When it comes to long term storage and access of any data, most people don’t understand how vulnerable they are. When is comes to housing data and backing it up, the key word is redundancy. Most people consider a single drive attached to their computer externally a “back up” drive. This is great for drives that use incremental back up programs like Apple’s Time Machine, or a whole host of consumer programs, most of which now come standard with an external drive. The inherent problem in all this is that most users don’t just keep copies at this point, but instead use the external drive as a place to house their only copy of large media, be it pictures, papers or music. The minute the data only exists in one place, you have opened yourself to potential data loss. All it takes is a drop of the drive, or just plain failure to lose months or years worth of work. You could burn the information onto DVDs and lock them away, but what about groups of data larger than your disk can handle, and what if you need to make a small change to the data, well then you’ve got to burn it all over again. No, its hard to get away from hard drives when you’ve talking about data anymore, let’s face it.

So if you’re stuck with hard drives and your external drive is already sounding funny, what do you do then? One popular answer amongst network managers and geeks alike is use of RAID technologies. RAID is an acronym coined in Berkley that means a “redundant array of inexpensive disks”. The core concept of RAID in general is to spread copies of the same data across a number of drives attached to the same computer in order to create redundancy in your system so that you can suffer the loss of a hard drive and not lose a drop of data. There are many flavors of how you can sort that data that provide benefits in safety or performance, but we’re not going to get into that level of detail today. RAIDs are also great because you get the added benefit of letting that group of hard drives appear to your computer as one single continuous volume of storage. Technologies like this are how Google and other major web hosting companies manage all the information stored on their servers for fast and regular access.

Sure, that’s great, but do I need 20 terabytes of storage? Chances are you don’t, but savvy companies have realized that consumers need that kind of security just as much as big companies do, just on a smaller scale. There have been blossoming offerings from major consumer suppliers to get you this product, some of them already built with hard drives that you can take home from the store and be happily ticking away. Vendors like Netgear and Data Robotics are making a fortune off this, and we want to help you make an educated decision in the future to help prevent that day when you realize just how much you’ve lost. We would like to help you make your next storage decision a wise and sustainable one. Our next installment in this series will feature a comparison of popular products known as DAS, or directly attached storage, stay tuned.

Jolicloud is an exciting release for netbooks, mostly because it takes the ideas seen in Moblin to their natural next levels. A smooth user interface for the tiny screen is a keystone to the os. Early feature lists include a dot-Mac like syncing service for all your jolicloud computers, which is promising but implies people own more than one netbook. Other features are easy integration to popular social services, and a mint linux like interface to installing software, with popular applications highlighted.

Jolicloud is also leveraging other alpha release software, like Mozilla Lab’s Prism feature, just released a few weeks ago. Basing your own alpha software on other alpha software may sound logical, but hopefully mozilla doesn’t scrap the project anytime soon. Built on Ubuntu linux and formed after the Netbook Remix edition, Jolicloud could be a potential major player in the netbook’s future.

Image Courtesy Palm, Inc.

The Palm offers much to appeal from both Blackberry and iPhone customers alike. Sporting both a keypad and a touchpad, Palm hopes to pick up the span of users yet undecided. Unfortunately, the price may not be low enough to undercut equivalent offerings from other providers, and seems to be targeted to retain Sprint customers as opposed to creating converts the way the iPhone did for AT&T. 

Nevertheless, all of the original video and demo of the unit seems to suggest that the Pre will be a very smooth and well integrated experience, and as Palm looks for this product to keep its loyal user base moving into the next generation of personal electronics, it better work well.  As usual, Palm has spent as much time on support sofware as the phone itself, and will leverage online technologies like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, along with Outlook. No sign of Thunderbird or Apple mail support, but plugins are bound to pop up if Palm can exploit  ground roots in the field. 

Only time will tell who will win this battle, and rumors are flying of a new iPhone out soon, which could steal Palm’s thunder. Looming in the dark are Android enabled phones, which may bloom in the near future. If you had a Palm Pilot, and are feeling nostalgic, on top of being stuck with Sprint, take a chance to test drive the Palm Pre on June 6th, and let us know what you think.

This innovative application is yet another clever integration that exhibits how mobile smart phone sensors combined with internet access can provide a rich and useful interface. Simply point your android phone at the night sky, and using the accelerometer combined with an internal compass and GPS position, you are presented with a Google Earth window depicting the night sky. Watch the video for more information and a demo.

Even more interestingly, Google announced a new feature today claiming to have similar results, focused on demographic information. This is a new phase in search engines, which will someday allow all of us to be the amazing plucky tech dorks assembling cross referenced data instantly on tv crime dramas. 

This is going to be an ongoing story to watch, but for now watch this harvard link for an upcoming demo video. 

[via NYT]

Google news timeline aims to create a rich user interface that gives us yet another way to digest all the information flying around the internet. Google describes the program as:

Google News Timeline presents search results from a wide range of sources. You can search and browse results from Google News, including headlines, quotes, photos from our Hosted News partners, and YouTube partner videos. You can also search for thousands of archival newspapers and magazines from Google News Archive Search and Google Book Search.

Seems like google could incorporate this interface into their popular Reader web application. It’s definitely a clever idea, let’s see where the company takes it.

Also from google labs, Similar Images aims to provide the user with a method to find exactly the images they are looking for, without the need to change or narrow search terms. Most images don’t provide a whole lot of tags or meta information that makes them useful for the typical search engine to find. Instead, type in a basic search term, and click on the “similar images” link in the best image fitting your interest to return more search options. Visual parametric searches like this could really take off in e-commerce venues, and change how we shop for items online. This sort of search will also be able to revolutionize how artists find stock imagery.

For a complete tour, view the video embedded after the jump.

[Techradar]

One of the most fielded questions we get is, “What program do you use to {insert random task here}”. Frankly most of us will tell you what’s the best program period, not the one to suit your needs, but Jose Picardo is a high school teacher who respects a lot of these bounds, and shares his experience online at his blog, Box of Tricks.

We see tons of these lists fly around, but its nice to find one grounded enough to speak to professionals who don’t always have the time to sit around and evaluate each program for a specific task. Check out his running list of programs here.