a how-do-you-do during today’s Apple presentation, but the new AirPort Extreme Base Station is probably the thing that I’m most excited about. Put the thing in a closet with my DSL modem, a USB 2 hub, a couple big USB HDs and my printer and suddenly the promise of a truly unwired office is a reality. My desk has no wires except for power, and I don’t have to give up outboard storage or printing to get it. And I can do my daily backup from my couch – I don’t have to go upstairs, plug in to the hub and then start my backup script.
The new web service
from Amazon, Amazon S3, is very interesting. It’s very simply API-addressable storage on the internet at a very low rate – 15 cents a month per Gig of storage and 20 cents per Gig of transfer. Am I wrong, or would it be trivially easy for the guy who made my backup software to integrate this into his software in some way so that I could have cheap overnight offsite backups? I know I could use Automator to upload a full backup image to Amazon S3 once a week – which is just what I plan to do.
Whew
. I’m really glad that Dantz has released a working version of Retrospect for OS X. I’ve been keeping backups of my documents and such, of course, but I like having a complete backup of my system.
David Pogue
: Mac OS X 10.1: The Real Mac OS X at the O’Reilly Network. I must say that I have really started to enjoy doing things on my Mac since upgrading to OS X. Totally ready for prime time, though I would love to have a super-effective backup regime figured out.
In case there is
any doubt, Cory Doctorow’s post about a parking lot, his grandmother’s worries, and network backups at Boing Boing is surely his best post ever! “And here I am, a pathological worrier in the guise of an sf writer. For me, the worry revolves around backup.”
