There are a lot of backup services out there on the internet so I thought I'd do a quick writeup of my favorite. Here are 10 reasons why you should use Mozy Unlimited Backup for your computer backups.

1. Ease of use - Their software is easy to setup. After the inital setup, there is zero effort required by you for your backups to function. If you do need to restore a single file, it's easy: just browse to it in your backup list and restore it. If you need to restore all of your files, you can grab a zip file of all your files from their website.
2. Cost - If you have less than 2GB of files to backup, the service is free. From 2GB and up, the service is $4.95/month. That's right, for $4.95/month, you can backup unlimited files (on a single computer.)
3. Cross platform - Works on both Windows and Mac (and I heard they'll have a Linux version someday, but I'm not getting my hopes up.)
4. Security - All communication is done over SSL (just like your banking website.) In addition to that, your files are encrypted prior to being sent over the internet (and are stored encrypted.) If you're extra paranoid like me, you can even use your own key to encrypt the files. But beware, if you use your own key it will be required to restore files - even Mozy won't be able to help you restore files without your key.
5. Past file versions - Let's say you butchered some changes to a file and wanted to get back the version you had 3 days ago. With Mozy you can do that!
6. Doesn't slow down your computer - The resources used by Mozy are small and you can custom configure them even further so that it will run when your computer is idle. I prefer to schedule backups to run in the middle of the night so they can use all of my internet bandwidth to get the backups done quickly (I leave my computers on all the time.)
7. Block-level incremental backups - Don't doze off at the techno-jargon. This is particularly useful if you are backing up your huge Outlook .pst file (or any larges file that you may have.) Any time you receive an email, that huge file is modified. Other online backup services will require that the entire file be uploaded during a backup. With Mozy only the changes to the file are uploaded, thus decreasing backup time and bandwidth usage.
8. Durable company - Mozy is owned by a very large data storage company (EMC is worth approx.$20B.) They're not going away any time soon.
9. Your hard drive is going to die - When it comes to hard drives, failure isn't a matter of if, but when. That external hard drive you're using for backups right now is going to fail. If your house burns down, it will die a horrible death at the same time as the hard drive in your computer. You need your data backed up offsite.
10. My mother uses it - She's been using it for over a year now, and if Mozy is good enough for her, isn't it good enough for you?

Our company uses Yammer so everyone can stay in touch and post status updates easily. One problem we've had is that the IM component wouldn't work with our google talk accounts (we use Google Apps for our domain.) I discovered here that all we needed were some additional entries in DNS.
After following that doc, our settings for that service are as follows (trimmed for readability):

$ dig SRV _xmpp-server._tcp.familylink.com.
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
_xmpp-server._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN SRV    5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN SRV    20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN SRV    20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN SRV    20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN SRV    20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
...

$ dig SRV _jabber._tcp.familylink.com.
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
_jabber._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN     SRV     5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN     SRV     20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN     SRV     20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN     SRV     20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.familylink.com. 600 IN     SRV     20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
...

After making those changes, I was able to go into my yammer account and add my google talk account like normal. I assume the same thing will work with Twitter, if you use a google apps account for that (assuming IM is working on Twitter, which it hasn't for months for me.)

It's an easy fix for Yammer with your Google Apps account. I'm also in the process of setting up yammer for my family's domain so we can stay in touch more easily. I think the thing I love most about Yammer is that I can send/receive updates from my phone.

Keep an eye out for some upcoming blog posts about ways to stay connected with your family (hint: Yammer is one of them)

Quicken just announced that Quicken Online is now free. It was previously just $2.99 month and was worth every penny. Now you have no excuse to not start budgeting online.
For $0.00/month, you get:

• automatic transaction download from your bank/credit card accounts
• bill reminders and alerts (I like to have alerts setup so I'm notified if any transactions come through over a certain dollar amount)
• mobile access to your current account information through any internet enabled phone
• and more...

They say they have some cool new features in the works (to be released at the end of this month.) I've been using it for about a year now and really like its simplicity and accuracy. Now I really like its price.

Check it out!

As of late, my American Express card is getting a little worn out. I've found that I often have to swipe it a few times to get it to work and sometimes it won't work at all. I do know a nice trick that a cashier once taught me: Try folding a piece of paper over the card being sure it covers the magnetic stripe then swipe it, I'm surprised at how well this works!
I called American Express today to get a replacement card, was done with the call in less than 3 minutes and they said that the new card will be delivered tomorrow. The woman that assisted me on the phone was pleasant. How's that for service?

Amazon just posted a security whitepaper which describes the security measures they have in place to protect their customers. It's a short read (9 pages) and I strongly recommend it if you are using EC2, S3 or SimpleDB for anything. They explain their security measures and make recommendations for further protection their customers can put in place to protect their data.

One major concern I had was addressed by the whitepaper, "The AWS proprietary disk virtualization layer automatically wipes every block of storage used by the customer, and guarantees that one customer’s data is never exposed to another." I was always curious about those disk devices on EC2 and what data might be lingering on them but never had the time to investigate.

