. iCloud lets you iCloud doesn't Dolly Drive will see all your itunes library from all your mac and apple devices stream a limited number of photos from your iOS devices onto your mac and Apple TV sync documents that have been integrated into the iCloud framework. Backup a set of items that are on your iOS devices provide Mac desktop or laptop backup provide automatic iPhoto sync backup for music that is deleted from your music library backup or sync of documents that don't comply with iCloud backup all and any OS X computer file to Dolly Grid cloud storage recover from a crash with Dolly Clone backup from anywhere your computer is multiple times a day CrashPlan CrashPlan provides an always-on cloud-based solution for online data backup. Instead of using a Time Machine interface, CrashPlan runs in the background of your Mac performing regular updates to remote servers. CrashPlan's Mike Evangelist told TUAW, "We are still absorbing the many facets of Apple's announcements, but our feeling is generally positive. First and foremost [iCloud] will validate cloud options for the average user. In a sense [it's] assuring non-technical people that the cloud is nothing to fear." He explained, "As is typical with Apple's solutions, iCloud is stripped down to a few essential features. We see it as an opportunity to continue to provide robust, cross-platform solutions for home and business users. Small and large businesses have needs that are clearly not addressed by iCloud, including security, monitoring and management, the ability to run local servers, and a lot more. That's where CrashPlan PRO excels." Arq and SyncPhotos Stefan Reitshamer is the developer behind Arq, whose backup solution is built around Amazon's S3 cloud-based data storage infrastructure. He was intrigued by what Apple's new technology means. "Apple is trying to get rid of the file concept in OS X, just like iOS. There are no files in iOS -- there are only apps and their data. In the keynote we never saw a Finder window or a file -- only the new Launchpad. Likewise, the iCloud backup stuff is built into apps. So unless all your apps have added iCloud integration, iCloud backup isn't going to suffice." "The syncing stuff looked very single-user," Reitshamer continued, "aside from the calendar sharing. The photo stream stuff was cool but it only synched to a single person's devices. You still can't do what my SyncPhotos app does (sync new photos from someone else's computer). It's not surprising. They've never been very interested in groupware; they're usually more focused on the individual user." Conclusions While iCloud approaches the notion of moving your data to the cloud, it still has a long way to go if Apple decideds to take it to a full backup solution. iCloud will ship with 5 GB of free storage (not counting purchased items like music and apps), with additional increments likely purchasable by the user.
Homebrew utility lets you backup Windows Phone on your terms
Are you itching to find a manual backup solution for your Windows Phone? That's a tough one to scratch. Currently, the only way to fully protect your handset's data is to wait for Microsoft to issue new updates -- where backups are automatically created within Zune during install. Now, xda-developers member "hx4700 Killer" is eliminating those long waits with a homebrew solution that works directly with Zune by spoofing an update -- thereby triggering a backup. We're told everything on your phone gets saved, and you can even roll back to your prior software version. To do this you'll need a few things: Zune itself, Windows Phone Support Tools, an update package from any Windows Phone, and this killer utility. So, if you feel like doing the time warp again, hit the source article for the required downloads and some helpful instructions.
Clickfree C2 Rugged hard drive can fall down, backup
There's just something about the phrase "built to strict U.S. military standards" that makes us want to go positively medieval on a rugged device. Sadly, the aforementioned qualifier doesn't mean that Clickfree's new C2 Rugged Back-up Drive is capable of withstanding, say, a hail of gunfire, but the rubberized disk will continue to work after being dropped from four feet. The peripheral also features the company's Easy Run software, which will start automatically backing up your PC when you're done showing that storage device who's boss. The 500GB C2 is available now through Clickfree's site for $140 -- or $100, if you're one of the lucky 100 first people to buy, so maybe buy two, in case you go a little overboard.
Dolly Drive 1.2 expands to 2 terabytes, adds seeding program
We met Dolly Drive when it was barely a week old. This week, version 1.2 became available with increased storage capacity, increased upload speed and incremental cloning. Dolly Drive is a cloud-based backup solution that works with Apple's Time Machine. Once configured, Time Machine treats it as it would any backup volume. Additionally, Dolly Drive creates a local bootable backup, giving you both a local and an off-site backup of your stuff. Version 1.2 increases the offline storage cap to a generous 2 terabytes. Also, incremental cloning improves the speed of that process, and a new multi-site grid infrastructure on DD's end decreases users' upload time. I've been happily using Dolly Drive for half a year now. Prices start at US$5/mo. for 50 GB of storage and max out at $55/mo for 2 TB. As a bonus, users receive an additional 5 GB storage per month at no extra cost for every month that they remain a customer.
