How to Choose a Cloud Backup Service

by DanielDern on 12-22-2011 09:13 AM

Data backups are – or certainly should be – an important part of your company’s ongoing IT activities.

Local backups continue to have utility, for companies who may need fast restores of large data sets, or of system images. Originally – and still, for a surprising number of companies – off-site backups were done using physical media such as tapes, removable hard drive cartridges, and external hard drives.

Common sense dictates that data backup media should kept off-site. If something happens to your primary storage, that event may also whack any local backups or your ability to get to them. (Cue the fire engines.) It may be necessary, too, to comply with government or industry regulations, such as those for health care and financial services, and it’s part of any business continuity and disaster recovery scenario.

But transporting backups off-site via physical media has many points of failure. The media can be (and too often are!) lost, stolen, misplaced, or damaged. Or the data may be scrambled, e.g., by proximity to magnetic fields. Even when everything goes right, the time to prepare, pick up, transport, receive, and file the backup creates delay, which impacts the timeliness of any restore requests.

Online backup, using the Internet or other network connections, has been around for a long time. Some solutions used the network as online transport, writing the received data to tapes or other removable media. Others, under an evolving set of names for the service or provider like Application Service Provider (ASP), Managed Services Provider(MSP), Storage Service Provider (SSP), etc., kept the backup online, in Virtual Tape Library or other formats.

Enter Cloud Backup

Along with cloud-just-about-everything-else, the past few years have seen the emergence of cloud backup: online backup companies using cloud storage providers, and cloud storage/compute providers adding backup to their service portfolios.

In part, cloud backup simply means more use of third-party data centers – as well as greater storage capacity, better prices, and pay-as-you-go scaling.

Cloud backup shares many similarities with other types of backup, and most of the questions you need to ask a software vendor or service provider are the same. For example: Are files backed up whenever a change is written to the disk? What kind of backup is done: incremental or full? Is versioning available? How much does it cost to put a large restore on a disk or NAS and courier it next-day? Who has access to encryption keys and account access codes? What service level agreements (SLAs) are promised or available?

But cloud-izing backup has added more function-and-feature opportunities – and a few more concerns as well.

But First, A Brief Reminder: Backups Aren’t Mirrors

Backups may provide some functions of live “drives in the sky,” but it’s important that you – and your users – do not confuse backups with live copies of your data such as RAIDed disks in a network-addressed storage (NAS) or array, or mirrored systems.

Mirrored or replicated storage is live data that is maintained in more than one location. That’s a good thing in the case of hardware failure (e.g. if a hard disk dies, you lose essentially no data) but if a user makes an error (such as deleting the accounting files) or the system is compromised (such as a from a virus) those unwanted changes are propagated.

Backups provide you with a way to recover from these glitches: retrieve a mistakenly deleted file, or go back to a previous point-in-time version, and so on. How much data and how fast it is made re-accessible are known as Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

De-Silo-Ing: Expanding Who, What Can Access Backups

Cloud backups, like other cloud-based services, can be more flexible than a classic online backup.

“Traditional online backup has one ‘in’ and one ‘out’ – the user does the backup, and may access it,” says Michael Fisher, co-founder and general manager at ElephantDrive. “The cloud offers a plurality of touchpoints and use cases. We and several other cloud backup providers expose access and other manipulation to the data both directly to end users and through APIs. For example, you can use the service for elastic ‘overflow’ to retain data for 30 or 60 days if you’ve run out of local storage capacity.”

Symantec’s Backup Exec, an on-premises product, lets users connect to cloud storage, says Amit Walia, VP of Product Management for Symantec’s Information Management Group. “We have Open Source Technology plug-ins that work with cloud providers, such as Nirvanix and let customers write data to storage in the cloud.”

Perhaps most significantly, backups can be used by Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity-in-the-cloud offerings from the same or other providers, holding virtual-machine images of company desktop or server applications, letting IT avoid the delay, effort and cost to maintain or quickly re-provision suitable hardware along with the OS and applications.

A growing number of companies, like Axcient and Geminare are offering DR/BC virtual-machine provisioning (assuming that a VM image has been previously uploaded), in concert with or as part of a cloud backup service.

And backups, or backup services, can also be used for online storage activities like file-sharing, sync, and other collaborative activities.

Axcient CEO Justin Moore says, “Because the cloud can be a seamless storage layer, you’ll see more blurring of data management, collaboration, storage, and backup.”

