Jean Galea

Backups are essential both on a personal level and perhaps even more within a business context. My work and play are fairly intertwined, so for the purposes of backups in my case I can’t really distinguish the two. What I will explain in this post can be used by someone to backup personal data but will also be useful to freelancers and small business owners.

There are some basic principles with regard to backups, and you should be aware of them.

• 3 copies of anything you care about – Two isn’t enough if it’s important.
• 2 different formats – Example: Dropbox+DVDs or Hard Drive+Memory Stick or CD+BackBlaze, or more
• 1 off-site backup – If the house burns down, how will you get your memories back?

My preferred cloud (off-site) backup system is Backblaze. At home, I have an Apple Time Capsule (you can also build your own using a Raspberry Pi and an external drive). The Time Capsule backs up everything on my laptop together with any attached external drives.

I also have two external drives which I use for photos. I don’t keep any photos on the Macbook, instead, I transfer them all to one of these external drives, then mirror that drive to the second one. So in the case of photos, I have two copies of them on my external drives, another copy in the Time Capsule, and yet another copy in Backblaze. In the past, I used to store another copy of archived photos on Blu-ray discs but I no longer do that as the process was quite time-consuming and I no longer have a CD drive on my laptop. I do however store one extra copy of my photos on a drive that I keep at my parents’ house. Photos and videos are very important to me and hence why I have 4 copies at any point in time. The drive that is at my parents’ house is an absolute last resort and is only updated twice or three times a year. All copies are encrypted.

You will have noticed that this system is not completely automated. It is, unfortunately, impossible to automate it completely because some devices such as my cameras (Sony RX100, GoPro) don’t have the functionality to connect to the internet and take backups on their own. That means that I have to manually connect them to my laptop and transfer the photos to my external drive. When I’m on holiday I try to do that every day. During the rest of the year, I do this once a week and only if I used those cameras during that week.

[Read more…]

I recently decided to migrate one of my brands’ email accounts from Zoho Mail to Gmail. Google Apps has many more features than just Gmail and we were also having some spam issues with Zoho Mail so the move was a no-brainer really. The only disadvantage is that Gmail is not free for business use with your own domain, but the price is worth paying, especially if you don’t require a large number of mailboxes/users.

The only disadvantage is that Gmail is not free for business use with your own domain, but the price is worth paying, especially if you don’t require a large number of mailboxes/users.

In any case, my biggest headache was how to replicate the same mailboxes I had on Zoho Mail and move the thousands of emails from Zoho to Gmail. At first, I looked at export/import facilities in both services, however, it turned out that the solution is much simpler.

The best way to migrate is to install a mail package on your laptop, in my case I used the free Thunderbird. There are many others, take your pick or use whatever you have installed already.

Secondly, set up the Zoho Mail inboxes on Thunderbird with an IMAP connection. You also need to create the inboxes in Gmail and enable IMAP (it’s off by default). Then also set up the Gmail accounts in Thunderbird. Once they can all connect it’s time to work the magic.

Let’s say I have a Zoho Mail inbox named inbox@mydomain.com and I have set up the same one on Gmail entitled inbox@mydomain.com. Once they are both able to connect from Thunderbird, what I do is access the Zoho Mail inbox, select all emails, then drag and drop into the same inbox on Gmail. That way the emails will be moved from Zoho Mail’s inbox to the Gmail one. That’s it, easy as pie.

Once you transfer all the emails in this manner, you will also need to set up folders (labels in Gmail) and filters. I suggest you set up the filters within Gmail itself rather than your email client on the laptop. That way you can switch clients at a later stage without having to set up the filters again. Gmail also has a great filtering system so there is no reason to use anything else.

It’s really easy to migrate from one email host to another using IMAP connections. The same procedure described above can in fact be used to migrate between any two email hosts that support IMAP.

Today I sat down for what I hoped would be a quick session of understanding how best to backup our family’s iPhones in a reliable manner. I then proceeded in spending a day trying to understand the utterly confusing world of Apple’s iCloud.

If you are in the same situation, I hope to spare you a few hours through this attempt at explaining the iCloud mess.

We need to consider a few important terms that will help us understand what we can do with iCloud:

• iCloud Storage,
• iCloud Drive,
• iCloud Backup,
• iCloud Photo Library,
• My Photo Stream.

No wonder people get confused when trying to understand iCloud! Let’s tackle them one by one.

iCloud Storage

iCloud gives you 5GB of storage for free.

You can upgrade your storage to 50GB, 200GB, or 1TB for a reasonable cost.

Once your iCloud Storage is full, your iPhone will stop backing up to iCloud until you purchase additional storage space or free up storage space in iCloud.

iCloud Backup

iCloud Backup is available on iPhones, iPads and iPods. It serves to back up your entire device (or just some aspects of it, depending on your choices) to iCloud.

iCloud Backups count against your available iCloud Storage.

iCloud Drive

Think of this as a sort of Dropbox or Google Drive, however without having direct access to your files through Finder as you would with Dropbox and Google Drive. It allows apps on Macs, iPhones, and iPads to synchronize files using iCloud. So for example, if you create a note on your iPhone and your MacBook is also connected to the internet, that note will also appear on your MacBook a few seconds later.

Your files in iCloud Drive also count against your available iCloud Storage.

iCloud Photo Library

iCloud Photo Library uploads and stores all of your photos and videos in iCloud so you can access them from all your devices.

There are some important differences between iCloud Photo Library and iCloud backup that you should understand before we move on.

iCloud Photo Library: all your devices can access and view individual photos that are stored in the library.

iCloud Backup: you can’t see individual files or photos in your iCloud Backup, even if photos are part of the backup. iCloud Backups are one big file that restores your entire iPhone – there’s no way to access individual files.

If you’re using iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Backup, you could be paying to back up the same photos twice: Once in your iCloud Photo Library, once in your iCloud Backup.

iCloud Photo Library works like the previously mentioned features of iCloud in that that the contents of the photo library count against your available iCloud Storage.

My Photo Stream

My Photo Stream uploads all your new photos and sends them to all your devices. Sounds kind of like iCloud Photo Library, right? But there’s a little difference:

Photos in My Photo Stream do not count against your available iCloud Storage.

iCloud Photo Library permanently uploads and stores your photos and videos in iCloud. My Photo Stream uploads your photos to iCloud so they’re automatically downloaded on devices with My Photo Stream turned on. It only works over Wi-Fi and doesn’t fill up your iCloud Storage space.

The Photo Library is usually the element that takes up most of the storage space in iCloud. 

If you want to keep backups of your iPhone photos and videos without running out of storage space on iCloud (the free 5GB), I suggest you use the following strategy:

1. Turn Off Photo Library As Part Of iCloud Backup
2. Turn Off iCloud Photo Library
3. Turn On My Photo Stream on your iPhone and iPad
4. Turn On My Photo Stream on your Mac or PC

Since My Photo Stream does not count against your available iCloud storage you will not have any problems with space utilisation in your iCloud account. The photos will be transferred to your Mac where you can then include them in your cloud or Time Capsule backups.