Technology: December 2007 Archives
About a year ago, I predicted that Apple’s iPhone would sell really well. A recently released market study by Canalys claims that the iPhone has a 27% market share in the North American smart phone market. 2nd place isn’t bad for a first-time product. Blackberry has a small lead, and Windows-based phones (all of them as a group) are in 3rd place.
It will be interesting to see if Apple can continue their success in the international market. I suspect that they can. I’m still hoping to find some justification for getting one at some point. :-)
I’ve always been annoyed that the link to my spam folder in GMail showed up as bold text because there were unread messages inside. At first, I tried using Greasemonkey scripts or other forms of hacking the style sheet so that the word “Spam” wouldn’t be so attention grabbing. These worked until I’d use a new computer or reinstall my browser (like after my hard drive crashed at work).
After reading Matthew Gallant’s note about how he uses filters to automatically mark his spam as read, I tried it out. After a few tweaks, it’s working great. I only get a few spam messages a month that causes me to open my Spam folder. In one case, it was a legitimate email that I was glad not to have missed.
The basic idea is to create a filter that marks everything in the Spam folder as read unless it contains one (or more) keywords you specify, like your real name. That way, most spam will just be ignored, but misclassified emails will show up as unread which you can then verify by hand. Very nice.
Well, yesterday the hard drive in my computer at work failed. I find this more than a bit funny as I work at Mozy which is company that does online backups. It gave me an opportunity to experience the process of restoring my files first hand.
When arrived at work yesterday morning, I noticed that my computer was freezing for a minute or two at a time. I thought it was some run-away process on my computer, but didn’t think much of it at first. Eventually, it got annoying enough that I decided to reboot my computer to get rid of it. That was the last I saw of my computer.
Eventually, I did manage to get the computer to boot into “single-user mode” which is designed for diagnosing and fixing problems. A few obscure terminal commands later, I discovered that the file systems on both partitions on my drive were badly corrupted. For those interested, the super block and all of its backups were bad on both partitions. Not good.
Apparently, the crash was caused by a power failure or brown-out over the weekend. The company is a bit behind in getting backup power supplies (UPS) to all of their new employees. They have several on order, but it’s going to be a week too late for me. I’d been through 4 brown-outs so far this year and hadn’t had any problems. My luck couldn’t last forever, I guess.
Anyway, since I’d been using Mozy to backup my important files. I got to see how Mozy’s restore process worked and discovered a few things that could help the process go a lot more smoothly. Just after losing a drive, our customers are wondering if they’ll ever see their files again. Getting their files back quickly and easily would make them incredibly happy.
I use the Mac version of Mozy, so I’ll avoid commenting on the Windows version. We try to make both versions similar, but I’m sure there are some differences. So here’s the list for happy customers:
- Consistency — get the files back at all.
- Accuracy — get the files in their exact original state.
- Speed — get the files as quickly as possible.
- Usability — having a simple, easy, quick process for doing it all.
Looking at this list, it strikes me that this is probably the correct order in which to focus our attention. The Mac version does a good job on everything, but can improve on #2 and #4.
The current version of Mozy does not backup some types of files correctly, including symbolic links and resource forks. It also has some UI issues with bundles. These problems have already been fixed for inclusion in the next release and are in testing now. They were some of the last bugs necessary for Mozy to get out of it’s beta state.
UPDATE: Version 0.9 (and later) of Mozy supports resource forks, symbolic links, and bundles.
The main improvements needed before restoring files with Mozy can be a joyful process (“Yes, it worked!”) are:
- The ability to restore files to their original locations.
- An option to “synchronize” a folder by deleting files that don’t exist on Mozy’s servers.
- Support for restoring a “backup set” instead of just browsing for files.
Right now, it is possible to restore files to their original locations by choosing the root folder as the destination and selecting all of the highest-level folders for restoration. You get one warning about overwriting files. Since this is probably a very common desire (it’s what I wanted after my reinstall), I think Mozy should make it easier.
I also found that there were some default files and folders on my computer that I didn’t want after restoring. In particular, I had to delete the default files for iCal and Mail before restoring to make things work right. Since I knew that I’d backed up my entire Mail folder, it would have been awesome if Mozy could have restored my Mail folder to be exactly like Mozy’s copy of that same folder. There could even be some type of “merge” process that displays what Mozy is going to do (including files that will be overwritten) and ask for permission to proceed.
When you configure which files and folders you want Mozy to back up, you can choose to back up a “set” of files from a list or browse the filesystem directly. When restoring files, the only option is to browse. Since our website allows users to restore files by choosing from the sets they backed up, it makes sense that the Mozy application should too.
Overall, I was able to get my files back without too much trouble. Since I’m the one responsible for eliminating that “trouble” for our customers, I’ve added these ideas to our list of things to do. I don’t think I would’ve volunteered to destroy all my data just to see what it’s like, but maybe I should have. In any case, I hope to improve Mozy’s restore process soon.