Here's an interesting snippet regarding their physical security:
"Amazon has many years of experience in designing, constructing, and operating largescale data centers. This experience has been applied to the AWS platform and infrastructure. AWS data centers are housed in nondescript facilities, and critical facilities have extensive setback and military grade perimeter control berms as well as other natural boundary protection. Physical access is strictly controlled both at the perimeter and at building ingress points by professional security staff utilizing video surveillance, state of the art intrusion detection systems, and other electronic means. Authorized staff must pass two-factor authentication no fewer than three times to access data center floors. All visitors and contractors are required to present identification and are signed in and continually escorted by authorized staff."

At familylink.com, we have 4 MySQL database systems on EC2 that run that our facebook app, various other social network apps and various websites. I recently switched our disk storage for those instances from the standard EC2 instance disks to EBS (Amazon's persistent storage for EC2) and wanted to share some brief numbers with you regarding performance.

I'm using a simple (yet quite complex) metric to measure the performance increase, load. System load is a number that show how many processes are contending for system resources (usually CPU.) For a more detailed description of load, read this article.

Enough of the talk, here's what I saw when I switched the 4 databases over to EBS:
---Database server #1---
Purpose: 2 moderately used databases
Disk change: 2 striped local disks (raid0) to single EBS volume
Peak Load change: 2.5 to 1
Estimated disk performance increase: 5x

---Database server #2---
Purpose: 2 lightly used databases
Disk change: 2 striped local disks (raid0) to single EBS volume
Peak Load change: 1.5 to 0.5
Estimated disk performance increase: 6x

---Database server #3---
Purpose: 9 lightly used databases
Disk change: 2 striped local disks (raid0) to single EBS volume
Peak Load change: 1 to 1 (no noticeable change)
Estimated disk performance increase: 2x

---Database server #4---
Purpose: 1 heavily used database
Disk change: 4 striped local disks (raid0) to 4 striped EBS volumes (raid0)
Peak Load change: 3 to 1.5
Estimated disk performance increase: 2x

Keep in mind that in theory 2 striped disks are almost twice as fast as a single disk. That's why I say there's a disk performance increase of 2x on database server #3 even though there was no noticeable performance increase (we went from using 2 disks to 1 disk.)

There you go, real-world numbers from real-world sites and servers. In summary, it's safe to say you'll see a significant disk performance increase if you switch over to using EBS with your EC2 instances. In addition to the performance increase, it's a no-brainer that you want persistent storage for your databases. One other huge benefit is snapshots. You can quickly and easily snapshot your database for backup purposes or for testing/reporting you may want to run against your most recent production data. See Amazon's site for more details.

If you haven't yet tested EBS with your systems on EC2, now is the time.

I started following CowboyWisdom on Twitter today and thought I'd share a couple of his quotes with you:

"Never approach a bull from the front a horse from the rear and a fool from any direction"

"When you are tired, thirsty and looking for shade..... Remember the horse is doing all the work.... think about his needs"

Guy Kawasaki posted an entry here where he lists 5 lessons he's learned as an entrepreneur.

1. Focus on cash flow.
2. Make a little progress every day.
3. Try stuff.
4. Ignore schmexperts.
5. Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn't do.

I personally like #2 and #5 most. I think it's important to make progress on projects every day, even if it's something small, just for the psychological win. Also, how many times have you been filling out a form on a website and just left in the middle of it? How can you expect your customers to suffer through things you wouldn't do? Remember, your customers probably aren't as passionate about your product/site as you are so you need to make things on your site that much easier for them.

Click through to the entry to read the full post.

Come on guys, get it right... I'm getting sick of this.

There are many reasons I love American Express. Here's one more. I was greeted with this email yesterday:
"At American Express, the security of your account is of the utmost importance. In an effort to protect and serve our Cardmembers, we consistently monitor accounts for possible fraudulent activity. Occasionally, we find it necessary to contact our customers to verify certain charges.
(Transaction amount and vendor name were listed)
In order to verify that these charges are legitimate, we ask that you please have your American Express Card available and call the American Express Account Security Group as soon as possible at 1-800-824-9289. Representatives are available 24 hours per day, 7 days a week to assist you.
You may also call the number on the back of your card and when prompted by our system, please enter your 15 digit American Express Card number. This will automatically transfer you to our Account Security Group."

Being the untrusting/paranoid person that I am, I called the number on the back of my card (I rarely trust anything I get like this through email or a phone call.) I called and verified that the transaction was indeed fraudulent. They are always nothing but professional on the phone. Upon verification, they canceled the card and I should be getting a new one in the next few days. Aside from getting Cash back (I have a Blue Cash card) they're on the lookout for the bad guys. Now, I'm curious about from where my credit card info leaked. I charge so many things to it that I'll probably never know.