THE STARGAZER SAFETY KIT

Here’s something that could make your family safer:  A series of nine forms (use as few or as many as you like) ranging from Emergency Contacts and Medications to About a Pet and your family’s Safety Plan.  Print them out, store them on a flash drive on your keychain, email them to a relative in another city, upload them to your on-line backup at mozy.com (I’ve found mozy.com, by the way, to be pretty terrific) – you decide how to use this, but simply deciding to use it could be a wise move.

ONESTORM.ORG

And here is something similar that, though designed specifically for hurricanes, could be used to prepare for any emergency. 

MOZY.COM

Okay, since you asked.  I have it set up to back up my files every four hours.  Because it only backs up files it sees have changed, it’s very quick – once your initial backup is completed.  That initial, monster back up can take forever, so I decided not to give it all 4.7 gigabytes at once.  I started with just one subdirectory of about a gig.  And I learned to do big virgin backups overnight, while asleep.  Ever since, it’s been a breeze.

Restoring is interesting, too.  If you need a single file – perhaps a previous version of an Excel spreadsheet you had just hopelessly gummed up – you can grab it (up to 30 days back).  I never seem to need that.  My reason for using Mozy is for the day my hard drive crashes or the NSA comes and spirits away my computer while I’m out doing my Power Walk and no one can explain how it could have disappeared – but the building personnel are all harmlessly drugged into unconsciousness and someone reports having seen an unmarked black van drive parked across the street even as cell phones all lost their bars for a 500-yard radius.  (Or maybe I just dropped it.)

Got the picture?  For free, you can download all the data you uploaded to Mozy onto another computer – if you have enormous patience.  Or for $67 (which includes shipping) you can have a DVD FedExed for next day delivery.

I still do occasional onsite backups – you never know when a tornado might hit Mozy.  But so far, I consider this one a winner.  Cheap and easy to use.

VISUAL SEARCH

Bob Redpath:  “I always enjoy when you pass on new tech ideas, so (no, I’m not selling anything and I'm not involved in any way with this company -- other than volunteering as a beta tester) here’s one that I thought you and my fellow readers might find interesting: SearchMe.com, a visual search engine.  It looks like the spawn of Google (which I love) and iTunes album search.  You can see the websites that come up in your results before you click on one.”

F Click on the quick demo video and you’ll see.  Kewl.