The day that Evernote died...

Evernote, for me at least, is the king of all note-taking apps.

Evernote (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let's go through some essential features that set it apart from the crowd:

• Cross platform: This is a biggie - Evernote runs on any device that you may be using, be it Apple, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, PC, Mac... the list goes on.
  You can also access it directly from any web browser of course.
  There is serious power in compatibility.
  
  
• Pricing: The free version offers a lot of functionality, so much so that I only found a need to upgrade from the free plan this month, for reasons that will be covered in this blog post...
  
  
• Evernote offers features that I haven't even started to use yet - scanning through the menu on my PC, I don't even know what some of the features do, but I am guessing that once I start using them, I will find it hard to imagine life without them!
  
  
• Convenience: Instead of trying to remember each and every thing that I did in my day, which customers I visited, time spent on-site, tasks completed etc., I make a point of updating Evernote on my Lumia 920 several times per day, and the data is automatically synced back to the cloud, and then onto each of my other devices when they in turn sync later on.
  Couldn't be any simpler really.

Cloud-based note software is therefore an amazing way in which to keep your life, your devices and indeed your mind in sync, no matter where you are or what device you happen to be using.

It is the perfect, simple, centralized solution... or is it?

For over a year now, I have been using Evernote (free), to make my life simpler by remembering important stuff for me - and it has worked sterlingly well.

Then last week, something decidedly odd and alarming happened which caught me completely off guard, and which turned an otherwise fantastic Monday into one with a distinctly blue hue.

While opening a critical note (I say "critical", since it pertained to information stored for the month that directly affected the bottom line of my business), I discovered that the entire note appeared blank.

The note title was intact, as was a preview of the first 3 lines of the note, but that was it.

No stress, I thought, still reasonably calm at this stage, as I switched over to my phone to access the note there.

Same thing on the phone. Zip, nada, nothing in the note.

Stress level successfully upgraded.

Last ditch to recover data? You guessed it - turn to the oracle of all things - Google.

Oddly, while this particular event appeared to be rather common in search results, no real explanation, solution or fix accompanied any of the articles that I was desperately trawling through.

Attempting to start rebuilding the note from memory only made things worse - the more that I could remember from the scattered bits and pieces haphazardly floating around my brain, the more I realised that the task facing me was near insurmountable - I had stored a lot of data in that note...

It would be safe to say that I was going through unusually high stress levels at that point.

In desperation I continued what now seemed a pointless effort to find any scraps of info online, that may turn the situation around.

Finally, one faint glimmer of hope caught my eye from the far recesses of the web - a feature included in the Evernote Premium (paid) which allows you to roll back to a previous version of any note.

Ah, but I was on the Free plan, so what use would this be to me?
Thankfully, quite a bit, since Evernote actually implements this feature on all new accounts, Free or Premium. 

This means that by upgrading from a free plan to a Premium plan, you can access historical data about your notes, even from the period before you became a Premium user - a massive lifesaver if you are someone like me, who was about to lose most of my remaining sanity due to data loss.

In short, I was able to upgrade to a monthly Premium plan (R 49 per month), and access a version of my lost note that had been saved that same morning, approximately 99% intact.

Stress levels normalised. Meltdown averted.

So what's the point of this post really?

Well, I am an avid cloud service advocate - whenever clients ask me about data storage needs for the future, cloud is always in there somewhere when I respond.

I think that the lesson in all this, is that while the cloud is as reliable, secure and stable as it can possibly be, shit does happen.

Just as external hard drives can be dropped or fail at random, cloud services and syncs can fall over with unpredictable results, and when dealing with your data, unpredictability is a scary thing.

Whichever way you go, be it local storage or the cloud, take precautions and put extra measures in place, within reason obviously.

Duplicate backup drives, store a local copy of your cloud data or make use of multiple cloud storage services.

Whatever you do, have something to fall back on, because when it all goes belly up, data is impossible to replace.

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Ever wondered how Google manages insane amounts of data? Take a peek at their datacentres...