“We typically see customers who engage with cloud services like ours start using them just as backup, but evolving into using it as a productivity solution,” says ElephantDrive’s Fisher. “For example, you can give remote sales offices access to this data, avoiding the need to work through the company firewall. And if you have a video or other large file you want to share, you can do managed file transfers.”

Simpler Provisioning

As with other cloud services, you probably expect that cloud backup means no hardware or software to install, no upfront or hidden costs, and easy web-based management. In reality, “no software” may still involve a brief script or shim loaded on each protected machine by the cloud backupware.

Don’t take this for granted, though.

“You need to confirm whether this is a turnkey service or one that you have to integrate,” says Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst of the StorageIO Group. “For example, when I use JungleDisk, they provide software, which I install. I don’t have to also buy Tivoli or Symantec Backup Exec, etc.”

Location, Location, Location

With an online provider using its own or a single third-party’s data center(s), you knew where your data was going. But a cloud backup provider may have multiple data centers, or work with multiple cloud storage providers, who in turn may have many locations.Autonomy (owned by HP) currently has 26 data centers, for example.

In some industries, there are legal requirements that data can’t be stored in other countries, or possibly even traverse national borders. Those rules may include backup/redundancy sites that the storage provider uses.

Look for data locality assurance, says Richard Bojanowski, owner of X-stream.ly, a hosted service for building real-time applications. “The customer should know physically where the backups are located (geographically) and be assured any replication remains within a known geography to ensure data compliance and discovery regulations aren’t violated.”

Value-Added Backup Analyses

The big challenges of backup – or primary storage, for that matter – include finding what you want quickly, and finding patterns or other valuable information that are in the data as a whole.

According to David Jones, CEO, Data Protection and Emerging Technologies, Autonomy, the company’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) software lets customers understand the meaning of data, including audio and video.  This, says Jones, “lets companies make better decisions about placement, frequency, and retention which, in turn improve RTO and RPO and reduce backup windows and costs.”

Opex Vs Capex, Volume, Etc.

Here’s a few more cloud backup issues and benefits that your business should consider:

OpEx Versus CapEx: All cloud backup vendors tout the fact that the service is pay-as-you-go (and “pay-as-you-grow”). That can be gentler on budgets than are capital expenditures for storage hardware and software, plus service contracts and other costs. However, be sure to read the contract carefully for one-time start-up fees, and costs for restore requests, reports, or other activities.

Are public clouds a match? For smaller businesses, backups relying on public cloud storage can be a good match, minimizing local IT requirements of gear and staff. But for others, depending on amount and type of data involved, using the public cloud, or backup providers that use the public cloud, may not be an option.  “A lot of data is so high-volume that network transport isn’t feasible,” says Symantec’s Walia. “And security, scalability, and control are always concerns. Plus, moving custom data to the cloud isn’t always doable.”

Cloud Backup: Part Of A Total Backup Strategy

Cloud backup has a lot to offer, but that doesn’t mean your company necessarily should go all-cloud. Increasingly, local backup software and appliances are including cloud backup, either as bundled services, or the “hooks” to let them easily connect to leading cloud backup and storage services.

For example, “NETGEAR’s ReadyNAS storage line includes several implementation of cloud computing/storage features, including cloud backup,” says Drew Meyer, senior director of product marketing, Commercial Business Unit, Netgear. “NETGEAR’s ReadyNAS Vault automatically moves data from the ReadyNAS to a third party data center in the background. And for companies with multiple ReadyNAS appliances in their network, we also offer ReadyNAS Replicate, which lets them use their own gear as a private cloud backup target, taking advantage of capacity they’ve bought but aren’t using.”

Autonomy’s services include a premises backup solution that gets its data from the cloud backup, based on analyses using Autonomy’s IDOL to determine what data is most likely to be needed from a local backup.

And Some Backup Advice Doesn’t Change

While cloud backup can bring better pricing and more flexibility, some aspects of backup still haven’t changed.

“Look for clear specificity, e.g., for SLAs and for restore times,” says StorageIO’s Greg Schulz. “‘Best efforts’ is vague. Make sure that restore times are ‘transit time via network or physical media to the designated site,’” not just for creating the restore image or media.”

“Make sure a cloud backup provider has compliance certifications, privacy policies, and strong security,” adds Scott Lee, director of marketing at EMC’s MozyPro online backup service.

