Get settled in for the long haul

One of the key downsides of online backup is the time it takes to actually get your initial backup into the cloud. Some companies such as CrashPlan and DollyDrive allow you to ship a physical hard drive to “seed” your backup, greatly reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred online initially.

If you aren’t with these companies or want an alternative, you can create a tiered backup strategy. If you do it all at once, it can take months and you’ll find you’re missing key files when you need them. Here’s what I typically recommend in terms of a staged approach for the average user:

1. Work first. Realize that while most people say pictures are the most important items to back up, those typically take the longest to upload. I prefer to start with the Documents folder. These typically are probably the hardest to recreate, as well as being time sensitive. This is the folder you’re also working in most often, so you may be more likely to accidentally overwrite things. If you use Outlook or Entourage, exclude the Microsoft User Data as the database for those email programs tends to be huge.

Keep an eye on the backup program, and make sure it not only successfully backed up that initial folder, but is also correctly backing up changes daily. Typically this takes just a few days. Once you have that folder backing up, the next folder I suggest is the Desktop folder. For convenience (and a bit of poor training), many users keep documents on the desktop rather than the Documents folder.

2. App and system settings. Next is the Application Support and Preferences folder in your user library folder. These contain the settings for your various programs as well as some supporting data files.

After you’ve got those critical files happily updating it’s time for the bigger folders such as email and the rest of your library folder. Email, of course is very important and annoying if lost, but often it’s already stored elsewhere, like on your email provider’s servers.

3. Photos and home video. Once you’ve got the documents and various support files and folders, it’s time to tackle the photos. More and more users keep copies (albeit at a lower quality) on services such as Facebook and Flickr, as well as sync photos to their iPhone, so it probably isn’t so urgent for most. What I do recommend is to spend some time and back up your photos manually by periodically burning them to disc from iPhoto. Be sure to keep these disks offsite in case of disaster, maybe with friends or family.

4. Music last — or not at all. Finally, after these elements are successfully updating each day, it’s time to back up the rest of your hard drive and can go with the software’s suggested recommendations. You might think about excluding your iTunes folder, however. With iCloud and iTunes Match, you might consider waiting on these folders or not backing it up at all. A large media library can choke a backup system for months without a large return on investment. While Carbonite or Mozy is trying to back up a movie you ripped off of DVD to entertain the kids on your last road trip, it’s missing the actual pictures from the trip. Which are more important?

General tips

A general recommendation I have for the initial load is to upgrade your broadband speed, at least for a month or so. Most companies will give you a free trial period of around 30 days at a higher speed in hopes you keep the service. Take advantage of that and upload like crazy, although be careful if you use a metered service not to exceed your monthly bandwidth limit.

Make sure your Mac doesn’t go to sleep during the initial backup period. I’ve seen clients subscribe to an online service and never get an initial backup because the computer is shut down when not in use. Unfortunately, they often learn this when they try to restore after a disaster. Ouch.

Each hard drive is unique, so your data may not conform to these guidelines, but consider a game plan for your initial backup and make sure that you stagger that backup so at least something new is being backed up every month. Nothing hurts more than to have a data disaster and find you’ve been paying for a service and it hasn’t been backing up the stuff you want.

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Quicklook is a great feature of OS X, allowing you to press the spacebar when a file is selected in Finder and quickly look at the contents. If you’re unfamiliar with Quicklook, check out this great introductory article.

As great as this is, there are a few occasions where it would be useful to quicklook a file that is not supported by default. Luckily, Quicklook is extendable with plugins; here are my favorite four.

BetterZip

BetterZip QuickLookGenerator lets you peer at the contents of an archive file (ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ARJ, LZH, ISO, CHM, CAB, CPIO, RAR, 7-Zip, DEB, RPM, SIT, DiskDoubler, BinHex, and MacBinary) without extracting it first.

Folder

Folder will display the contents of a folder. One might ask, why not just use Finder to view the contents of a folder, since that is really its job? I often will navigate to a top directory with Finder, and then bring up QuickLook. I then use the arrow keys to navigate that top directory, with Quicklook still open. This lets me peer at all files, including any subdirectories, without breaking my navigation method.

Suspicious Package

Suspicious Package lets you peer into the contents of a .pkg file, often used as application installers. This is also useful to browse the package receipts in your machine’s Receipt directory (in /Library/Receipts) which represents all packages previously installed. This is handy if you need to manually clean up packages.

ColorCode

Color Code gives you syntax highlighted source code. This supports a range of source files from the standards like C, Java, Pascal, XML and Plists (which are usually just XML, anyway). This is great for quickly glancing at any source code files you need to.

Other File Formats

To see if a Quicklook plugin exists for a specific file format you use, such as Adobe Illustrator (ai), Flash Video (flv) and more (even Commodore 64 disk images), check out qlplugins.com for an up-to-date list of available plugins.

