One of the largest personal iTunes libraries I've ever seen belongs to a client of mine. This client, who was a DJ in the 50's and 60's, has a huge collection of vinyl albums and singles that he painstakingly digitized, cleaned up, and catalogued in iTunes. Needless to say, opening iTunes on his Mac Pro is an exercise in patience.

Thinking about his music storage needs, and the huge amount of digital photos and video that my wife are accumulating, got me musing about other ways to do mass storage inexpensively. At this point, I'm probably OK with a DroboPro, but what if I needed petabytes (1 petabyte = 1,024 terabytes = 1,048,576 gigabytes) of storage? Most solutions at this point in time are quite expensive.

As of 6 AM PDT this morning, off-site backup vendor BackBlaze has put their solution to mass storage needs, the BackBlaze Storage Pod, out to the world as an open source project. Their solution is a relatively inexpensive box (US$7,867 for 67 TB of storage) made up of off-the-shelf components that can be reproduced and/or improved upon by others who also need huge amounts of cheap storage. See those red boxes in the picture to the right? Each one of those contains 67 TB of RAID 6 storage in a 4U box. For a petabyte of storage, you're going to need to spend about $117,000 on about fifteen of the boxes.

I swear, getting old is not a lot of fun.

Last night, I taught a class in data security for home and small business users at our local community college. There were a lot of good questions from the community education program students, so the class ended quite late and I was still answering questions as I walked out the door.

This morning, I went to grab my MacBook Air out of my laptop bag and literally grabbed air instead. In my haste to get out of the classroom and head home, I had packed everything but the laptop. Fortunately, the classroom was locked and few classes are scheduled for early morning, so I called the campus police and had them rescue the MBA for me. Problem solved!

After actually losing an iPhone 3G a few months ago, I wrote a post about what to do to prevent data loss and identity theft when lose your iPhone, and included a few tips on how to hopefully keep yourself from losing the phone in the first place. In this post, I'll talk about the things that I do (or can do) to keep my MacBook Air and my data safe, even when my mind conspires against me to try to lose the computer.

Back in December, online backup company Backblaze launched a private beta of its service for Mac users. Like its Windows counterpart, the Backblaze subscription service is $5 US a month (or $50 US a year) for unlimited backup space. Today, the company is officially launching its service for Mac users, along with an updated client, better support for external drives and enhanced recovery options.


Configuration and setup

Just like in the beta, Backblaze remains extremely easy to set-up and use. You just install the program (by default it will run in the background, though you can change this), enter in your e-mail address and password, and it will start backing up your files. The default setting has Backblaze running any time it finds an available internet connection. The backup process is constant and Backblaze stores multiple versions of a file for 30 days (so if you are frequently changing a document or spreadsheet, 30 days worth of revisions are saved to Backblaze).

If you want to remove Backblaze, the company has made the uninstall process easier and more intuitive. There is now an uninstaller built into the install DMG image, just double-click on Uninstall (right next to the install option) and you can take Backblaze off your system. If you trash the DMG, just download it again off the Backblaze web site for easy removal.

Backblaze won't backup your Applications (thought it WILL backup stuff in your User/Library folder, so many of your application settings will remain backed up), but it will backup your photos, movies, audio files as well as things like your iPhoto or Aperture database, various documents, and more. By default, .ISO, *.exe and *.DMG files are excluded from the backup file type list, but you can remove most of those extensions (*.ISO cannot be removed) if you want to backup that information.

The maximum single file size is still 4 GB, but keep in mind this doesn't mean your iPhoto or Aperture databases won't be safe. Those databases are actually just folders with lots of smaller individual files, that's fine. If you have individual files over 4 GB in size, those won't be backed up with Backblaze. You'll need to split the files into smaller segments or make alternate arrangements.