“As with any service, with the cloud you should always make sure that you know what you are paying for and what measurements are in place to show you are actually receiving the service,” says X-Stream.ly’s Bojanowski. “Ensure that you understand the service levels you can expect for transaction response times, data protection, and speed of data recovery.”

Also, determine how the cloud backup service works with your existing backup tools and procedures. “Bigger environments typically have an investment in backup software and procedures,” says NETGEAR’s Meyer. “In moving to cloud backup, IT here is more conservative. They want to complement what they’ve invested in and ease over to newer more efficient technologies.” There’s also a financial aspect to this, Meyer notes: What’s the impact of your licensing schedule for the backup software you have in place or your contract with a tape management provider?

“Think about what model you want to use,” advises Meyer. “Are you ready to outsource all your backup data management? Do you want to move to an outsourced model in slow, careful steps, via a hybrid local/cloud route? Do you prefer to stay hybrid for security and performance reasons?”

And here’s one final thought, from X-Stream.ly’s Bojanowski that’s always worth repeating: “For a service that will surely be critical to your company, the best advice is to ask a lot of questions and get all commitments in writing.”

Tunebox: A new way to listen to music from your Dropbox account

November 16, 2011 at 10:58 am by John Cook

Seattle developer Phil Kast was rock climbing in Eldorado Canyon near Boulder two months ago when he slipped off a ledge, falling 15 feet and breaking his tibia.

But while the broken shinbone set Kast back — and made life tough in terms of walking and getting on the bus — it also allowed him to focus on a new iPhone app called Tunebox which is launching today.

“Being broken definitely helped me not get distracted by playing outside, but this is pretty much exactly what I want to be doing with my time,” said Kast, who left his full-time job at Urbanspoon earlier this year to focus on new independent software projects.

Tunebox is the first of those efforts. The $1.99 iPhone app allows users of Dropbox to access music files via the online storage service, no matter where they wander. It also allows user to fast-forward or rewind songs, and listen to full albums while viewing cover art.

“I came up with the idea when I realized I was already using my Dropbox account to move music around,” Kast tells GeekWire. “Buy an album at work, send it home, that kind of thing. I saw big companies launching music locker services and I thought, why not just organize the music I’ve already got in the cloud, and play from there instead?”

The Dropbox iPhone app already allows users to play music files for free, but Kast still thinks there’s an opportunity.

“(The Dropbox app) can only queue up one song at a time, you have to browse folder by folder to the song you want, it doesn’t show cover art and can’t show you artist/album or any other track info,” said Kast. “Music just isn’t the focus of their app.”

Other mobile music companies are attempting to achieve what Tunebox does, but Kast said he’s been unimpressed with most efforts. “I don’t think the direct competition is very developed,” he said.

Kast is hoping to emulate some of the features in iTunes Match, the $25 per year online music servicefrom Apple.

“I’ve worked really hard to come close to the level of polish it’s going to have, and the barrier to getting started will be a lot lower — cheaper, quicker, less committing,” Kast said. “The way things are going, in a couple years most people will either be using a subscription service like Spotify or Rdio, or a cloud/music locker service like iTunes Match, Google Music, or Amazon Music. I’m a tiny player surrounded by huge companies, but my hope is that Dropbox +Tunebox will become a popular option in that second category.”

Has Carbonite had a privacy breach? I’m getting spam.

By Richi Jennings (@richi ) – November 2, 2011.
[Updated to add a second reply from Carbonite]

Oh ****, where’s all this spam coming from? It looks like Carbonite, Inc. has been giving out customers’ personal information. The company’s admitted giving my email address to a third party, despite promising that it wouldn’t. Should you be worried? Let’s take The Long View…

Like many anti-spam wonks, I don’t give out my email address to just anyone. Instead, when I need to register for something, I make up a unique email address. That unique address is aliased to my real email account, but can be switched off if the sender turns out to be a spammer.

Similarly, if I start receiving spam to that email alias, I can tell which organization leaked or sold my details, because the alias is uniquely tied to that organization.

And so it came to pass that I started getting spam to an alias I gave to Carbonite. Note that this wasn’t spam from Carbonite, but from several unrelated organizations.

It would appear that Carbonite has either sold my personal details, or has had a security breach. Either possibility is nasty, particularly for a company that we’re supposed to trust with our data — in case you’re not familiar with Carbonite, it’s an online backup service!

If the company sold my details, this is in direct contravention of its privacy policy:

Carbonite will not sell your personal information to third parties. … Carbonite will not disclose your personal information…to third parties unless disclosure is necessary to comply with law.

