The Bleeding Edge

The Dell/Sonicwall NSA 3600 arrived. A very serious-looking piece of kit. 1U bay about 20 inches deep. A dozen copper 1 Gb/s Ethernet ports. Four copper 10 Gb/s Ethernet ports. A couple of optical ports. Fan that sounds like a wind tunnel until it realizes that it doesn't need to … [Read more...]

CrashPlan is a cloud backup provider that provides a client app. They have a free, credir-cardless trial program. I downloaded the app and signed up. I picked a directory with files that averaged about 50 MB in size. And started the backup. Then I looked at the … [Read more...]

The CloudFront S3 Browser is an Amazon S3 client. It comes in a free version, which it advertized as not supporting concurrent transfers, and a $30 Pro version that does support them. It doesn't offer the unattended operation of Goodsync, but I tested it anyway. I had two … [Read more...]

Next on my list of cloud storage providers was Google Drive. It's easy to sign up if you already have a Google account. Goodsync supports it. I set up a test backup job in Goodsync. Initially I got an error: It looks like Goodsync is changing the gdocs:// URL header to … [Read more...]

One often-overlooked limiter of Internet connection speeds is the firewall. When you test your connection speed, you're doing it through the firewall, of course, but unless you take a close look at the firewall itself, you won't know whether the limitation is your ISP, or the … [Read more...]