Humans are pretty excessive creatures by nature.

We like it when stuff occurs in large amounts, for example:

- Money. 

We all wanna be rich. Disagree? Not buying it. 

If I had a million bucks and gave it to you, would you bin it? 

Didn't think so.

- Food. 

Might not apply to everyone, but a lot of food 'aint a bad thing :) 

I know I like a big meal!

- Waste. 

Man oh man we humans are Professors of Waste. 

Go and Google the amount of waste that a single cruise ship generates for example. It's sickening stuff.

- Humans.

How many of us are there on the planet?

More than a handful I would guess...

You get my drift. 

We like excess, and that includes data - we generate crazy amounts of data on a daily basis.

I do not know the figures offhand, but just take a moment to consider the millions of people who are online right this second, doing their thing surfing, downloading, uploading, streaming, emailing, using VOIP, Facebook-ing, tweeting, hacking, backing up, syncing their devices to the cloud, using remote desktop, Teamviewing, IRC'ing (do they still do this? :)), Dropbox'ing... man I could go on all year, and all of next year probably as well!

The point is, huge amounts of data require a serious infrastructure.

Now I am not talking about your corporate office server room with a few rack-mounted switches and a handful of servers.

We are talking Google type stuff here, and I gotta say I look at things a little differently when I stop to think that as I am typing this post, my data is being saved live into a datacenter like one of these Google monsters...

Click each image to enlarge and see the description of each facility:

Little bit crazy, 'aint it?

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Snapdisk - backup 500GB of data to the Cloud - 1 year free trial...!

Do you backup your data?

If you are like a lot of people I speak to everyday, then you probably don't give it a second thought.

Truth is, there are tons of things that could cause irreversible data loss. 

Here are just a few of the more common ones:

- hard drive failure (either through physical damage, or sometimes hard drives just decide to crash on their own for no good reason... it happens!);

- theft (self-explanatory);

- fire (self-explanatory);

- accidental deletion (you know, where you mistakenly drag and drop that folder into some unknown abyss on your computer...)

These are the biggies, and no matter which way you slice it, you need to have a backup copy of your data somewhere nowadays.

Gone are the days of filing cabinets and thousands of paper hard copies of documentation. 

It's all digital now, and that means that we rely on machines to take care of our data.

Unfortunately though, as I tell all of my clients, it is less a question of "if" a hard drive will fail, but more a question of "when" it will fail.

A hard drive spins at speeds anywhere from 5400RPM, right up to 10000RPM, depending on the drive model and application (server, desktop, laptop etc.) .

That's a lot of work for a hard drive to do, and those moving parts will eventually get tired.

It may take years, decades even, but you can count on it happening at some point.

Thankfully, the speed at which Information Technology is growing and developing, means that a hard drive will probably become obsolete and be replaced, before it has a chance to fail.

Even so, rather be safe than sorry.

So what are our options when backing up data? 

Personally, I recommend external hard drives to get the job done (USB for single machines, NAS Drives for backing up an entire network).

Single drives are now available in sizes up to 3TB (3000GB), which is huge chunk of data, so that means you can pretty much put your entire life onto one of these drives.

So then, is all well in backup land?

Well yes, as long as your external drive never crashes and is locked away in a fire-proof safe whenever it is not backing up...

What then, if your backup drive grows legs, or if the drive gets dropped or otherwise damaged, rendering your backup stone dead?

Enter the Cloud - a glorified term used to describe computing / services / data storage facilities that are internet based.

We have all heard the term, and it is often loosely used in daily conversation, but one of the areas where it is fast gaining traction is for offsite backups.

What a great data insurance policy - dump it somewhere on a server far, far away (protected from power spikes, fire, water etc.), and sleep easy at night knowing that your data is safe.

Having researched available Cloud Backup services exhaustively of late (there are many!), I came across one service recently that seems to have a serious edge over other offerings, in terms of pure value for money...