I asked Carbonite what was going on. The company responded with a dry drawer statement:

Carbonite has discovered an advertiser misappropriated our e-mail list during the process of one of our e-mail marketing campaigns. When Carbonite launches an e-mail marketing campaign, it provides a suppression list to e-mail advertisers so that Carbonite customers do not receive promotion emails from Carbonite (since they’re already customers) and importantly, so that people who have opted out of receiving emails from Carbonite do not receive future email from us. This list was mishandled by an advertiser and we have taken immediate remedial efforts. As an online backup company, the security and privacy of our customer data is our top priority. We take all matters related to privacy very seriously. The matter will be addressed privately with the involved third parties and we will ensure that all customer e-mail addresses are permanently removed from their database.

TL;DR: Carbonite disclosed Carbonite customers’ personal information to a third party. It did so in contravention of its privacy policy.

The story the company’s giving out tells me clearly that “the security and privacy of its customer data” is not its “top priority,” and that it doesn’t“take all matters related to privacy very seriously.”

But, Carbonite would no doubt reply, the advertiser is simply a contractor — not really a “3rd party.” It’s necessary for it to give out customers’ email addresses, so that people don’t get inappropriate email, Carbonite would probably argue.

Horse feathers!

This is completely the wrong way around. What Carbonite should have done is to scrub the advertiser’s list itself, rather than send our sensitive data to a third party.

If that wasn’t possible, it should have arranged a way of matching the suppressed addresses using a one-way hash. That would have allowed the advertiser to remove Carbonite customer addresses from the list, without actually disclosing them.

Oh, lest we forget, this is the same online backup company that lost the backups of thousands of its customers, while denying any data were lost, despite reports from customers who said they had (ahem) lost data. Carbonite later admitted that 54 customers were affected, while thousands of others had to re-upload their data.

It’s also the company whose VP of marketing was caught red-handedposting astroturf-positive reviews on Amazon, along with other Carbonite employees. When the news broke, the company denied it had sanctioned the phony reviews.

So I guess this is Strike Three. Why should anyone trust Carbonite, Inc. ever again?
Would you trust Carbonite? Leave a comment below…

[If you're at all affiliated to Carbonite, please make that clear. I especially invite CEO David Friend to exercise his right of reply; but please, no anonymous PR drawer statements.]

Update: Dave Friend blogs his reaction…

I am pretty angry about what happened. We broke our hard and fast rule about the privacy of our customers’ email addresses. So I owe any customers impacted by this an apology and a full explanation.
…
[We] use a supposedly trustworthy email forwarder to communicate subscription-related information to our customers.
…
[C]ustomers’ personal information was not compromised in any way.

 

Riiight. As predicted, mea-culpa #3 from Mr. Friend. Except that the “trusted” email service provider is actually a known spam-friendly company. I’m not ready to name names just yet — not until I’ve gathered more evidence — but it it’s reasonably clear to me which company Friend is talking about here.

If he’s serious that he thought this company could be “trusted” he’s naive as heck.

Also, this account differs significantly from that provided by the anonymous company spokesperson earlier. So which is it: the stupid trusting of a known spammer, or the even-stupider suppression-list explanation?

Dropbox for Teams Not Ready to Take on Box.net

By Joe Brockmeier / October 27, 2011 9:00 AM

Dropbox has been testing its Dropbox for Teams service for some time, but the other shoe has finally dropped. The company formally announced the service today, which looks a lot like standard Dropbox with corporate billing tacked on. Good news for companies wanting to offer Dropbox to employees, but is it up to competing with Box.net? Drobox may be the world’s 5th most valuable startup, but it’s still lagging Box.net pretty badly.

Dropbox for Teams adds centralized billing and admin controls to the standard Dropbox service. Pricing starts at $795 annually for five users, which comes with 1,000 GB of storage. Additional seats run $125 per year, and grant an additional 200GB of storage. By comparison, a personal account tops out at 100GB of storage and $199 per year.

The Teams package also gives companies a few perks over the personal accounts. First is phone support, which shouldn’t be too heavily used. If there’s an actual glitch with Dropbox, I can see using phone support, but the service itself doesn’t require much hand-holding.

Secondly, you get the “pack-rat” perks for free. This means that Dropbox throws in the Dropbox Profeature for saving a file history indefinitely. I have to say, this is a nifty feature that can save your bacon if you overwrite a presentation or other work file.

