Interesting

A no hassle (but costly) RAID for the Home. By David Pogue

An Easy Way to Back Up, but It Costs

DAVID POGUE

Hold up your right hand, look this page straight in the eye, and answer truthfully: At this moment, is your computer completely backed up?

Did you answer “yes?” Congratulations, you statistical freak. Skip to the next article.

If you’re like the huge majority, however, your backup is out of date or nonexistent.

And that situation is getting more dire every day. The world wants us to snap more pictures, download more movies, play more music, shoot more video. Well, great. But if something’s worth snapping, downloading, playing or shooting, then it’s also worth backing up.

So you buy an external hard drive. And another. And another. After a while, your desk looks like mine, festooned with a hideous archipelago of mismatched drives, each with a cable and a power cord.

And by the way, those drives are not, themselves, backed up. Most contain the original files I’ve offloaded from the computer for long-term storage. If one of those drives dies, I’m out of luck.

Boy, does Drobo have a suggestion for people like me.

See, corporations don’t go buying external drives from Best Buy. They use RAID arrays (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). That’s a passel of drives congregated inside a single metal box; clever software makes them look to a computer like one big drive. Or three smaller ones, or 50 little ones — however the highly paid system administrator decides to chop them up.

As a bonus, thanks to a fancy encoding scheme, the files on a RAID system can be recovered even if one of the participating hard drives goes to the great junk drawer in the sky. (That’s why it’s R for “redundant.”)

For several years now, a company that calls itself Drobo (short for “data robotics”) has been pursuing a single dream: make RAID arrays for noncorporate people. High-end types, small businesses and creative professionals with little technical expertise and no technical staff.

And next week, it will offer two new models: the Drobo 5D ($850 list) and the Drobo Mini ($650).

A Drobo is just a sleek, glossy, black empty shell. You have to buy internal hard drives to insert like cartridges. Online, for example, you can snag a couple of 2-terabyte drives for $110 each. That ought to hold a few baby pictures.

Once the drives arrive, you start to understand the nosebleed Drobo price tag — because there’s no setup or configuration. You don’t even have to attach the drives to rails or caddies or fiddle with screws, as you do with professional RAID systems; you just shove them in like frozen waffles going into a vertical toaster. The Drobo automatically assimilates them into your increasingly large virtual drive.

Also unlike most RAID systems, the drives you buy can be different brands, speeds and capacities; Drobo is an equal-opportunity enclosure.

The Drobo 5D has slots for five drives — standard 3.5-inch, SATA internal drives, which these days come in capacities up to 4 terabytes each. The new Mini, the first Drobo that could be called portable (7 x 7 x 2 inches, suitable for peripatetic video editors and photographers), has four slots. They accept 2.5-inch laptop drives, which, these days, offer a maximum of 1 terabyte each (about $80).

Here’s the big payoff: As your life fills with files, you can fill your empty slots with more drives. Once you’ve filled them all, you can eject one of your smaller drives and replace it with a more capacious one. None of that requires copying files, reformatting a drive or managing anything. The Drobo system automatically recognizes new drives and makes them, too, part of the suddenly larger virtual hard drive. This breezy, suit-yourself flexibility is unheard-of in traditional RAID systems.

Here’s the other payoff: Drives die. When that happens, you don’t lose any data. In its RAID-y way, the Drobo auto-reconstructs everything that was on the corpse drive. You keep using all your files as if nothing had happened, even as the Drobo starts redistributing your files so that they’re protected against another drive failure, which can take hours or days.

Drobo’s trade-show reps are fond of this parlor trick: As a movie plays from a Drobo, they eject one, then two drives, simulating crashes of those disks — and the video doesn’t skip a frame.

Now, so far, this description could apply to all Drobo models; they’re distinguished primarily by the number of drives you can insert (4, 5, 8 or 12) and the kinds of connectors to your computer they offer (Ethernet, FireWire, USB, iSCSI). Each has a magnetically attached front door, a color-changing status light (“all is well,” “getting full” or “dead drive — replace me”), and horizontal blue lights that serve as a “fuel gauge” for your virtual drive’s capacity. On the Mini, the status light is a cool glowing band of light around the margins of the front panel.

What the two new Drobos add are Thunderbolt connectors, which hook up to recent Mac models. They also offer USB 3.0 jacks for connecting with Windows machines. (Both kinds of cables come in the box; at these prices, they’d better. Then again, a Thunderbolt cable alone costs $50, so it’s a nice thought.)

The point is speed: USB 3.0 is about five times as fast as USB 2.0, and Thunderbolt is about twice as fast again.

