Month: January 2009

Stop ‘Reply All’ Fiascos by Using BCC

Mark Morgan pointed out this reply-all fiasco at the State Department where people hitting “reply all” to e-mail messages sent out on huge distribution lists was causing problems for the State Department’s mail server. The State Department then circulated a memo threatening disciplinary actions if people continued to “reply all” to such messages.

Stupid.

The problem is not the end-user who hits “reply all” but rather the clueless sender who is including dozens or hundreds of e-mails in the CC or TO field. If you need to send a mass e-mail you need to be putting those e-mail addresses in the BCC field for a number of reasons.

First, it prevents the stupid but inevitable “reply all” messages. Hey, even I’ve accidentally hit reply all instead of just reply when responding to such mass e-mails. If the sender had bothered to take a few seconds to paste the addresses in the BCC field, it wouldn’t have mattered.

Second, in general when it comes to mass mailings I don’t need to know who else is receiving the mail. Oftentimes the result is that the recipient now has more information about who has specific authority or access to certain services than he or she really needs.

Hitting “reply all” to a mass e-mail is bad form, but it pales in comparison to sending out e-mails to dozens or hundreds of people that reveal all of those e-mail addresses in the To or CC field.

Cheap Online Backups

Photojojo is usually a pretty interesting photo-related site/blog, but they had me shaking their head with their effusive recommendation of Backblaze for computer backup,

Backblaze is the best online backup tool we’ve ever used.

Why we love it:

  • No DVDs, no hard drives to mess with
  • Backups happen invisibly as soon as files are added
  • $5/month, no matter how big your hard drive
  • Won’t slow down your computer. Really.
  • Your online backup can’t be lost or stolen
  • Download your backed up files anytime (of course) or have them overnighted to you on DVDs or a hard drive (spiffy!)

Sigh. Okay, here’s the deal — if you really think these service that offer unlimited data backup for ridiculously low prices are sustainable, you might as well go all the way and send your life savings to Bernie Madoff for those consistent 8-10 percent annual returns.

And, no, I’m not suggesting Backblaze or other services like it are fraudulent. In fact I give Backblaze credit because they are very upfront about their business model,

How Can You Backup Everything Online For Just $5 per Month?
We have developed a highly efficient storage system that enables us to optimize how we store data. And we’re counting on some people having a lot of data and others not very much, but that it will work out on average.

Backblaze also has some interesting upselling options including offering to send users DVDs and hard drive backups of their data which is a very nice option to have.

Who knows, it could work out for them. But this is an extremely crowded space at the moment and we’re presumably talking about extremely important files. I’m not sure I’d want to count on a service that’s counting on a certain usage pattern and that is competing against any number of firms counting on exactly the same thing.

Personally I think asking “what’s the cheapest online backup option” is not a good way to think about backups. Rather, I’d start by imagining all of your data has been wiped out today — how much would you be willing to pay to recover that data? Then discount that price over time based on your income and other backup options you’re using.

Maybe ultimately backing up all your data is really only worth $5/month. If so, Backblaze certainly seem like an interesting service to explore. Otherwise, I’d look elsewhere (I’m using an Amazon S3-based system, but the caveat is I pay $50-$60/month for the 300+gb I’ve got stored there).

BQBackup.Com

Okay, I’m a  little paranoid about losing data (or as my wife puts it, pain-in-the-ass OCD). So as the data on this server has grown to 20+gigabytes, its been a challenge figuring out how to back it up in case of a failure at the data center, and also how to capture regular snapshots.

The current scheme is this. First I signed up with BQBackup.Com which is a New York-based company that specializes in hosting for online backups. $20/month buys 100gb of storage.

Second, I set up an rsync job in crontab so that every morning at 4 a.m. rsync starts on the server and syncs with my BQBackup site.

Finally, I installed Linux on my MSI Wind and created a couple of cron jobs that at 6 a.m. download the MySql databases from the main server, then rsync with the BQBackup site, and finally write the resulting 20gb to a year-month-day.tar.gz file. Throw those on a  hard drive and store at an undisclosed location offsite.

And just in case that all fails, the files on the MSI Wind get backed up to Jungle Disk along with the other 300gb or so of personal data I really can’t afford to lose.

EightMaps.com and the Future of Public Records

EightMaps.com is an interesting mashup of Google maps and publicly available information on donors to the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 which narrowly passed in California. So you can select where you live and see if anyone nearby donated to a pro-Proposition 8 group.

It would, of course, be just as easy to set up a similar application showing who donated to groups opposed to Proposition 8 (my wife did even though I told her it was going to pass), so presumably my house would show up on such a mashup.

But using public records, we could get at a lot of interesting data. For example, I’m assuming that marriage records in California are public, so someone opposed to gay marriage could create  a mashup showing the homes of every single gay couple married in California prior to the passage of Proposition 8 (which would include quite a few people who are not residents of California).

All-in-all, this sort of use of public records in general seems abusive and I suspect over time will lead us to reconsider the wisdom of making so many records public. Frankly, I’ve never thought political donations should be public records. The interest in preventing corruption is more than overwhelmed by the chilling effect that mashups like this will increasingly cause.

Web Worker Daily Swipe at Review Basics

Pam Poole did a nice review of Colaab with mention of other web-based document collaboration services.

At the end of the review she couldn’t help but take a swipe at Review Basics. Poole notes that Review Basics goes so far as to let the user post a feedback on its demo using the built-in collaboration tools, so she did,

review-basics-ugh

In the ensuing comment thread Poole writes,

I hesitated to include that. I’m not militant or a prude. But there’s a time and a place! It’s all about context. I’m really curious to know if an equally suggestive picture of a guy would have bothered any guys.

Context is everything and I think, in this case, it would. Come on, this is a document collaboration service — images like this simply tell me you’ve got some very immature folks handling things. Do they really think I’m going to recommend that my co-workers go check out your service after seeing something like this in their demo? I shouldn’t have to send my boss a “possibly NSFW” notation if I want him to check out your demo!

Given that the document collaboration space is pretty crowded, I’ll just click over to one of your competitors rather than deal with this sort of nonsense.