I recently did some evaluating of a few online cloud backup solutions, and thought I would share what I found here. I evaluated Dropbox, Carbonite, and CrashPlan. I ultimately went with CrashPlan, for reasons I’ll describe below.

Dropbox

I’ve been using the free offering from Dropbox for about a year and a half now. It’s great. At least, for what it does it’s great. The integration with the shell is perfect: the moment a file in your dropbox is modified, Dropbox starts uploading it to dropbox. It puts an icon of the file letting you know if the file has been backed up or not. And I’ve never gotten an error that I couldn’t modify a file because it was in use by Dropbox. Plus, it gives you a public folder which others can access via HTTP. You get 2GB for free, and I have no complaints about the free service.

However, I have about 80 GB of stuff I want to back up, and that number will only grow in the years to come as I record 720p videos of the kids growing. Dropbox’s prices are pretty steep if you want to buy more storage: $99/year for 50GB, or $199/year for 100GB. I guess if you pay for extra storage, you are really paying for all the people who are using Dropbox for free. Maybe they’re hoping to win you over with the awesome free service, and then maybe you won’t shop around before considering upgrading. But if you shop around you’ll find those rates are pretty unreasonable. There is also the issue that Dropbox wants part of your computer to be your Dropbox. Meaning, you would have to move all the folders you want to back up into your Dropbox folder. That’s kind of a big deal too.

Bottom line: Dropbox upgrades are a bad idea. Don’t do it unless you feel it is The Right Thing To Do, as a way to thank them for their awesome free service and to try to ensure that the free service stays around a bit longer.

Carbonite

Next up was Carbonite. I heard about Carbonite through an ad on a podcast (the Adam Carolla show I believe). They offer unlimited gigabytes for $59/year. Some web searching revealed that they seem to have a way of nudging some users away if they use too many of the “unlimited” bytes. But most of the complaints I found were from about two years ago. You can do your own research.

I tried the 15-day free trial. It has useful shell integration like Dropbox, which was nice. You tell it which folders to back up (rather than having to put everything in a “Carbonite” folder or something). However, the biggest turn-off for me was the file extension blacklist. Certain types of files are not backed up automatically by Carbonite. In particular, video files are not backed up. (As I said above, one of the main reasons I want cloud backup was to protect our photos and videos.) You cannot directly edit this blacklist, or tell Carbonite “hey just go ahead and back up anything”. Instead, you have to find a file that is not being backed up, and right-click on it and go into the Carbonite options and tell it to always back up that type of file. So you have to go searching for files that Carbonite might have missed. Throughout the 15-day trial I kept finding different types of files that Carbonite was skipping—exe, ini, all hidden files, and a few other extensions.1 This was enough to turn me away from Carbonite. I need to be confident that it is backing up everything!

CrashPlan

Last in my search, I arrived at CrashPlan. Like Carbonite, CrashPlan offers an unlimited plan. Theirs is only $50/year. They don’t have the nice shell integration like the other two. The only thing you have is a tray icon, which seems to be out of sync with the actual application every now and then. Another problem I have with it is that it locks the files while it is uploading them, so while I was uploading files I occasionally got a “this file is in use by CrashPlan” error message. Which is annoying, but I can live around it. Their approach to this seems to be “watch the file system for changes, but only actually upload new/changed files every 15 minutes”. I have changed that back to just once every hour to mitigate this risk.

I think some of the strange design decisions stem from the fact that (I think) it was originally a tool used to back up files from one computer to another (most likely on the same LAN), or from one hard drive to another on the same system. (In fact, you can still use it for that purpose for free.) It is definitely the least user-friendly of the three services I looked at, but it’s not crazy or anything.

In spite of these flaws, I still went with CrashPlan because the service works great, it is a better value than Carbonite, and doesn’t have the file type blacklist. I also got a code from CrashPlan about a week before my 30-day trial ended, with a code to get a year for only $42 (saving $8). I don’t know if this is normal, or if I just happened to be evaluating the service at the right time. I’ve been using the service for about two months now (counting the trial month), and I’m pretty happy with it.

I guess I should mention that there are others out there that I didn’t really look into much, like Mozy. And Microsoft and Apple each have their own proprietary cloud backup solutions too. I’m just reporting on the things that I looked into.

Those of you who don’t follow video game news too closely may not be aware of Heavy Rain.  It’s a game I’ve been following for some time, and every new trailer that is released makes me even more excited about it.  Calling it a “game” is even a bit of a stretch, it truly is more like an interactive movie.  Kind of like a really sophisticated “choose your own adventure” book.  Below is a video that was released this week that gives a really good overview of what the game will be like.  (It was aimed at a Japanese audience, hence the Japanese subtitles, but everything except the game dialog is in English.)  The basic idea is that there are four characters that you control through the course of the game, and they all end up investigating a serial killer (the “origami killer”).  I like the idea (which is discussed in the movie below) that you can’t truly mess up.  No matter what happens, you can keep playing and just deal with the consequences.  Even if all four characters end up getting killed, there is an ending to the story for that situation.

Anyway, the game won’t be finished until sometime next year, so I don’t want to give too much praise to a game just because of a clever concept.  That said, I totally dig the concept.

Also, this video is over nine minutes long.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is the best book I have ever read.