Installing plugins

Quicklook plugins are generally distributed without an installer. To install Quicklook plugins where an installer is not provided, copy the .qlgenerator file to either
/Library/QuickLook/ (to be available for all users) or /Users/username/Library/QuickLook/ (to be available for just that username).

To uninstall these, simply delete the .qlgenerator file from where you installed it.

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Despite being an avid OS X user, there are deficiencies in this great OS of ours and many of the ones I focus on center — unsurprisingly — around security.

In the plethora of accurate claims of superiority in Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads, one counter-example is the ability within Windows to encrypt individual folders. While Microsoft’s EFS is no panacea of security and usability, it does work and there has been no practical parallel yet within OS X. Until now.

A Twitter post early Thursday morning from the legendary Matt Gemmell quietly announced Espionage from Tao Effect software (Greg Slepak & John Ashenden). This $14.95 utility (for OS X 10.5+) uses some interesting tricks to bring folder-level encryption and/or privacy to your workstation. Read on to see what’s going on under the covers and to find out if Espionage is the right solution for you.

Encryption Choices on OS X

Without bringing in additional tools, such as TrueCrypt into the mix, Apple offers two ways to secure your information. The first is with FileVault (which has some security and usability issues of it’s own) where you can choose to encrypt your entire home folder — but only your home folder — to keep prying eyes away.

The second is to use Disk Utility to create an encrypted disk image and then mount that whenever you need to store or retrieve data. This is a cumbersome, but effective, process and is ultimately what FileVault is doing under the covers to work it’s magic.

If only there was a way to associate these secure disk images with folders and have the mounting be handled automatically…

A Peek Behind the Curtain

Normally, the inner- and inter-workings of an application are either too-intricate (e.g. Photoshop) or too mundane (e.g. TextEdit) to cover during an app-review. However, when it comes to security, very few details are insignificant and one of the prime uses of Espionage is to secure your data and control the access to it.

Espionage has two basic features, enabling general encrypted folders (using the same “trick” as FileVault) and providing a way to “lock” folders and require a password to access them.

It performs the latter through a kernel extension named “iSpy” that is installed upon first run of the application and can be seen by dropping into the Terminal and issuing the following command:

$ kextfind -case-insensitive -bundle-id -substring 'com.taoeffect.' -print
/System/Library/Extensions/iSpy.kext

“Protected” folders show the typical “restricted access” icon when locked:

And prompt you for an access password (which you create when “securing” the folder):

Because it operates at such a low-level, this “protection” exists even when using command-line utilities to access files in the folder. That is, even attempting an “ls” from the Terminal will bring up the access prompt (provided you have not already unlocked the folder). This “protection” only works on the system the folder was “protected” on and requires the kernel extension to be running. If you disable/unload the extension or just boot in target disk mode, you will be able to access the data. The Tao Effect developers make no claims of security with this method of protection and even go out of their way to warn you.

But, What About Encrypted Folders?!

Ah, yes. The main reason you will want to use Espionage is to take advantage of the encrypted folders. As I have indicated, they use the same slight-of-hand that FileVault uses and create a hidden, encrypted sparse disk image that then is mounted and linked with the folder you specify. For existing folders, it creates this disk image, copies the files and folders from your target selection into the new disk image and sets up the linkage behind the scenes after deleting your old files. I should warn you that it did not do a secure delete of the “expenses” directory and I was able to find it and the contents therein in the “Trash”. This could easily be recovered and is a pretty serious oversight in an attempt to make your digital life more secure.

As part of the magic, you will see that there is a new folder in your “Volumes” directory (this is where all mounted disks get placed by default) where Espionage keeps mount points for all these sparse images.

And, you can also see just where Espionage stores these sparse disk images via the Terminal or through Disk Utility.

Since it is just a disk image “hack”, Espionage also provides a way to specify the default size and filesystem type:

So, What’s The Verdict?

Espionage does have some very interesting capabilities and I was impressed that the installer (which puts the kernel extension into place) includes full details as to what it is doing.

The application also includes other niceties such as support for Growl notifications and the ability to always enable or block application access to a particular folder under the watch of iSpy — and, you will need to make use this feature if you plan on utilizing any type of automated backup solution that will include that folder in the source path list.

However, due to the deficiencies with the way it initially creates encrypted folders and also some quirks during the operation – especially when performing multiple operations on the test “expenses” folder — I, personally, will have to continue to use my existing methods of securing data. As you saw from the FileVault screen capture, I do not use FileVault, but I do use secure disk images locally, on USB sticks, fileshares and when I am backing up sensitive data to my offsite provider. I also use TrueCrypt when I need to ensure my disks are fully protected.

I strongly suggest, however, that you do watch for future updates to Espionage as the developers will no doubt work the kinks out of this initial release and provide a very solid solution to fill the gap left by Apple. Since I am not aware of any features of Snow Leopard that will obsolete the functionality of Espionage, it should continue to fill this gap through the next release of Apple’s desktop operating system.

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