Cloud Storage - What's a Guy to Do?

I have a lot of photos; but I'm no photographer.  In fact, most of the photos are the sucky kind that only members of my family could ever like.  But we do like them - they represent various important moments in our lives.  Thus, it is important to me that I preserve them.

A few years ago a friend of mine had his photo harddrive crash on him.  He didn't have a backup.  He lost a lot of photos that were incredibly important to him.  That hit home pretty hard so I made sure to keep a physically synced external harddrive backup of all my photos.

A year later another friend came to me looking for help.  His laptop and his external harddrive had both died at the same time; probably some kind of power surge or something.  Either way, he had lost all of his photos that he had religiously backed up to his external harddrive.  That hit home again so I started syncing my photos to the cloud.

I signed up with TextDrive along time ago.  They are Joyent now; but when I signed up as part of their "Mixed Lunch" plan or something like that the account came with a few bonuses.  One was a "StrongSpace" account with 25GB of space.  This was way before things like Dropbox existed.  The tools provided by TextDrive weren't nill but I found some good windows tools that would SSH to my StrongSpace and do an rsync backup of my photos.

Then StrongSpace was sold and my space was bumped to 50GB!  Perfect, I have about 40GB of photos now.  But, StrongSpace kind of sucks for viewing your files online.  And, because I basically just backup photos, I wanted a better solution so I paid for the 80GB plan with picasaweb at Google.  Then I setup Picasa to sync all my photos there.  This had the added benefit of making all of my photos available in the photo gallery of my Android phone.  I was pretty happy with my setup;  two remote backups and the local external drive.

Then I changed jobs.  I took my external laptop with me and hooked it up to my Mac (a new computing experience for me), installed Picasa and told it to sync.  It re-uploaded all of my photos and my 80GB was suddenly full.  Not good.  I ended up installing the Google command line tools and deleting all my photos from picasaweb.  I haven't re-synced to that service.  Thus my 80GB of space has been laying fallow.

I've used DropBox since about when it came on to the scene; I'm a cloud storage hipster.  I love the service but I've been unwilling to spend the $200/year to get 100GB of space.  I'm kind of cheap.  I have a SkyDrive account through my new job but I never used it so I missed out on getting 25G for free; so I'm stuck at the 7GB entry point announced this week.  Plus, I'm not sure Microsoft is really a better option for me than Google is - plus I already have the grandfathered 80GB for $20/year plan on Google so why not use Google Drive?

Well, Raganwald is why.  He seems like a pretty smart guy and he has some real concerns with Google and his concerns keep me thinking and second guessing my decisions to be so tightly tied into the Google Cloud.  I use them for Email, Calendaring, Blogging, Google+, Maps, heck just about everything.  Do I have anything to really worry about with Google?  I don't know but Reg's concerns keep on niggling in the back of my mind.

Google Drive came out yesterday and my 80GB was bounced to 85GB.  That's plenty of room for me to sync all of my photos to it; plus because it works like Dropbox, all the photos will also sync to my home computer - and I can setup a local rsync on it to mirror the images to yet another external harddrive.  That would give me four local copies and the two cloud copies.  If I lost my photos at that point - well fuck it.

Google Drive has some cool features.  I like the way it provides a web-client viewer for so many different file types (35 I think).  That in itself is pretty damn handy.   But it is one more way to tie myself to Google.  They are currently one huge single point of failure for my online life.  I don't like single points of failure so I'm tempted to use a different service for my photo syncing.  And, if I'm going to switch, maybe I should take Reg's concerns to heart as I pick an alternative; thus I probably want to avoid MS as well.  Sure, Microsoft isn't exactly an advertising business like Google is - but it would be naive to think they aren't also in advertising.

So where does that leave me?  Here are the options I am considering:  Dropbox and SugarSync.  Why? Well they are the only two I've either used or have had wholeheartedly recommended to me by other Cloud Storage Hipsters of course.  In either case I think I would get the 100GB plan so SugarSync is a full $50 a year cheaper.  The question I then have to answer is "Is Dropbox worth an additional $50/year?"  And, remember, I'm kind of cheap.  However, I have to remind myself not to compare the pricing of either with that offered by Google since Google augments my low rate by mining my data.

