Enjoy!

From everyone at BuddyBackup.

Forty-four percent of all respondents report they only back-up data weekly, monthly, rarely or never, which means that millions of people lost data permanently.

Read more here:

http://www.mactech.com/2010/08/03/key-findings-8th-annual-2010-bsi-computer-theft-survey

BuddyBackup – free software first look – Which? TechDaily

• by Catherine West
• in Backup Software,Computing,Software & Security
• 1 October 2011

BuddyBackup is a free backup program that requires some willing friends, or you to have a second computer. It works in a similar way to a cloud backup tool but instead of saving to the cloud, it uses the spare storage space of your ‘buddy’ on their PC.

Rather than the dog, you’re more likely to lose work because your computer crashes or your laptop gets stolen. (A staggering 818 laptops were stolen from students in Greater Manchester during the 2010-11 academic year.)

Which is why backing up your work is vital but it needn’t be expensive. BuddyBackup offers unlimited, online data backup for free.

“Most students will take out insurance in case their laptop gets stolen,” says Mark Couvaras from BuddyBackup. “And while that can pay for a new computer, no amount of money is going to replace weeks and months of hard work. BuddyBackup software is like a free insurance policy for your data.”

BuddyBackup works by storing your files onto spare disk space on your friends’ (or buddies’) PCs. The system applies military-grade encryption to your data before it leaves your PC, which means that only you can see your files.

But backing up and remembering to back up are two different things, so BuddyBackup works continuously and automatically backs-up any changes or additions you make to your files. This means that once you’ve done an initial backup, you never have to worry about doing it again.

For added security BuddyBackup defaults to a minimum of two buddies. It wouldn’t be wise to backup just to your housemates, so it’s a good idea to include buddies who are off-campus or friends and family back home.

BuddyBackup only uses a trickle of your bandwidth when you’re on your computer. This means you can continue to work while BuddyBackup is backing up your files.  After you’ve backed up, your files will continue to sit safely on your buddies’ computers.

BuddyBackup is smart software. It regularly checks that your buddies still have your backups. If it discovers a problem, it will automatically backup your files to a different buddy instead. This means you’re safe even if a buddy uninstalls BuddyBackup or has a computer failure.

If you have a disaster, you can easily recover your files by running BuddyBackup from your new computer.

“And because you’re avoiding an online storage company or cloud server,” adds Mark “BuddyBackup is a greener option too because it doesn’t add to the energy burden from power-hungry data centres.”

For students starting at university for the first time there’s a lot to take on board; living away from home, making new friends, being financially responsible and of course studying for a degree.

Three or more years of hard work is going to be done, most likely, on a laptop. But if that laptop were to crash or get stolen, students could lose all their coursework in one swipe.

The danger is a real one. During the last university year, from September 2010 to July 2011, Greater Manchester police reported a total of a massive 818 computer thefts from students.*

And while students may not be to blame, they shouldn’t expect their tutor to be sympathetic.  UCL’s Science and Technology student handbook 2010-2011 clearly states: “Data loss will not excuse missing a deadline”.

Which is why backing up work is imperative but it needn’t be costly or complicated. BuddyBackup is a free, unlimited, online, backup software for PCs that is ideal for students.

“With so much going on in student’s lives, it can be easy to forget to backup work,” says BuddyBackup Manager, Mark Couvaras. “Yet, if they don’t, they’re putting their degree in jeopardy.

“Once you’ve done an initial backup, you never have to worry about doing it again because BuddyBackup works continuously and automatically backs-up any changes or additions you make to your files,” adds Mark.

BuddyBackup backups your data onto spare disk space on friends’ (or buddies’) computers so that you avoid paying a cloud provider for storage space.

“BuddyBackup is also a greener option because unlike the cloud, it doesn’t require the use of data centres which have a huge energy consumption,” says Mark.

BuddyBackup software applies military-grade encryption to your data before it leaves your PC, which means that only you can see your files.