Finally, there’s a subtle perk when it comes to storage quotas. The file sharing features for the Teams works just like file sharing for standard Dropbox except that files shared between team members are not counted twice against storage quotas. If I share a 5MB file with any random Dropbox user, we both have the 5MB counted against our quotas. If you share a 5MB file with a fellow team member, then it only counts once against the Dropbox quota for that team. (Sounds trivial, but I suspect actually coding that up was tricky.)

Competing with Box.net

The Dropbox clients stay the same with Dropbox for Teams, all that really changes is pricing and support. Which makes me wonder how well Dropbox for Teams will compete with Box.net.

Box.net has a lot more in the way of features that Dropbox isn’t offering. As it’s offered now, Dropbox features little integration with business software, no workspaces or task management and collaboration features. The pricing for Dropbox undercuts Box.net slightly – it works out to about $13.25 per month for a Dropbox user, compared to $15 per month/user for Box.net.

Dropbox sharing is just as clunky as the personal version, which is to say that you have to select a folder, and then manually share it with one or more people. That’s fine for personal use, but I think it could get really annoying if you need to share with a large team.

Granted, Box.net looks to be a bit stingier with actual storage space, but Dropbox’s dirty little secret is that most users don’t come close to hitting their quotas anyway. A team of five sharing typical work documents is not going to need 1TB (1,000GB) of storage – or even close. (Hint: You’d need to do some selective pruning of what to sync to your laptop if your team was hitting the storage cap, since most lappies don’t have 1TB drives.)

One interesting thing about the pricing for Dropbox for Teams – if you actually come close to the full usage, you’ll be saving more than $100 a year on what it would cost to store 1,000 GB on Amazon S3. The cost for 1,000 GB on S3 for one year would average out to more than $1,680 plus charges for requests, at the $0.14 per GB/month rate. Of course, Dropbox is surely getting Amazon’s top-tier pricing (or better) which means that it should be paying around $660 a year for a 1TB of storage.

For small businesses, or those that prefer simplicity, Dropbox may be the better option. But for teams that actually need to collaborate, Dropbox is still wanting.

Even at the Laugh Factory, Losing Data Is No Laughing Matter

By DAVID H. FREEDMAN

Courtesy of the Laugh Factory.Jamie Masada

Jamie Masada will never forget the phone call last year that alerted him to the erasing of a chunk of his business and of his life. The call came from a manager at the online backup-storage company to which Mr. Masada had entrusted what might well have been the world’s most valuable collection of stand-up comedy video — 1,500 hours of acclaimed comics performing on the stage of Mr. Masada’s groundbreaking Hollywood comedy club, The Laugh Factory. Some of the video was historic, including Rodney Dangerfield’s earliest performances and stars like Dave Chapelle and Dane Cook honing their acts before hitting it big. And much of it existed only on the servers of the data storage company.

Or had existed, because the manager was calling to tell Mr. Masada that his data had been lost, irretrievably, in a catastrophic series of mishaps. “I had copies of some of it, but not all of it,” Mr. Masada said. “I hung up the phone and wept.”

For Mr. Masada, the ordeal was particularly tough to take, not only because of the volume and value of the lost data but also because he had actually taken the trouble to safeguard it by entrusting it to a professional backup service. (Mr. Masada declined to identify the service, insisting he doesn’t badmouth anyone as a matter of policy.)

To be sure, such professional outfits are generally pretty good at what they do, and the chances that an established backup service like Carbonite or Mozy will lose your data is less than tiny — especially compared to the chances that you’ll lose it yourself if you don’t back it up at all or if you keep it backed up on disks in your office or home that can be lost to theft, flood, fire or a malfunctioning device. But as Mr. Masada can tell you, online storage isn’t a fail-safe solution.

Mr. Masada is an ebullient wiseguy who sounds as if he could hardly have ended up anywhere else in life but in comedy. Although you wouldn’t guess it to listen to his nonstop kidding, he also runs a pretty sophisticated enterprise. “I love technology,” he said. “Whenever anything new comes out from Apple, Google, Intel or anyone, I’m all over it. I learn what I can about it.” With a second Laugh Factory in Long Beach, Calif., and a third opening in Chicago in a few weeks with yet another to follow in Las Vegas, Mr. Masada realized a few years ago that he needed to be able to run the business remotely, so he brought in two tech specialists to help him. “I know some Disney wizards who help me, too,” he said.