A few weeks ago I finished playing Shadow of the Colossus.  Since the game is three and a half years old, I’m not going to talk about it too much.  The game consists solely of 16 boss battles, in which you defeat colossi that are often hundreds of feet tall.  But the interesting thing about the game is that you start to sympathize with the colossi.  The only reason you are killing these things is because some god told you he would bring your dead girlfriend back to life if you would do it.  But no justification beyond that is ever given.  The colossi are not terrorizing villagers or anything like that.  In fact, they keep to themselves in a land devoid of human life, and they’ve certainly never done anything to you.  And, with the exception of the final colossus, none of them even appear to be attacking you for any reason other than self defense.  In one case, you must even shoot a colossus with an arrow in order to make it wake up!  As I was playing the game, I had the thought that this must be similar to bullfighting.  I mean, the bull has never done anything to the matador, yet the matador provokes him and stabs him with swords, ultimately delivering a final blow in a weak spot (between the shoulder blades, I think).  This is quite similar to what happens in Shadow of the Colossus.  And the game has a satisfying ending which I won’t spoil.

If you follow games at all, you’ve probably heard the praises of this game over and over.  So I’m not going to continue repeating things that have probably already been said in much better words by much better writers than myself.

Now that the election is over, I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

One: Stephanie and I went by our polling place at 6:30 PM on election night, just to see what the line was like.  There was literally no line.  We could see inside and there were some booths that weren’t even occupied.  No more waiting in line in the cold for ninety minutes to vote early for me.

Two: As a general rule, I don’t like to hear other people’s opinions of politics.  Especially the opinions of people with extremely strong opinions.  That said, I’ve been surprised and impressed with the mature, sensible way most (but not all) of the extremely conservative people I know have reacted to the results of the election.  Just one example: “My man didn’t win, but I will now support this man as my President.”

Nearly two months ago, I joined Facebook.  I had low expectations, despite the fact that a few people whose opinions I value told me the same things I’m about to tell you.  I have to say, as a whole, Facebook doesn’t really suck.  I guess I was expecting something more like MySpace, which just kind of looks like the Internet ate too many gifs and had to throw them up as partially-digested ads.  Or something like that.  I probably stretched that analogy too far there.  Whatever.  The point is Facebook doesn’t suck, and it’s actually kind of fun, even for an antisocial computer geek like myself.

A hilarious blog I discovered a few months ago is Stuff White People Like.  I’ve been meaning to mention it here for a while, but a good post last week, entitled Being Offended, reminded me I needed to share.  Here is an excerpt:

Naturally, white people do not get offended by statements directed at white people.  ...  As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.

Another good one is Knowing What’s Best For Poor People:

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Those are two of my favorites.  Some other good ones to read are Study Abroad, Music Piracy, Organic Food, Hating Corporations, Religions that their parents don’t belong to, and Grammar.

And for a great cross-section of the kinds of idiots that reside on the internets, try to read some of the comments!  (I say “try to” because very few people will actually succeed.)

I had to devote a small part of my blog to spreading the word about The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.  I wouldn’t be doing this except for the fact that you probably haven’t heard of it.  It’s a movie about Steve Weibe’s efforts to beat “Gamer of the Century” Billy Mitchell’s 1982 world record Donkey Kong high score, and the efforts of Billy and his posse to stop him.  It’s a documentary, but it’s still really entertaining and hilarious.  I won’t spend time repeating things you could read on various other sites.  I’ll just suggest that you go see it if you can find a theater that’s showing it (you currently only have two options in North Carolina...).  Failing that, save it in your Netflix/Blockbuster queue so that you can watch it whenever it comes out on DVD.

you’re the best around, nothing’s gonna ever keep you down

Not too long ago I posted about Budget and Time Warner not being very good at communicating what happens on their website to the real people who also work for them.  In order that none may claim me to be a negative Nancy, I’m going to post about one company that seems to have gotten it right: Papa John’s.

At first I was afraid to order pizza from a website.  It’s the kind of thing that requires instant communication to the human beings in the brick & mortar location.  If it’s not done right, your pizza could take hours to get prepared, or worse yet it might not get made at all.  If this required the manager to check his e-mail or something, it would not go well.  But after the time I called in an order for pick-up, and they decided to deliver it (and Stephanie called me from the apartment just as the cashier was trying to find my order in the computer), I decided I’d try to remove the idiot answering the phone in a noisy room from my pizza-ordering process.

I’ve now been ordering Papa John’s online for over a year.  That’s a whole year without hearing “Thank you for calling Papa John’s, please hold.”  In that time, I’ve only once had an order messed up, when I got pepperoni instead of pineapple.  Even in that case it was printed correctly on the receipt, so I think the guy making the pizza just didn’t read closely enough.  This is a problem that could easily be solved by replacing all the humans with pizza-making robots.  The kind which will someday take over the world.

My only real complaint is that I can’t use the coupons they send in the mail when I order online.  But usually they have the same deals or better online so it’s not that big of an issue.  On the plus side, you can take advantage of the system to some extent.  For example, Stephanie and I prefer to get pizzas with pineapple and bacon.  A large 2-topping pizza is $12.99.  Now, either through an unadvertised online promotion or a glitch in their system, a large Smokehouse Ham & Bacon specialty pizza is $11.99 (with ham, bacon, onions, and green peppers).  You can remove or substitute two toppings from a specialty pizza and still get it at the same price (I’m not sure if the rule is 2 toppings, or half of the toppings).  So if we substitute pineapple for onions and remove the green peppers (or substitute extra cheese), we now have the original pizza we wanted, with an extra topping or two, for a dollar less.  And when there are deals such as “free cheese sticks with a large specialty pizza,” which there usually are, we are able to take advantage of them (we technically have a specialty pizza).  So now we’ve got extra toppings and cheese sticks for a dollar less.  Funbelievable!

I think this is pretty cool:  Microsoft got some of the wallpaper images for Vista from amateurs they found by searching Flickr.  Read more here or maybe over here.