For added security BuddyBackup defaults to a minimum of two buddies. It wouldn’t be wise to backup solely to housemates, so it’s a good idea to include buddies who are off-campus or friends and family back home.

BuddyBackup is smart software. It regularly checks that your buddies still have your backups. If it discovers a problem, it will automatically backup your files to a different buddy instead. This means you’re safe even if a buddy uninstalls BuddyBackup or has a computer failure.

If you have a disaster, you can easily recover your files by running BuddyBackup from your new computer.

“Most students will take out insurance in case their laptop gets stolen,” says Mark. “And while that can pay for a new computer, no amount of money is going to replace weeks and months of course work. BuddyBackup software is like a free insurance policy for your data.”

* Source Greater Manchester Police (August 2011) – through a Freedom of Information request made by BuddyBackup.

It’s one thing to get round to downloading images onto your PC but quite another to remember to backup them up!

Just like you should always take out travel insurance, you can ensure your photos are safe should your camera or computer get lost, damaged or stolen.

With BuddyBackup you can have unlimited, continuous, online backup of your photos for FREE!

Once you’ve got it, you never have to worry about backing up your photos again. So you don’t have to bother doing manual backups to an external hard-drive or CDs either. (With BuddyBackup you can even backup your external hard-drive online).

BuddyBackup’s easy-to-use software works by backing up to the spare disk space on your friends PCs. The service is free (and always will be) because it doesn’t back-up to power-hungry data centres, just as many buddies as you like.

BuddyBackup applies military-grade encryption to all files before they leave your PC, so even your nosiest buddies won’t be able to snoop around your photos.

Once you’ve done your initial backup, BuddyBackup will automatically backup any images you add to your folders.

Of course, you can back up any of your files on your PC, not just images. So you can have peace of mind to know that your photos, videos, music and work are all protected.

BuddyBackup’s newly improved software lets users back-up unlimited data onto spare disk space on their friends’, family’s or colleagues’ computers for free. The system uses military-grade encryption so your ‘buddies’ can’t see your files.

“It gives users peace of mind to know that their files are backed up to people they know and trust and not an unknown server in cyberspace with questionable security levels,” says BuddyBackup Manager, Mark Couvaras.

Large servers face continuous threats from hackers as seen in the case of Sony, which led to data being stolen from 77 million accounts in April and a further attack this month with 1 million account details and passwords being accessed.

As seen, even the largest cloud operations are not immune to disasters; customers lost data permanently when Amazon’s EC2 cloud service crashed.

“In the past, online storage companies have been taken over resulting in data being lost. Others have gone bust, leaving customers unable to retrieve their files,” warns Mark.

“What’s more, terms and conditions can change, meaning that some unscrupulous companies might start charging you for storage if you want to get your data back.”

“BuddyBackup is a simple, secure and free alternative to the cloud. It’s robust because you can scatter your documents, photos, music and videos across lots of friends. And the more buddies you back up to, the safer your files are,” adds Mark.

Once a full back-up is completed, BuddyBackup constantly monitors your computer for changes and only uploads files that have been added or altered. The software backs up continuously as long as your buddies are online. If they’re not, the changes will be made as soon as they are back on again.

Buddybackup’s latest upgrade means you can now choose who the files should be backed up to, and how many backups should be made. For example, you can now set it so that your most vital files are backed up to 3 remotely located buddies, whereas your music is backed up only once to your USB drive. That way you don’t waste time and space making lots of backups of files which are less important.

“As well as serving home users, it’s a free and easy way for employees to back-up data on their laptops to a central computer in the office,” adds Mark.

“Plus, because you’re avoiding an online storage company or cloud server, BuddyBackup doesn’t add to the energy burden from power-hungry data centres, making it a greener option too.”

www.buddybackup.com – available in 11 different languages.