They call themselves "Snapdisk" (http://www.mysnapdisk.com), and here is a summary of what they offer and what you pay (or don't pay...) :):

- 500GB cloud storage to backup any data that you need to, from several machines if necessary (bear in mind that 500GB is a large chunk of data - most new mid-range laptops are shipped with a hard drive in the region of 500GB);

- 1 year free trial; Thereafter $6.95 monthly or $69.95 annually (1 year free? I'll take a year free trial any day thank you very much!);

- Choice of scheduled backups or continuous backups (data is backed up literally as changes are detected);

- PC & Mac compatible;

- Files are available from anywhere with an internet connection via the secure Snapdisk website;

As I learnt more about Snapdisk, my interest got the better of me, and I am now running it to take care of my own backups.

I have to say that so far, Snapdisk is pretty damn good. 

The backup client is easy to install and configure, and it runs smoothly without a significant hit on performance. 

There are also options to control how much bandwidth is being used, so as not to hog the available internet connection while the backup is running.

If Snapdisk continues to impress me over the next few days, weeks and months, then by the time that my 1 year free trial is up, I certainly won't mind paying $7 (approx. R 60) per month to have my data safely stored in the Cloud.

It's incredible how we view our physical possessions as critical items to insure (cars, furniture, phones etc.).

Sure - these are of course important, but at the end of the day, you can always go out and buy a new phone / car / TV / etc.

You cannot say the same for your data.

R 60 per month to guarantee the security of my data, with the first year free?

Sounds like a serious bargain - count me in.

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Could you make the switch from Outlook to Gmail...?

Google are a smart bunch of guys - this is common knowledge to most people who know even a small amount about IT and the internet.
One of their attempts at being really smart is their Google Docs offering, which is available free of charge if you have a (free) Gmail account.

If you have never used Google Docs before and you have a Gmail account, look out for the "Docs" link up at the top of the screen next time you are logged into Gmail.

Anyway, long story short is that Google Docs is essentially the beginning of a cloud-based suite of software that eventually aims to supercede the likes of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
Nice idea Google, but could that really happen in the working world?

I have also had experience with people in the workplace who have been switched over to Google Apps, which is the corporate Google offering which aims to replace Microsoft Exchange, which has been a tried, tested and proven corporate solution.
I must say that user resistance to something other than Outlook is simply huge - even though Google Apps can do most of what Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange can do.

People see an interface that they do not recognize and it seems like they get a bit spooked... and the problem is that some of their being spooked is actually justified.

Google are selling their Google Apps solution in a very aggressive manner, by basically trying to alter user mindsets from a largely local, Microsoft Office-based solution, to a largely cloud, Google Apps-based solution.
While this is great in theory, Google Apps still falls short of the mighty MS Office / Microsoft Exchange on many counts. Niggles and irritations abound if you try to integrate Google Apps into Outlook - corrupted meeting requests, mysterious Unread items all over the place, mail from decades ago suddenly reappearing in your Inbox... it can quickly add up to a lot of users suddenly feeling a little peeved about migrating from the tried and tested solution that is Microsoft Office.

The positive flip side of this confusing little coin is that Google are a hugely proactive company, and this means a process of continuous improvement, development and therefore frequent updates and additions to their products.
They are constantly listening to customer feedback and altering their offerings accordingly, wherever possible. Could you ever see a company like Microsoft doing that...? Sure, Microsoft do release Service Packs, hotfixes and the like, but no way as frequently as Google do.

I guess only time will tell if the cloud will get the better of the traditional Microsoft Office suite - while Google Docs cannot offer the sophistication and full functionality of its' Microsoft counterparts, it does allow a user to work on documents, spreadsheets and presentations live on the web, from anywhere in the world, while collaborating in real-time with colleagues, friends and other contacts who can be thousands of miles away at the same time... it's powerful stuff by any standard.

Don't think that Microsoft are taking this lying down - they have their very own cloud strategy called Windows Azure which has already attracted tens of thousands of customers, although it is more geared towards developers.

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