How may time does it take to lose import files or photos held on your computer before you put in place a backup strategy to protect your files.

I thought I’d share my personal backup strategy, as I don’t just reply on one process, in fact I have three sync/backup methods

• Windows Live Mesh
• Carbonite
• External Hard Drive (Allway Sync)

Windows Live Mesh

This just has to be the best sync application around, so easy to configure, all you need is a Windows Live Signin and download a small local application and then just select which folders you want to sync.

Once you have sync’ed your folders they are available online or anyother machine you have installed Live Mesh application on to.

With a built in Remote Desktop application allow you to connect to your pc when you are away from home, this is a god send if you forgot something you left on you machine, or you just need to access one of your applications when you are away from your computer.

Currently Live Mesh is in Beta, I think this is due to the fact that it is running on Microsofts Cloud which is not full live yet.

The other draw back is it currenly only supports up to 5GB of storage, so you need to pick and choose what you want to sync, but for most users this is more than enough storage space.

Carbonite

This is an online backup storage application, unlike other backup applications it just works and does not get in the way of your working.  With unlimitted online storage it is perfect for high end users such as myself.  Only limitatation is a maximum file size of 2GB, which is not normal an issue.

External Hard Drive (Allway Sync)

With external hard drive so cheap this is a must have, and so easy to setup just purchase, it arrives in the post, plug it i, format and you are away.  The final step is to find an application that will sync to the external hard drive.  I choose Allway Sync, free download, a little techincal in setting up and getting going, would have been nice if this application had a noddy setup and looked at what and how your machine was configured and prompted you with a possible suggestion for sync.  But it’s free and it works.

So there you have it, three places where I keep all my files, and two places for my music, photos and videos

Other Alternatives

Online Storage Services Review 

The Online Storage Gang

I’ve been looking around for some Data Grid’s and as I love jQuery throught I’d share some Grid written in jQuery, well only one at present, froma Russian developer

http://trirand.com/jqgrid/jqgrid.html

If you are like me and you missed your chance to attend Mix09, then all is not lost as you can view the Azure sessions 

Here’s the list of Azure sessions:

• Using the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio to Build Cloud Services
• Introduction to the Azure Services Platform
• Overview of Windows Azure
• Building Web Applications with Windows Azure
• Windows Azure Storage

Updates to the Azure platform, must spend some time on this soon

Greetings from the Azure Services Platform Team,

We are excited to announce that we have released an update to the Windows® Azure™ SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio®. These latest releases are available here:

• Install both the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752
• Install the Windows Azure SDK alone: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130232

What’s new in Windows Azure SDK

• Support for developing Managed Full Trust applications. It also provides support for Native Code via PInvokes and spawning native processes.
• Support for developing FastCGI applications, including support for rewrite rules via URL Rewrite Module.
• Improved support for the integration of development storage with Visual Studio, including enhanced performance and support for SQL Server (only local instance).

What’s new in Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio

• Combined installer includes the Windows Azure SDK
• Addressed top customer bugs
• Native Code Debugging
• Update Notification of future releases
• FastCGI template

We will continue to release updates to Windows Azure and its tools based on your feedback. Please visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130231 to share your Windows Azure experiences.

Thank you for your continued interest.

Sincerely,
Azure Services Platform Team

Now that MVC has been released, it’s worth getting hold of a free MVC book, which should help you get going on using MVC.

aspnetmvc-nerdinner_v1.pdf (13.78 mb)

http://nerddinner.codeplex.com/

Finally Microsoft have released MVC…

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.

The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.

As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.

If you have not already done so, check out Steve Sanderson‘s book on MVC, 

What with the release of LINQ to Entities, and LINQ to SQL, which one performs better?

For comparison of performance it is worth chekcing out Eric’s blog, but I still perfer LINQ to SQL.

Not that I would use the Entity Framework yet, see my article on this