Watch a YouTube demonstration at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPILoWgnL8E

Ends

For more information, please contact:

Leonie Guguen
Communications Manager, BuddyBackup
Tel: +44 (0) 161 408 5040
Email: leonie.guguen@buddybackup.com

I received my iPad yesterday, many thanks! I still can’t believe I won

I would like to thank BuddyBackup for valuing their existing customers and entering them into the draw. I didn’t expect to win and what a fantastic surprise it was on a Monday morning! BuddyBackup has performed flawlessly over the last 6 months and the support on your forum was really helpful. All in all, not bad for free software!

All the best for the future

Max

Bits and Pieces

First let’s go over a few terms you’ve probably read or heard about:

• Kilobits
• Megabits
• Gigabits
• Kilobytes
• Megabytes
• Gigabytes
• Megablobs (OK I made that one up….)

The first thing to say is don’t feel bad about not understanding these unit!

They are confusing, used only for historical reasons and are not even consistently used. Computer scientists, physicists, network & hard drive manufacturers might give you a different definition of some of these units.

This is not your fault, and in fact some companies will actively use this confusion against you.

So let’s try to unravel these units.

The basic units are reasonably easy:

• A bit is a zero or one
  

A “bit” is the smallest unit of information in computing. It’s basically a “0″ or a “1″, or if you like a “yes” or a “no”. It might sound strange that the whole basis of modern technology is built on so humble a thing, but the reason is because of  the way electronic hardware (i.e . your computer) works. The point is that if you string together enough “yes” and “no’s” you can represent anything (imagine a game of 20 questions, only you have a million goes!).

• A byte is 8 bits

A “byte” is 8 lots of bits in a row. A byte is roughly enough information to represent a single character of the English language. So “hello” would be 5 bytes (which is 40 bits (5 x 8)).

(I’m glossing over two issues: firstly older computer systems might use different numbers of bits to refer to a “byte” e.g. 6, 7, 8 or 9 bits. Nowadays, it’s almost universally 8 bits. Secondly, characters in other languages might require 2 or more bytes to store).

• A kilobit is 1000 bits.
• A kilobyte  is 1000 bytes.

So those are easy. Maths nerds reading this will realise  that a kilobyte is 8 times larger than a kilobit. That’s a commonly repeated pattern you’ll see between “bits” and “bytes”.

(So actually I’m lying here, again. SOME people (Computer Scientists in particular)  actually call a kilobyte 1024 bytes. The reasons for this are highly technical and really just to make life easier for Computer Scientists – thanks guys!

Recently there was a move to try to standardise the “kilobyte” to be 1000 bytes, but the problem is that lots of people still use the old size. You’ll see this issue repeated for Megabytes and Gigabytes – some people say a Megabyte is 1000 kilobytes, others say it is 1024 kilobytes. Read more about it here.

For most cases, the difference is quite small, so don’t worry about it too much.)

For those of you who remember studying the solar system at school, here is a familiar to-scale representation of the sizes of these units:

Relatively speaking, these units (up to the Kilobyte) are still very small. By comparison, a typical JPEG photo would be at least 200 kilobytes.

The next step up is the Megabit and Megabyte.

• A megabit is 1000 kilobits
• A megabyte is 1000 kilobytes

And here they are in comparison:

And finally we get to Gigabit and Gigabyte.

• A Gigabit is 1000 Megabits
• A Gigabyte is 1000 Megabytes

You can also see the relative size of a typical MP3 and a moderately high quality photo (JPEG).

Note how “kilobits” and “kilobytes” are so small, they don’t even appear on this chart. For modern day computing, the only unit of any useful size is Megabits/Megabytes, and Gigabits/Gigabytes.

That massive orange Jupiter-like blob in the corner is a Gigabyte. A modern decent sized hard drive would be at least 200 Gigabytes so you can imagine how big that would be.

Shortened Names

You’ll often see these units shortened like this:

• kbps
• mbps

The first two letters “kb” refer to the unit (kilobits, kilobytes, megabits, megabytes). “ps” stands for “per second”. So, it’s a measurement of how much data can be transferred in 1 second.