Copying a 2.3-gigabyte folder of music files from a MacBook Air to a Drobo 5D took 35 seconds over the USB 3.0 connector, 19 over Thunderbolt. Backing up a single 520-megabyte video file took 5.5 seconds over USB 3.0, 3.5 over Thunderbolt.

The 5D and Mini also offer a slot for a solid-state drive (basically, flash memory, with no moving parts) that it uses for acceleration. If you install one, the company says you’ll notice that large libraries of photos or music will get faster the more you use them. The SSD stores smallish data bits — photo thumbnails, music album data, and so on — so they’re delivered to your computer much faster.

If you’re rich, you can fill the Mini’s drive slots with expensive but fast SSD’s instead of traditional hard drives.

Now, there are some noteworthy flies in the Drobo ointment. First, the price is steep; at $850, the Drobo 5D costs $250 more than the Drobo S (an identical model except that it has FireWire instead of Thunderbolt and lacks the SSD slot).

Second, these babies connect to one computer, not your whole network. You can access it from other machines using Windows or OS X file sharing, but that requires the main computer to remain turned on.

Third, any storage or backup that’s right there in your home or office is vulnerable to fire, flood or thieves.

Finally, the data protection in RAID systems requires a huge sacrifice in disk space. On a Drobo, you lose the storage of your largest entire drive (the calculator at http://j.mp/V5hhTc shows how much you’ll lose). If you buy four 1-terabyte drives, for example, you wind up with only 2.7 terabytes free for your storage. The rest is used to protect that data.

Pessimist: “One whole drive sacrificed? What a ripoff!” Optimist: “A complete backup of my files that doesn’t require double the space? Amazing!”

(Drobo also lets you turn on an option that maintains all your files even if two of your drives fail. As you’d guess, this option requires an even greater storage sacrifice.)

Now, clearly, a Drobo is absurd overkill for many people. If everything in your world fits on your computer’s built-in hard drive, one cheap external drive may be all the backup you need.

But if you traffic in drive-busting files like photos, music and videos, or if losing your files would kill your small business, a Drobo might make good future-proofing sense.

In either case, that’s enough reading. Go home and come up with a backup system that you’ll actually keep current.

TALKS

Malte Spitz: Your phone company is watching

What kind of data is your cell phone company collecting? Malte Spitz wasn’t too worried when he asked his operator in Germany to share information stored about him. Multiple unanswered requests and a lawsuit later, Spitz received 35,830 lines of code — a detailed, nearly minute-by-minute account of half a year of his life.

Malte Spitz asked his cell phone carrier what it knew about him—and mapped what he found out. Full bio »

Google’s Data Advantage Over Apple’s Siri. By Quentin Hardy

Correction Appended

Google has been gathering data on the way people speak for five years.

When Eric Schmidt was still chief executive of Google, I asked him what the company owned that would make it particularly hard for any emerging search contender to wipe Google out. Spell check, he said. Google had observed the spelling mistakes and corrections typed into billions of queries, and had a vast understanding of what people really meant when they typed like thsi. Google was able to use this knowledge to offer a “did you mean” function in search, eventually completing queries before people were finished typing.

Voice recognition technology is critically important, not just for mobile phones, but potentially for control of lots of other devices, particularly televisions. It is still early days, but if you’re thinking about which side will win in the battle between Apple’s Siri and Google Voice Search, consider the lesson of spell check.

Other companies would not be able to get that learning, he said, since people had come to expect search engines to fix their spelling. The customers would stay with Google, where that problem was solved. Microsoft Bing has proved Mr. Schmidt was not entirely correct in Google owning spell check, but it does take a company of Microsoft’s size to come at the problem.

It is common around the world to use Google to check one’s spelling now, and it’s common inside Google to use that same ancillary learning on new products.

That is probably why Google Voice Search, in its Siri-like manifestation in the new Jelly Bean version of the Android operating system, appears to be winning the heart of my colleague Nick Bilton. Nick says Google Voice Search appears to have better understanding of what he’s talking about, and can answer questions better. There are also numerous videos on the Web showing its prowess.

If Google is better, it is most likely because it has roots in a product Google introduced in 2007, called Google-411, or Google Local Voice Search. Ostensibly a product that provided free directory assistance, Google was mostly interested in capturing the way different people pronounced words.

While the Jelly Bean version of Voice Search is new, Google’s linguists have five years of data on billions of pronunciations. A year ago, just for the English language, Google had a database of 230 billion word strings, and had worked on 23 other languages, based largely on 411 and related voice-based search products, including an earlier version of Voice Search. It’s another spell check.

Apple never worked on that kind of feature, which is one reason Siri is one of the few products Apple officially released in beta form. It is building up its database of speech during Siri’s early life. Some of the cute ways Siri talks when it does not understand a question, such as repeating back what you have said, may in fact be efforts to see if you will correct its understanding, somewhat in the way Google learned spell check. Google Voice Search on Jelly Bean is starting late, but its quality advantage from all that learning beforehand is what makes it better in the early days.

