Adobe Lightroom does a great job at organizing my collection, which is stored on two external hard drives. I have a primary drive and a backup one. When I import new photos in Lightroom, I have the option to “Make a Second Copy To” and specify my second drive.

Having a local backup is important. In fact, the external drive that used to store my main collection died unexpectedly in September and I had to resort to copying everything from my backup drive to a new drive.

A local backup is convenient and allows you to quickly restore your files, should your main drive go awry. The problem with local backups is that they’re not enough.

Fire, flood, burglary, or even a fluke incident like somehow frying both hard drives at the same time, all come to mind.

Now that there are some relatively inexpensive options in which to store one’s files on the cloud, I’ve been looking for a viable solution to this issue on that front.

There are many services offering some form of on-the-cloud photo backup. Unfortunately most of them either don’t support RAW files or cost way too much money (I’m talking $50/mo for the amount of data I have). [1]

In the past I tried using generic backup programs like Crashplan and I found them to be unbearably slow, as the upload speeds were nowhere near what my connection is capable of.

To make a long story short, it came down to Dropbox and Google Drive. Neither of which support client side encryption upon upload, while also both struggling to handle directories that are stored on external drives.

For Mac, there is an excellent program called Arq [2] which enables you to perform your own encrypted, incremental, versioned backups to various cloud services including S3, Amazon Glacier, and Google Drive. They do not seem to support Dropbox at this time. [3]

That pretty much determined my ultimate choice for me right there. [4] With Google Drive I get 1TB of data for $9.99/mo and that same space is shared amongst Gmail, Google Drive, and Google+ Photos, which certainly doesn’t hurt. Unlike Glacier, which would cost more or less the same, there is no waiting period for your files to become available in case a restore in required.

Arq handles backing up external drives without a hitch. Connect to the drive and the backup starts or continues. Disconnect the drive, and all backup operations are put on pause.

The only precaution you need to take is to change the Google Drive settings on each computer you use, so that the Arq Backup Data is not synchronized (otherwise you’d have 500+GB of data downloaded on each computer).

It’s an almost perfect solution for me, especially because I’m not limited just to photos. I can use the same software and the same Google Drive space for other folders and files that I need to backup. And with the same application, I can also upload selected folders to S3 or other services I use if needed.

The only downside to this is that the data is encrypted so I can’t just look at the individual files on drive.google.com. Something I can live with.

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The gist of it is that these meetups are hubs for developers and technologists who are interested in cool, innovative technologies related to Cloud computing, big data, analytics, mobile, wearable devices, social media, and so on (and of course IBM’s portfolio of relevant products.)

The first events have been very well received, but due to the geographical location of my team (Toronto), the focus thus far has been centered on Eastern Canada (specifically Ontario and Quebec). I, on the other hand, work from Penticton, BC so I happily offered to cover Western Canada starting with Vancouver. Depending on the interest level we receive out west, cities like Calgary and Edmonton may soon follow as well.

If these topics tickle your fancy and you reside in British Columbia (or travel here regularily), please consider joining the Vancouver SMAC meetup.

The first event will be held on June 9th, at 6pm at the Launch Academy. You can RSVP here.

The main topic of this first event will be Codename: BlueMix. IBM describes it as follows:

Codename: BlueMix is an open-standards, cloud-based platform for building, managing and running apps of all types (web, mobile, big data, new smart devices). Capabilities include Java, mobile backend development, application monitoring, as well as capabilities from ecosystem partners and open source — all through an as-a-service model in the cloud.

In practice, it’s a really cool developer playground to build and deploy apps in the Cloud with innovative components that are both IBM products/services such as BLU Acceleration and third parties such as Node.js, Redis, RabbitMQ, Twilio, and Square to name a few. If you played with Heroku before, the idea behind this platform shouldn’t feel alien to you.

During our first meetup, we will give you an overview and demo of this cool technology that’s currently available in beta. Fear not though, we’re not about to try and sell you anything. This isn’t a timeshare presentation afterall. 🙂

In fact, we want these events to become an opportunity to network and show and tell what the local community has been up to in the SMAC space. (Those who are interested in presenting should get in touch with me for future events.) And if you needed any more incentive to take part in this exciting event, free pizza and pop are also included.

If you’re intrigued, I suggest you join this SMAC meetup here, even if you can’t make it to the first meetup, so as to receive notifications about future events that you might be able to attend.

I really look forward to seeing you there!

The post Join My Vancouver SMAC Meetup for People in Tech appeared first on Programming Zen.

In the latest edition of DB2 (version 10.5,) IBM introduced a series of new technologies to facilitate high-performance analytics work. They branded it DB2 with BLU Acceleration, due to the multiple approaches employed to improve speed of use and processing.

Beyond the cool name and marketing, there is actually quite a bit of interesting technology that makes enterprise data warehousing features available to everyone. You can watch a video and read more about the 7 key ideas on the BLU for Cloud site. These include:

1. Column Organized Storage
2. Simplicity
3. Actionable Compression
4. Core Friendly Parallelism
5. Vector Processing (SIMD)
6. Scan Friendly Caching
7. Data Skipping

You can try all this for free online (well, in the cloud if you prefer) directly through your browser. This saves you from having to install anything on your computer.

If you are curious you can apply for the Early Access Preview and test this thing out today. Sample data is provided for your convenience, but you can also upload your own data to experiment with. Keep in mind that it’s a shared environment, so it’s not recommended that you use it with any sensitive data.

To learn more, you can also attend the upcoming DB2 Tech Talk webinar on the subject, on Thursday the 21st of November, 2013.

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