Unfortunately, these abbreviations are often used inconsistently, and not clearly.

One issue is how to distinguish between “kilobits” and “bytes”.

Often the convention is to use UPPERCASE “B” to refer to bytes and lowercase “b” to mean bits.

So:

• KBps means kilobytes per second
• kbps means kilobits per second
• MBps means megabytes per second
• mbps means megabits per second

BUT this  is often not consistently used, particularly in some companies’ marketing material. The rule of thumb is this: if it’s a broadband company talking about internet speeds, they will be referring to megabits and kilobits regardless of whether they use upper or lowercase letters for “mbps”.

Conclusion

• A bit is the smallest unit of information: a zero or a 1
• There are 8 bits in a byte
• Common pattern of each unit is that it’s 1000 times larger than the previous unit (kilo –> mega –> giga)
• Kilobits/Megabits are 8 times smaller than kilobytes/megabytes
• Beware of abbreviations: kbps, mbps

In part two I’ll be talking about some of the pitfalls in the way broadband companies report speeds.

Broadband speed is relevant to our product, BuddyBackup, as it determines how quickly you can backup and restore files over the internet.

John Wood

The question is, what kind of disaster?

Sure, your computer might just go “pop” and smoke a little, but it might also go “ka-boom” and smoke a LOT. Like this one:

Oops! Good job I had off-site backups...

When it comes to backup, you have to ask yourself exactly what you’re trying to achieve. If you just want to handle to occasional lost file, or Windows crash then actually maybe you don’t need to do anything.

Modern operating systems and applications are much better at dealing with this sort of stuff. For example, you’ve probably noticed that newer versions of Microsoft Word can restore “lost” files, so if your computer crashes and you forgot to save, you might be OK.

Similarly, most modern operating systems use a Recycle Bin, so when you delete files, they’re not immediately gone.

Geeks can even sometimes restore “really” deleted files using special software, and if you’re really serious you can send corrupted hard drives to companies who will try and read the data from them (it’s expensive, mind).

So why bother backing up?

Unfortunately, it’s very much like home insurance. You might go through a lifetime without having a major fire or flood, but that doesn’t mean you won’t buy house insurance (right?). So to me, data backup is the same: it’s the 1 in 100 event; the small percentage of us that have a major disaster such as fire, flood or theft. If your backup strategy doesn’t account for this, then what’s the point?

In the business we talk about “off-site” backups. What this means is making sure that a copy of your data exists away from the place of business. The same principle should apply to home users as well.

In the past (and still present in some cases!), the solution to this was to physically move your backups (which might be on magnetic tape or removable hard drives) to a second location. For example, you’d have someone responsible for taking home the backup tapes at the end of the week.

Of course this requires a lot of diligence, and also, well, a guy to carry tapes around, so is completely inappropriate for use in the home or small businesses.

A more recent solution to this has been “online backup”. With this, your files are delivered over the internet to a third party company, who looks after them for you. You rely on the company to store the files for you, and let you download them when you need them.

Usually you run some software on your PC to manage the backups (BuddyBackup fits into this category), but sometimes it might be a done via a website.

The nice thing about online backup is that it’s much less effort: you’re using the internet for delivery so there is no messing about physically moving stuff. Also, (depending on the quality of the software running on your PC), it can be easier to setup and run.

It’s also often the only viable “online”/”off-site” option home or small office users.

So, when you think about backup, think about what exactly you’re trying to protect against. In this internet age, there are plenty of options for off-site backup that is actually going to survive a real disaster.

BuddyBackup gives you off-site backups for free by saving your files encrypted onto your buddies’ computers.

John Wood

www.buddybackup.com

New to BuddyBackup? Here’s some blurb from the site which should hopefully give you an idea of what we’re about:

BuddyBackup gives you unlimited online backups of your files for free, by allowing you to easily and securely backup your data onto your buddies.

So, check out the site and give the software a whirl!

The BuddyBackup Team