That is not the only area where Google develops one product for the sake of another. The Google Goggles application on Android, which uses computer-driven image recognition to help identify an object the customer photographs, is also a product for use in connection with Google Maps. You can take a picture of a street in Goggles, and if Google Maps has taken a picture of that place with its Street View cars, it can tell you where you are.

Correction: July 19, 2012

This article has been corrected from an earlier version to note that while the Siri-like Voice Search on Jelly Bean is new, there have been earlier versions of Voice Search.

TALKS

William Noel: Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes

How do you read a two-thousand-year-old manuscript that has been erased, cut up, written on and painted over? With a powerful particle accelerator, of course! Ancient books curator William Noel tells the fascinating story behind the Archimedes palimpsest, a Byzantine prayer book containing previously-unknown original writings from ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes and others.

William Noel is a curator who believes museums should make their collections free and available on the Internet. Full bio »

Ted Logo

TALKS

JP Rangaswami: Information is food

How do we consume data? At TED@SXSWi, technologist JP Rangaswami muses on our relationship to information, and offers a surprising and sharp insight: we treat it like food.

JP Rangaswami thinks deeply (and hilariously) about disruptive data. Full bio »

In honor of Frogger’s 30th birthday (and perhaps George Costanza), problem-solver Tyler DeAngelo revamped the game with real-time data from cars traveling down NYC’s Fifth Avenue. Then he –- and two pals –- grabbed one of the classic arcade machines and took it to the streets. “5th Ave Frogger” is run by rigging a camera with a clear view of the street up to a computer, which then translates the positional data of cars into in-game cars that your frog must avoid.

[joystiq]

The Unbreakable Smartphone That Lasts For Weeks Without Recharging. By Ariel Schwartz

It sounds utopian, but a new kind of memory is going to make your phone drastically more efficient and less prone to breaking down.

Stuart Parkin’s digital storage research is part of the reason why the video stored on your cell phone works. It has also contributed to Google and Facebook’s ability to build giant data centers. The IBM researcher’s work on data storage has changed the way we use electronic devices. Now he’s about to do it again—this time, by soaring past Moore’s Law with a new kind of memory technology that’s 100 times faster and far more energy efficient than what we have now.

The technology is called racetrack memory, and eight or so years from now, it might be what’s storing data in your laptop or cell phone. Racetrack memory is more stable than flash (which is what Apple is rumored to be using for memory in the next generation of MacBooks), allows for long battery life, and stores unfathomable amounts of data.

Imagine: a nearly unbreakable smartphone that can store thousands of movies and lasts for weeks without needing to be recharged. In one fell swoop, racetrack memory could mitigate the problem of pricey devices constantly needing to be replaced and alleviate pressure on the power grid.

If that happens, we might have Parkin’s work on spintronics—a technology that uses an electron’s spin and “magnetic moment” in addition to its electric charge—to thank. In the case of magnetic memory, currents of spin-polarized electrons move magnetic data up and down a vertical racetrack (hence the name) on a silicon chip at a speed of hundreds of miles per hour. It’s this move into the third dimension (up and down) that allows racetrack memory to bypass Moore’s Law.

Ultimately, IBM hopes that racetrack memory devices can be wiped and rewritten millions of times. Flash drives often lose reliability after a bit undergoes 100,000 rewrites. It stand to reason, then, that devices using racetrack memory should last significantly longer than their flash counterparts.

Stuart in his lab.

The concept for racetrack memory has been around since 2008, but it was only in December 2011 that the IBM team unveiled the first fully functioning prototype on a single chip.

There is a ways to go before racetrack memory is commercialized, but in the meantime, we can look forward to seeing magnetic random access memory (MRAM)—a chip that operates using magnets instead of electricity—in electronics within the next two to three years. MRAM isn’t quite as worldchanging as racetrack memory, but it will mean that smartphones can last for days longer than they do now without needing to be charged.

ARIEL SCHWARTZ

Ariel Schwartz is a Senior Editor at Co.Exist. She has contributed to SF Weekly, Popular Science, Inhabitat, Greenbiz, NBC Bay Area, GOOD Magazine and more. Continued

How To Claw Back Privacy Under Google’s New Policy. BY KEVIN PURDY

The step-by-step guide to using Google’s best offerings, but spreading your online eggs into more than just one big basket out in Mountain View, California.

Google has a new universal privacy policy taking effect March 1. You probably received an email or notification (or six) about it already. The policy mostly simplifies the rules of what Google can do with your data across its many, many services, but it also makes one thing really clear: Either you’re cool with Google, or you aren’t.

