Hopefully I got your attention there, so this entry is going to be a bit more tech-centric given the subject matter. There's been some new tech I want to talk about and just to mix it up a bit a little personal stuff too.

So my last entry was exactly a week ago, hurray for being regular! (Wait, isn't that what the Metamucil commercials say?) So first leme just get the "personal update" bit outta the way. As per the last entry I was feeling really shitty about things and it was mostly a way for me to just purge the whole thing from my system. This past week and weekend has been slow, work has dropped off. I've been doing a bunch of sheet music conversion for my dad. Basically taking printed music and scanning it in to be used on a digital music display system. The idea being that you don't have to carry around milk crates full of folders of sheets of music, but instead this one device and say a flash drive with everything on it. Lastly, mother's day wasn't too bad. Just hanging out with the family and such. Went to see Aida the musical at Hillbarn theater on Sunday which was a nice change of things.

Allright, on to the technical things shall we? So in these past few weeks a few bits of tech related goodies have come to my attention. Lately I've been listening to the Mac Break Weekly podcast, which is entirely Pablo's doing. If you're into Apple/Mac stuff it's a podcast worth listening to. So as per the title of this entry the two bits is one hardware, one software: Drobo and Drop Box.

Let's start with Drobo. So the name comes from a bit of portmanteau of "disk" and "robot", well something like that. Now if you haven't already heard of it here's the summary: It's a multi drive enclosure which offers a RAID-like drive system while offering fully protected data storage. What's that mean? In short, you can just add drives to it (up to four) as you see fit and Drobo will adjust things as it needs to make sure everything works out. Now it uses a proprietary system which nobody but them really knows what's going on but it's something like RAID 5 or 6. What's that, basically when you have a setup where you have data split across multiple drives, if one fails you run the risk of loosing ALL of the data. In a RAID 0 setup that is because you have just lost a piece of every bit stored. Now a protected system has this nifty parity bit thing where basically if you loose one drive, it knows what the missing bits are and can repair itself. Pretty cool huh? The idea here is that you don't need a backup of this device as it is self-repairing.
What could you do with this device? Well for one you could use it as your backup drive (Time Machine, SuperDuper!, Retrospect) OR which I'd opt for is to use it as your media storage drive. Because of it's scalability you simply add or upgrade drives to make more space necessary. Thus as your music/movie/photo collection grows and hard drives become cheaper and bigger so does your storage.
Now I'm sure plenty of you are already squawking about "Well I can get a five drive RAID enclosure with network connection (NAS) Blah blah blah!" Quick check: if you have a drive fail in that box, you yourself have to migrate data and fix the file system. Whist Drobo will do it for you, just replace the bad drive. Ooohhhh. As for Network Attached Storage enter DroboShare. I will agree that the whole network bridge was clearly an afterthought but many reviews I've read say it works better than other built-in NAS products. I'm hoping for the next generation to just have it built in, we'll see.
So lastly the roundup: Drobo will set you back $499 and DroboShare is an additional $199. Drobo does not come with any drives, so depending on how much you want you'll have to factor that in. Given bare drive prices these days, that's not much. Lastly something to be aware of, because it is protected data adding four 1 Terabyte drives will not give you 4 TB of space. You'll get around 3.2 TB. Long story short, remember that parity bit self-repairing thing? Yeah that takes up some space. Yet what you loose in space you gain in security of knowing your data is safe.
Last bit Daniel at Apple Universe Podcast did an interview/episode/video with the folks at Data Robotics Inc. Check out the video for a great demo of the product. (Video's a bit rough but not too bad.)

Ok wow, I write too much, let's get onto software! Drop Box.
Check out their site, there's a great demo video of the product. Basically in short it is a VERY cool system in which you have a folder, your Drop Box, on multiple computers what it does is keeps all of them in sync. Leme give you my application that I wish I had it when I was back at UCSC. Desktop at my house, PowerBook I would take up to campus. The big issue was keeping all the various files I needed available on both computers. Take some notes in class, on my powerbook, now gotta transfer it to my tower. Ooop, wrote a paper on at home, printed it, but ooop, don't have the file on the powerbook. You get the idea. Drop Box will make the the folders on both computers match. AND it also keeps incremental copies (think Time Machine) on their server, accessible via a web interface. Now you can use it on more than just two computers and it works on both Mac OS X and Windows.

Now if you're thinking "Sweet I gotta have this!" calm down. Currently it is in private beta, so you can't just go and sign up. I have been fortunate enough to have gotten an invite from them and have been tinkering around with it. Like any invite based system, I have invites. No do NOT pester me for one, you won't get it. I'll offer them as I see fit. Sorry. As of this point we're at version 0.6.231 so very much a beta. Even so it's very lightweight and works quite well. I've had a few quirks here and there, but overall I'm VERY satisfied with it. I really look forward to the final product. Keep your eye on their site/my blog for when it goes final.

Alright this entry has been long enough, I was planning for something a deal shorter but I got carried away. Seems to be a pattern in my writing. But what about the doughnuts? Oh, that was just a way to make the title interesting and alliteration.