Tag: Application Software

Data protection for online apps

Chris Gilmer of Web Worker Daily poses an interesting question: "...what happens when disaster strikes?". I am not sure of the answer. Even at the office when then servers or the network goes down work comes to standstill. Most of the data I manipulate, either via a web or rich client application, is located remotely. I have started thinking about the questions and logistics of working offline and though not perfect I do have a solution at least for data that can move ( e.g. text documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc). At home I have been using a home built network attached storage system (FreeNAS) to synchronize my local data to remote storage. The downside is increased storage requirements and increased network bandwidth but so far it has worked well for me.

Update:  I have decided on using the Amazon S3 service for data backup.

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Web 2.0 again

After discovering the ITRedux web site I decided to try out a few of the apps recommended on the site. I liked iRows and was quite impressed with it especially when I found out it could handle chart and graphs! The features are fairly basic but useable. One problem for me was when I imported Excel work books with multiple sheets and graphs. iRows chose to break the worksheets out into multiple workbooks and I lost the linkage between the sheets. I have not fully tested Zohosheet.

I had already tested Writely, which I like a lot, so I tested Zohowriter. I had no problem importing existing Word documents but I feel that Writely does a better job of emulating a real word processor.

I also tested Thumbtack, an online presentation system. There is no current ability to import Powerpoint slides. Slides must be created from scratch and there is not way to include graphs from a spreadsheet although one can import images.

I look forward to using these tools on a daily basis and see what works and what does not.