Mac users have the benefit of being easily able to back-up their files with Time Machine, but it can even prove a chore for us to connect our Mac to an external hard disk. Time Capsule provides an alternative, as users can back their files up by WiFi, but this is an expensive product.

Online back-up services hold a number of advantages over backing up files locally. For example, data is safer with them, as an external hard disk could easily be destroyed. It also allows portability; laptop users can effectively back up their data anywhere as they don’t have to carry around a spare hard disk!

Several online back-up services exist, but the two largest are Carbonite and Mozy. I recently bought a year’s subscription to Carbonite and in this article I shall review it.

Carbonite is an incremental remote back-up solution, available for Windows and OS X. Basically, after an initial back-up, any new or modified data is uploaded to their servers and backed up. This means only data that must be uploaded is, instead of all data being uploaded again.

Carbonite allow you to back-up any files, except Applications. Free trial users can’t back up their music or movie library, but paid customers can back photos, films, documents and music up. At the moment, I have backed up everything except my music library, because that will take some time to upload.

Users can upload an unlimited amount of data to their servers, where it is encrypted.

It takes quite some time to upload your files. I had to leave my computer on over a few nights to upload 5GiB of data, but I expect this is due to my Internet connection rather than Carbonite. I did experience a few problems though: it doesn’t automatically configure my firewall or ports. The lack of documentation resulted in my having to speak to their customer service, who readily provided me with a solution. They were slightly abrupt but got to the root of the problem.

I will share a few of these solutions for Mac users:

1. Allow ‘/Library/Application Support/Carbonite/CarboniteDaemon.app’ to receive incoming connections (the log is in the same folder)
2. Forward ports 25, 53, 80 and 443 to your machine
3. Ensure no folders which are constantly being written to, like cache folders, are included in the back-up

Users control Carbonite through a prefpane in OS X. This preference pane allows users to see how much data is left to be backed up, allows them to exclude data from the back up and allows them to restore files. I would like there to be a few more options in this pane, such as the ability to see the file currently being uploaded and access the log. The icons of the Mac folders are also outdated.

An interesting features of Carbonite is that users can access their uploaded files anywhere, such as their office or at family’s. This effectively allows Carbonite to act as Remote Access.

Restoring files is as simple as simply selecting the file and the location to which you would like it restored.

So, down to the details. Carbonite is $55 a year, however Subscription.com (who provided the software for me to review) offer a Carbonite offer code for a 20% discount. This is remarkably simple to apply: one simply has to go to Carbonite through their website, it is simply one extra click to save $11! I have gone through this process and it is remarkably simple. Subscription.com also offer codes or similar click-throughs to offer discounts on everything from antivirus software to newspapers to magazines!

When using Mac or Linux, I often find myself stumbling upon features which I just find ‘nice’.

I love the built-in support for VNC. On Mac, it is as simple as waiting for the remote computer, providing it’s on a local Bonjour one, to appear in Finder. And enabling it is a checking a box in the Sharing preference pane. (connecting to a non-local machine is done through going to Connect to Server in Finder and prefixing the computer’s location with vnc://). Support varies by distro for Linux, but generally the service is pre-installed.

I love how I can mount SFTP and FTP shares in Nautilus under Ubuntu and in Finder on OS X. Unfortunately, support on OS X is read only. Whilst Windows has limited support for FTP and WebDAV etc, I personally find it very cumbersome and not nice to play with at all. I’d happily use Nautilus to put files onto my website; but on Windows I’d have to use Filezilla!

Faces in iLife 09 is great. Whilst there are better commercial (and probably free) options, it is just nice that is there. But it doesn’t intrude, whilst in Windows it no doubt would somehow majestically stand out to make it obvious that such a nice gimmick is included!

Desktop search is nice. I don’t think Windows Search can compare with Spotlight or Beagle. On Windows, I’d probably download Google Desktop Search. But no need on Mac or Ubuntu, as they’re already there.

I also love the simplicity of Linux commands like dd. On Windows, you’d need something like Acronis to do the same job, just much worse!

So, bringing on the flame war. What do you like in your operating system which isn’t in others?

Mac’s “Get a Mac” campaign gave us Mac users a sense of superiority for a couple of years but Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” is actually starting to work. The average PC user is starting to no longer accept my jibes about their operating system and see my remarks as snobbery (how dare they!) as opposed to the truth.

The interesting thing about Microsoft’s campaign isn’t that it portrays PCs as cool, in my opinion, but rather as ‘normal’ with everyone, all sorts of people, using them. Whilst Mac’s campaign focuses on Mac’s being fun and creative.

Naturally, the advert has some problems. There seems to be lots of Windows users in Africa but I imagine Linux is much more affordable for them; shame Microsoft don’t support OLPC!

Your thoughts on the adverts?

ShareTool is Mac-only software, made by the Speed Download’s developer, which simplifies the process of accessing your Bonjour services (such as file, printer, screen and iTunes sharing) from any Internet-connected place in the World.

ShareTool automatically configures your router, through NAT-PMP or UPnP, so you can remotely connect to a Mac network you have at home/your office from another Mac.

Using ShareTool, you can easily share files between the Mac, print something off remotely to your printer or even access your iTunes library. There are also many other Bonjour services you could use ShareTool to access remotely (for example, Skype or IM).

ShareTool does this through an SSH (which by definition is secure) tunnel, meaning it will work with or without a VPN or even a static IP. An SSH tunnel ensures that your data is transmitted pretty securely, so it’d be pretty hard to decrypt any data you send, and it also allows you to secure the web more securely if you’re being forced to work on a network you don’t trust, so a man-in-the-middle couldn’t read everything you are!

That all sounds terribly complicated, but ShareTool simplifies the whole task into an easy-to-use GUI as opposed to the difficulty you’d face without it!

ShareTool only costs £17.70 for a 2 machine licence, £45 for a 5 machine licence or £12 for a single machine licence (but you need at least 2 or there’s no point!).

YazSoft have kindly provided me with one 2 machine licence to give away (worth £17.70!). If you want it, either send me a message on Twitter (twitter.com/computerjoe), email me using the contact form or leave a comment. I will choose the winner in a random prize draw.

8th September: Stephen Shambaugh wins the licence!

I love Adium, which is a Mac multi-network IM client. Today saw the release of Adium X 1.3, which added some essential features, which have been missing for some time.

One of these missing features which this version adds is particularly useful for me: MSN personal messages. MSN is the most popular IM protocol in the UK and this, therefore, is particularly important. Ever since my switch to OS X, I’ve been missing the ability to see people’s personal messages (whether it be their status, their juicy gossip or their wit). In fact, the only way I could view them before was using a single-network MSN client, like aMSN or Microsoft Messenger, or this dated, homebrewed and unreliable custom build of Adium. Adium achieves this by using the msn-pecan plug-in for its library, libpurple (the library it was in common with Pidgin).

Another useful option is adding a search option to contact lists, allowing you to quickly get someone’s email address or quickly provide the IM address of a buddy to another buddy.

The new version also adds support for Facebook IM, MobileMe, several new icons, redesigns the ‘Get Info’ option on contacts to be more Inspector-like and performance upgrades.

Adium 1.3 supports Adium’s position as the prime OS X chat client and adds some much needed features and in general just makes Adium much more intuitive.

Adium 1.3 will run on a Mac with OS X 10.4.0 or higher.

(Direct download link)