Sometimes we in the United States overlook the “big picture” in terms of technology.  To us, it’s frustrating when the Internet service is out and we can’t catch up on email, Facebook, or our favorite iTunes music and TV shows.  To many in the world, having the extensive connectivity we often take for granted is a distant goal - one they may not ever live to see.

What many of us also overlook is that the Internet provides an educational conduit, enabling access to countless volumes of information.  This access is be available to all users, regardless of social status or geographic location.  One of the reasons we founded Gallop is contained in our mission statement: “We believe that the world should be interconnected to facilitate communication and exchange.”  Clearly, the pervasiveness of the Internet and the services it provides have revolutionized our way of life, business, and education.  Ensuring access to that information is a tremendous challenge.

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©2008, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

You may have been following the recent news regarding the broadband monthly usage caps that providers like Comcast (Gallop Forum / NASDAQ:CMCSA) and Frontier Communications (Gallop Forum / NYSE:FTR) have been implementing.  This article does not debate the relative merits of these policies but simply examines ways to monitor your usage.  This way, you can avoid accidentally exceeding whatever cap you may be subject to. We’re going to take a look at how to do this, whether you only have one computer at home or several of them behind a router (the latter takes a bit of elbow grease).
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©2008, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

If you’re just joining this series of articles, welcome!  You may want to read articles one, two, and three first, or just jump in with the final installment.

Now that you’ve got the foundation of a robust backup process at your home or small office, let’s take a look at what it will take to truly complete the picture - an offsite backup. While this was once limited to large corporations that could afford many computers at widely varying locations, the advent of commodity storage services accessible over a typical home broadband connection has changed the landscape dramatically.  It is now possible to have virtually unlimited secure storage spread out across the country or even the world, all without leaving your desk or drastically changing your backup strategy.

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©2008, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Unless you’ve been on a desert island without TV or media, you’ve certainly heard a lot about the massive bailout for the financial and real-estate industry, which will enable companies to offload “toxic” assets to the federal government, but what does this mean to you in terms of technology services?

Although not discussed at length, one of the underlying concerns about the related effects to this crisis has been its possible wide-ranging impact on other, generally unrelated, industries - including the technology industry.  As the crisis rumbled slowly, squeezed banks in turn squeezed their customers and pushed to foreclose homes and take ownership of assets, while reducing new credits issues to buy new homes.  This had a direct impact in the new home sales across our economy.  By now, that scenario is well-known, so where does the technology industry come into play?

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©2008, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Now that you’ve learned about formulating a home data backup strategy, and shopped for hardware to support the local storage component of that strategy, let’s talk about the software you’ll need to make backing up your data a painless, automatic operation.  The goal is to use something that you won’t give a second thought until you need it someday.  As with any technology choice, options range from the simple and free to the elaborate and expensive.  Don’t worry though - there is plenty of middle ground, and this area probably meets the needs of most consumers.  In all cases below, we’re talking about backing up the files on your computer to a storage device somewhere in your home or otherwise in the same location as the computer itself. Read the rest of this entry »
©2008, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

The way media finds its way from producers to consumers is ever-evolving. It used to be clear which medium was delivered through what product: newspapers produced written content and radio produced audio content. You would have never expected your radio to provide you written news because it was just never built with that end in mind.

Fast forward about 70 years and all the sudden the lines are not so clear. More and more the trend is for all products to provide all different types of content. For example, you probably only expect your gaming console to play video games. But there has actually been a recent push to make them deliver more than that, for example movies that are streamed through your internet connection and that you can choose and watch without leaving your couch or even having to power up your DVD player.

Netflix (Gallop Forum / NASDAQ:NFLX) announced during this year’s E3 plans to partner with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) in order to turn the XBOX 360 into a streaming media center. Last week, Tivo (Gallop Forum / NADSAQ:TIVO) also announced that it was partnering with Amazon (Gallop Forum / NADSAQ:AMZN) to allow customers to shop for media online without leaving their couch.

This constitutes a clear trend of essentially ‘making your hardware do more’. You should expect more and more that the functional boundaries around physical products are going to be going away, and that long gone will be the days when the only way to watch a TV show was to tune in to the right channel at the right time and sit through 20 minutes of commercials per hour.

Although it was already possible to hack your existing products to make them do more, the difference here is that the big names are streamlining this concept and making it a supported industry solution as opposed to a hazardous hobby that is likely to cost you more in voided warranties than it is worth.

Now what does this all do for us consumers? Well, for one more choices, and that - of course - means more competition which inevitably leads to lower prices and higher quality.

©2008, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to consider an overall backup strategy for your data. Now let’s get started on actually implementing it!

This article, the second of four, will look into the hardware available for use in establishing a local backup of your data.  That is, a backup or series of backups that are stored at the same location as your primary computer.  For sake of argument, we’ll say this is “in-house” storage, meaning that it resides somewhere within your home.  We’ll compare and contrast three of the most common options, giving you the background needed to establish your own set of requirements and to select a suitable solution.

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©2008, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.