Here is an article that does a brief rundown of the differences between a variety of different cloud storage services.  Again, I'm just focusing on SugarSync and Dropbox and, honestly, based on this article I can't see a reason to not go with SugarSync for my purpose of keeping all of my photos backed up to the cloud and between my home and work computers.

So what do you suggest?  SugarSync, Dropbox, or is there some other service that just kicks ass, cares about privacy, and will do just what I need at a reasonable cost?  Let me know because I need to make a choice!

Remove Ubunutu Dual Boot with Windows 7

My linux luck continued with a failure in getting Ubuntu 11.10 to work properly right out of the box so I decided to uninstall it.  However, removing it isn't nearly as simple as installing it was.  Here are the steps you need:

1. You need to remove the linux partition(s) - I used the free tool EASUS Partition Master, removed all of the non windows and non-recovery partitions, and then stretched out my windows partition to reclaim that space.
2. After you setup the new partition rules your computer has to reboot.  After the bios screen the unix boot loader Grub will still appear offering to start linux or windows.  Start windows but then hit f8 to get to the recovery menu for windows.
3. Pick to start windows in recovery mode; a graphical user interface will open.  Eventually you'll have the chance to pick from a small menu of about eight options, pick the "Command Line" option (or console).
4. At the command line enter "bootrec /fixmbr" without the quotes. This will get rid of grub.  It's almost instantaneous. 
5. Restart your computer; EASUS Partition Master will then do it's partition resizing foo.  This isn't instantaneous so just have some patience.
6. You're done. 

Install PHP PEAR on Windows 7

This seems like it should be obvious but it turns out getting PEAR isn't straight forward.  The documentation at pear.php.net is inaccurate for a windows install where you use the installer at php.iis.net to install PHP on IIS7. It turns out there is no go-pear.bat file in your php directory after installing this way.  However, after some trial and error and a bit of luck I figured out this seven steps to getting PEAR installed.

1. Download go-pear.phar at http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar
2. put that file in your php home directory.
3. open a command window as administrator; move to your php home directory
4. enter "php go-pear.phar" without quotes
5. accept the default value for everything it asks about; system wide, path options, updating your php.ini etc
6. once the script is done pear is installed; you just have one last step
7. in windows explorer go to your php home directory and double click on PEAR_ENV.reg to update your registry

PHP array_map in practice

Last week I spent some time making sure I understood how map and reduce actually work and what their purposes are.  This week I needed to use map while fixing a silly problem.  Some of this background info will be pure cruft to most of you but hopefully it will be enlightening in it's own way.

There is an application somewhere in our organization that utilizes an access database to store a catalog of information.  This catalog is then made available for consumption within our web properties via a webservice that is written in php and which returns the data contained within the database in either json or xml format.

Here is the basic way the json was being generated previously:

 $rs=odbc_exec($conn,$sql);

 //declare an array to hold the query results
 $data = array();
 
 //populate the jobs array with the query result set
 while($curRow = odbc_fetch_array($rs)){
  $data[] = $curRow;
 } 
 echo json_encode(array('jobs'=>$jobs));

Very straight forward and, it appeared to work well until today. Someone copied and pasted a descriptive field of one of the catalog items from a word document into the access database and a single smart quote (apostrophe really) worked its way into the data. When this happened that field was rendered in the json as null even though there was clearly data contained within.
It took me a little while to see that it was a smart quote buried in the middle of the paragraph of text but once I did I knew right away how to clean it out - using MAP; or in php paralance, array_map. Combined with this nice function to convert smart quotes I had a winning solution on my hand without having to add much code at all. Here is the final version of that same code:

 $rs=odbc_exec($conn,$sql);

 //declare an array to hold the query results
 $data = array();
 
 //populate the jobs array with the query result set
 while($curRow = odbc_fetch_array($rs)){
  $data[] = array_map("convert_smart_quotes",$curRow);
 } 
 echo json_encode(array('jobs'=>$jobs));

Just updating that one line in the middle of my while loop let me make sure that every element in every row was clean of nasty smart quotes by telling array_map to call the convert_smart_quotes function on each element. I have to say I really do like the power and simplicity of map (and reduce).