…in a galaxy far, far away…

No, that’s not quite right.

But several years ago, there was a website that had ‘free’ software. All you had to do was pay the shipping (which, as I recall, was about $5 per CD). Sadly, that website died a couple years back. Disappointing, they had some nice stuff.

But I have found a replacement. Free-CDSoftware.com will  ship you CDs for $7.50 per CD. Not all are current things, but there is some good stuff there.

Alas, I have counted no less than 20 titles I would like.  That’s more than $100 worth of software that I want! Drat. Maybe, eventually, I’ll be able to get them all.

After several successive computer failures (for various random reasons), I’ve finally decided to do something smart… back up my files! I know, I know… I should have done it sooner, much sooner, but it’s always been something that ‘I’ll do later’. Smart idea, right?

Anyway, I decided to take a look at four different services:

• IBackup
• IDrive-E
• Mozy
• Orbitfiles

I started off looking at IBackup. Their site looks nice, but $10/month for only 5GB? Uhm… I can get webhosting for cheaper than that and you get bandwidth included. It may be a very nice company, but no good for me! Next!

I looked next at IDrive-E and saw that you only get 2GB for free. Not bad, but I decided to check out Orbitfiles instead. With Orbitfiles, you get a whole 6GB for free, plus you can share files and they (supposedly) even let you sell those same files. Unfortunately, even though their FAQ says that you can sell files, that seems to be disabled at the moment. Oh well, sharing is still good, right? Maybe you have to sign up for one of the paid plans? I don’t know. At least you can set passwords on files (password: blogic) and even notify people via email that you have shared a file with them. This could be handy for someone who does something like custom artwork since you don’t want to be emailing someone a file larger than maybe 5MB. Ew. Anyway, there are two ways to add files to Orbitfiles: through the web interface or through their ‘Hercules Uploader’. At this time, the uploader is at version 0.9 and still has bugs to be worked out. It does upload files, but I’m not entirely positive it will upload all your files.  This is important, since you’ll have to double check to see if everything transfered… a pain, if you’ve got more than a handful of files. On the plus side, the both of the uploaders are easy to use. Free accounts have a limit of 100MB per file, however. All in all, Orbitfiles seems decent (though with the spelling errors on the site, it does look like it was created by a bunch of high school/college age people), but is currently unsuited for backing up large amounts of data.

After I was done playing with Orbitfiles, I went back to looking at IDrive-E and decided to sign up and download their software. Software doesn’t work at all without a restart. Uhm, ack! Alright, so one restart later and I try to back up a few of what I thought were relatively small folders. I get the message that it’s now backing up 9.2GB! What? I only have a 2GB free account. What’s going to happen when it hits the limit? Why didn’t it tell me this before starting the backup? Completely unsuitable.

So I look again. On IDrive-E’s own front page, it mentions ‘Mozy’. What is Mozy? I’d never heard of Mozy before. So I go to look at Mozy. 2GB free! Woo! So I sign up and download. The software takes a bit to install, but once it does it tells me exactly how much data I’m trying to back up (around 9GB). Oops. So I can navigate around and tell it to take out all ‘music’ files, documents, etc. I can tweak it to only back up the files in a particular folder or all of those types of files for the whole drive. I finally got it down to just under 2GB. Phew. So after I get this set up, as I’m waiting for the backing up go, I started poking around my account page on Mozy. Apparently, for everyone I refer to Mozy, I can get an extra 250MB of storage space… and the person that signed up under me also gets an extra 250MB space. I think that’s pretty nifty. Of course, if you don’t have enough friends that you can convince to backup their computers, you can get unlimited storage space for only $5/month per computer. Down side? Every computer in your account has to be unlimited. That means $10/month for 2 computers, $15 for 3, etc. But, hey, you probably already wanted that anyway if you have multiple computers, right? On another positive note, Mozy also works for Mac computers, something that the other backup sites don’t seem to offer.

All-in-all, Orbitfiles is good for sharing the occasional random (and large) file while Mozy is good for the actual backing up of your computer. Why don’t you give Mozy a shot and see how you like it?

Software for a computer, especially a Windows computer, is not cheap. That’s why I like finding as many places to get free software, such as Freeware Home, as possible. I don’t even know how many times I’ve been ’saved’ by freeware.

I’ve just found a Sudoku generator. It may be awhile before I get back…

This time, I bring you FreeBookZone. Free Book Zone not only has free computer science books, but books on things like engineering and more than one science. Want some novels? There are some there, too.

There isn’t a huge selection, but it is something worth taking a look at, if only to see if there is something new.

It’s always good to have more than one source for things, so I present another site with free tech books. They also have lists of free magazines you can either subscribe to or get a free trial of. Some of the magazines are in print, some are just online, but they’re certainly worth checking out.

It’s nice to have everything you need, in one place when you’re trying to do anything computer related. Trying to search all over the internet can be fruitful, but can take quite awhile.

That’s where books come in. Books are great. Despite the popularity of websites and electronic copies, I still say that there is nothing like a hard copy of something. I find it much easier to bookmark a particular place and come back to it later than with something on the computer.

On the other hand, sometimes you can’t get your hands on a hard copy for whatever reason. In that case, you might want to try looking at these free computer books online.

There are multiple topics covered (many dozen, in fact), and even links to other book sites. It’s definitely worth a look.

One good thing about books, as opposed to websites, you can print out an electronic book. It’s a bit more difficult, though still doable, to print out a complete website.