Today, Mr. Masada can be anywhere in the world and get up-to-the-minute updates on how many people are entering each of his clubs and how many drinks they are consuming. The drink data is also compared to liquor inventory data and the cash take at the bar, information that helped Mr. Masada quash what turned out to be a substantial employee-pilferage problem. And he can get a live video feed of the performances, too. “If I see a good comic isn’t killing, I have to figure out why,” he said. “Maybe he’s a low-energy comic, and we shouldn’t have put him on after a high-energy one. I’ll call the booker right away and say, ‘Do me a favor, have this guy lead off next time, O.K.?’” He also runs a slick Laugh Factory Web site. And he’s cut a deal to have live performances streamed to smart televisions in 3-D. “Anyone anywhere will be able to see the show like they’re in the front row,” he said. “They’ll be able to tell who’s sweating.”

From the beginning, he has also been videotaping performances religiously, switching to high-definition as soon as it was available several years ago. At about 10 gigabytes per hour of HD video, Mr. Masada’s trove of data grew rapidly. And he was also smart enough to know that sort of valuable data deserved special protection, which is why after asking around for advice he decided to pay an online storage service $1,200 a month to keep the best of it safe for him. Oops. After the disaster, the backup company explained to Mr. Masada the unlikely chain of equipment and procedure failures that led to the loss and assured him they had taken herculean measures to try to recover the data, all to no avail.

The loss wasn’t insured, but rather than taking legal action — suing, after all, is a form of badmouthing — Mr. Masada rethought his data protection strategy. Understandably, he became determined to keep a close eye himself on his remaining video library, as well as on the rapidly growing volume of video he continues to accumulate. Once again he asked around, and this time he decided to buy a $7,500 storage drive from Drobo, choosing a model that holds more than 1,000 hours of HD video. He keeps it right in his office, where he can watch the lights glow, letting him know all is safe. “I could have gotten a cheaper unit,” he said. “But with this I can sleep at night.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. Masada relies entirely on the Drobo for backup — he has no backup for his backup, online or otherwise. Drobo’s somewhat pricey drives are highly regarded, and let’s hope he won’t be so astoundingly unlucky as to suffer another freak loss of data. But I suspect the lesson here for most of us isn’t related to the choice of online versus local hard drive backup — either way, chances are strong you’ll be fine. Rather, the lesson is that given the growing value of our data, it makes sense to avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket. Personally, I back up online, to an external hard drive and then again to DVDs kept in a fireproof safe.

What do you do?

NPR Mentions iCloud

With the new iPhone 4S announced, many more people will be exposed to cloud storage through Apple’s iCloud service.  NPR mentions this in an article published today.

Found here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141254027

SAN FRANCISCO October 12, 2011, 01:21 pm ET

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — To some people, Apple’s new iPhone 4S isn’t the overhaul they have been hoping for. Its model number, which doesn’t include a “5,” stinks of the status quo.

That’s ridiculous.

Sure, the 4S doesn’t render the iPhone 4 obsolete, and on the surface they’re nearly identical. But with a faster processor, new software, a voice-activated personal assistant and a souped-up camera, it’s a major improvement.

The 4S will be available Friday in black or white. It will cost $199 to $399, depending on storage space. It requires a two-year service contract with Verizon Wireless, Sprint or AT&T.

If you have an iPhone 4, you may want to hold on to it for now. But if you’re sporting an older model such as the 3GS or considering making the leap to an iPhone from another type of handset, it’s an excellent excuse to buy one.

The coolest new feature on the 4S is Siri, a software-based personal assistant who responds to your voice in a somewhat robotic, yet soothing female tone.

Siri can do all sorts of things, from setting your alarm clock to finding a good local sushi joint to playing DJ with your music. She can’t bring up websites, but she can search the Web for pretty much anything.

Once you let her know who you are and where you live, she can even do complex tasks such as reminding you to call your boyfriend when you get home, helped by the phone’s location technologies such as GPS. She can understand conversational English, which is great because I was able to speak as I normally would (though I did have to enunciate well). This means you can say things like, “what’s happening today?” or “what’s going on today?” and she’ll let you know what’s on your calendar.

She’s also a dictation dynamo, transcribing emails and texts much better than a phone running Google Inc.’s Android software. It would be awesome if she could intelligently insert punctuation marks, but she does get them if you tell her “period” or “exclamation point.”