If you like the idea of advertising being finely tailored to your tastes and interests, of Google services trying to guess what they can help you with, then you’re all set. But if you’re either specifically concerned about Google having some rather particular details about you, or more generally about having all your personal data eggs in one basket, you definitely have alternatives. And they’re not the kind of alternatives that require a beard, a cabin, and jars filled with liquids of disconcerting provenance.

You can , but you can’t opt out of Google using something you search for to change what you see on YouTube, or the ads you see in Gmail. But you can opt out, in the most basic way, by using different services to get what you need from the web. Here’s a skeptic’s guide to gaining back some privacy while continuing to be connected.

Get Your Data Out Of Google

Your first stop on any check-up or checkout of Google is your Google Dashboard. It’s where Google shows you everything you’ve directly given to them for use with their various tools. You’ll see most of everything Google is holding on its servers: your Android device details, Chrome syncing data, Gmail particulars, and so on. Some offer links to download or delete their data right on this page, but most only offer “manage” links that just take you to the service settings. Now that you know what you’ve got, head to the Data Liberation Front, maintained by Google’s own engineers. Here you’ll see everything you can grab out of Google products, for importing into other services, and perhaps as a pre-acccount-deletion maneuver.

Not every Google service can fully export your Google account data. But it’s worth noting that you can often transfer your Google data to your own Google Apps account—that is, a Google-powered account managed through your own web domain. Google’s upcoming one-for-all policy switch doesn’t apply to Google Apps installations, and Google Apps accounts offer more robust data migration and backup offerings. Among them are the ability fully back up your account, through services like Backupify.

Switch To Other Services

The closest thing to Google’s wide, varied, extremely free web offerings is in Microsoft’s Windows Live/Bing ecosystem, or perhaps Yahoo’s slightly disjointed web world. But the point isn’t to get boxed in by a different all-inclusive firm, is it? You want to spread your data around, so here’s a shortlist of the best semi-independent services that match up to Google. Consider using a secure but easy password manager, like previously mentioned LastPass, to ease the transition.

Search: Duck Duck Go — The name is weird, but the search results are clean and convenient, and the search terms you enter aren’t collected, compared, or shared. The relevance of the results themselves are, frankly, not bad, compared to Google, and there’s definitely less in-house Google -related promotion. Bonus: Geeks can get into the keyboard commands and instant search shortcuts.
Email: Yahoo Mail — There is nothing to match Gmail’s features, capabilities, and accessibility. But Gmail has, at the least, inspired the other web-based mail systems to catch up. Yahoo Mail looks and feels pretty good on the web, and if it’s not quite up to your standards, you can use it with a desktop or mobile email application of your choice and forget its interface entirely.
Google Voice: A few different apps — Google Voice is a unique offering of a free number, free SMS, one-number-many-phones routing, and voicemail transcription.Line2 is, at least for iPhone and Android owners, the best comprehensive alternative, offering a dedicated number, free SMS, and actual voice-over-IP calls that don’t use your minutes, but it is roughly $10 per month. Phonebooth offers similar services, plus voicemail transcription, but it’s also not free.
Calendars: Windows Live Calendar — Technically Windows Live Hotmail Calendar (pretty name, we know), but other than the unwieldy Microsoft branding, it’s a handy, web-based app that can easily import Google Calendar .ics files and sync to other applications through feeds or Exchange protocols. Plus, it shows you the weather for the upcoming week, which is pretty neat.
Work-type documents: Zoho suite — What Zoho lacks in Google account tie-ins, it makes up for in rich, deep features. Zoho’s word processing and spreadsheet documents are much more comparable to traditional desktop applications, and the suite offers a variety of tools for project planning, team communication, discussion and voting, and pretty much everything you’d need to work with others online.

Remember: Google (And Others) Only Take What You Put Out There

What freaks people out most about Google’s all-app sharing policy isn’t the idea that Google knows you’re searching out fashion boutiques. It’s the idea that Google knows you’re working on a side business you’re trying to hide from the boss, or that you’re looking into infertility treatments. Google says in its upcoming policy that it won’t tailor advertising or otherwise act on information in “sensitive categories,” like “those based on race, religion, sexual orientation or health.” Still, it’s an endless game, guessing what Google may and may not be monitoring, whether through algorithms or data given to the advertising staff.

So no matter which services you’re using, store your sensitive documents on your computer, and maybe in a backup service that has a clear privacy policy. Use anonymity tools like Tor to look up truly sensitive material. And take some advice that’s always applicable: Don’t send email that you would be ashamed to have read by anyone other than the intended recipient.

[Image provided by Shutterstock; Thumbnail: Flickr user Bill Rhodes]