For a particularly difficult test, I read a random paragraph from a copy of “The New Yorker” to the 4S and to an Android smartphone. Siri didn’t get all the words correct, but she overwhelmingly beat the competition.

Of course, after spending all this time together, I wanted to know all about Siri. I asked her a bunch of personal questions, with mixed results. Her favorite color is something she doesn’t know how to say — “sort of greenish, but with more dimensions.” She changed the subject when I asked if she was seeing anyone.

Note for foul-language fans: Siri understands profanities, but she may chastise you. She did this to me, so I asked whether she had a problem with my language. She told me to get back to work. I apologized.

Beyond Siri, I was happy to see a better camera on the 4S, which has an 8-megapixel lens compared with 5 megapixels on the iPhone 4. My shots had sharper details as a result. The new camera can also take pictures faster, and a new lens gathers more light so pictures shot in dim lighting look better.

The addition of a camera icon on the phone’s lock screen makes it easier to start snapping. Just double tap on the “home” button when the phone is asleep to bring up the icon, and tap that to open up the camera. Also, there’s finally a physical camera button on the iPhone as the 4S’s volume-up button does double duty.

You can even record high-definition videos in 1080p on the 4S — the best resolution currently available on a consumer camera.

The iPhone 4S has the latest version of Apple’s mobile software, iOS 5, which seems geared toward making the phone even easier to use.

One of the best additions to iOS 5 is iMessage, which lets you send texts, photos or videos to other Apple devices over Wi-Fi or your wireless carrier’s data network. That makes it easier to send texts to iPads and other devices that aren’t phones. It also saves you texts, if you’re not on an unlimited text plan.

With the iOS 5 upgrade, swiping the top of the screen now brings up a handy notification page, which shows you things such as appointments, reminders, weather and stock quotes.

IOS 5 also gets points for allowing you to step away from your computer: You can set up your iPhone and receive software updates on the device itself, without plugging it in.

In addition, it includes Apple’s new iCloud content-syncing software, which can store your content online and push it wirelessly to your devices. If you buy lots of digital content from Apple, you’ll like how it can automatically add songs, apps and e-books from Apple’s iBookstore to all your iCloud-connected devices. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do this with TV shows or movies, so you’ll have to go into iTunes on the device to download them or sync the content from a computer.

The iPhone 4S’s performance is noticeably bumped up by a new dual-core A5 chip, which is the same processor in the latest iPad. With this chip, the phone can process graphics and complete other tasks much faster. Web pages, especially graphics-heavy ones, loaded faster than they do on the iPhone 4

Call quality was decent over Verizon Wireless’ network, though it sounded a bit flat. Calls are supposed to be improved on the 4S with the inclusion of two antennas that the phone can use to receive or send data.

With location services on and using a combination of Wi-Fi and 3G cellular service, I got about six hours of copious texting, websurfing, video-watching and calling out of the 4S before the battery needed recharging. Given this, it should hold up fine during a day of normal use.

If you have an iPhone but don’t want to trade up to the 4S, you’re not entirely left out: iOS 5, which includes iCloud, will be available Wednesday as a free update for the iPhone 4 and 3GS, both iPad models and later versions of the iPod Touch.

If you don’t have an iPhone, however, the 4S is a great one to get, even if its name doesn’t include a “5.”

The NAS Space Heats Up, and ElephantDrive Remains Essential

Netgear has been ahead of the NAS pack with ReadyNAS Vault by providing online backup for their NAS devices for the last year or so.  Now, other NAS providers like QNAP also offer online backup via ElephantDrive.  Recently it’s become more and more standard practice to include online backup with NAS offerings.

In a recent article about Buffalo the author noted how their NAS offering does not include online backup via ElephantDrive or Amazon S3:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/storage-appliances/370444/buffalo-terastation-pro-6-bay

“The drives comes preconfigured in a RAID6 array, but you can delete this and create RAID5, mirrored or striped arrays for more capacity. Unlike most of the competition, the appliance doesn’t support IP SANs; Buffalo wants you to use its elderly iSCSI unit for this.  FTP services can be activated on selected shares and Buffalo’s WebShare allows them to be accessed remotely over the internet via a web browser. The TeraStation can also function as a destination for the OS X Time Machine service, but it doesn’t support cloud backup services such as Amazon’s S3 or ElephantDrive.”

So as you can see it is becoming more and more important in this market to carry ElephantDrive by name on manufacturer’s NAS devices.  Look for ElephantDrive when you’re shopping for your next NAS.