I don’t like losing data, and I’m guessing that you don’t, either. I already do local backups, but not only can it a little cumbersome and easy to forget (not to mention drive failures), fire or theft could result in the loss of the both the data and the backup.

So, I also want a backup that’s off-site, easy, and reliable. I’ve taken it upon myself to set up online backup for my wife, parents, and brother, so I’ve had the opportunity to try more than one provider, and wanted to share my experience.

My Criteria for our Online Backup Service

I’ll start by sharing what’s important to me in backup provider so that you know what biases I have and how my opinions may apply to you. Also, my research and review are primarily from Q4, 2011. Features and pricing may have changed.

Unlimited for a low, flat price

I have roughly 300 GB of personal data. The bulk of that are digital photos and videos, and that’s with almost no RAW photos and only rarely is there HD video. Any non-unlimited plan would have been significantly more expensive.

My wife, dad, and brother each have between 50-100 GB, and that grows with every photo-opp. Not only would it have been unpleasant to have to think that each new document, photo, and video could result in an increased recurring payment, I simply did not find anything compelling in the services offered by non-unlimited providers.

Security: Private Encryption Key

Nearly every online backup provider encrypts customer files, but most also store the encryption/decryption key. It is thus possible for a misbehaving employee or hacker to access customer files. While improbable, it is a non-zero possibility. There’s no direct cost for choosing a provider that supports a private encryption key, so I opt to choose one that does.

A couple caveats

• You will have to go out of your way to use a private encryption key for services that support it.
• You will not be able to access the files of your online backup if you lose your encryption key.
• Some services allow you access your backed-up files through the web as an added-value feature. You will not be able use this feature because the service provider will be unable to decrypt your files for you. (When I want functionality like this, I use Dropbox.)

Convenient and Reliable

Once set up, you should not have to think about it anymore. Specifically, once I set this up for my mom, she shouldn’t have to do anything if/until the day comes that she needs her data restored.

Also, it should be fairly easy to restore deleted files or previous versions of files. Ideally, We should be able to get to previous versions by right-clicking on the file in Windows Explorer/Finder.

Services Not considered

Based on the criteria above, a couple services were out of the running.

Mozy

I first tried Mozy when they had an unlimited plan. I’m glad I didn’t subscribe, because they discontinued it. At $9.99/mo for 125 GB and $2.00/mo for each additional 20 gigabytes, I would be paying about $27.50/mo for my 300 GB of data.

Dropbox

I wouldn’t call Dropbox a backup service (nor would they), but I looked at it anyway, so I may as well mention it. At $19.99/mo for 100 GB (and I don’t know how much for additional space), it’s not cost competitive. Dropbox’s value are in other features, such as easy, instant, secure-enough file sharing with friends, family, and coworkers.

Backblaze

I didn’t go with Backblaze for several reasons:

1. They don’t support a completely private encryption key. At best, they store your key encrypted by your password (and they don’t store your password). However, this means that your files are only as secure as your password and the systems protecting your keys.
2. At the time I began comparing providers (August and September of 2011), Backblaze would not back up many file types, including ‘ISO’, ‘VHD’, and ‘EXE’. I have many of the these types of files that are actually personal files, and not being able to override this was a deal-breaker. They do now allow this to be overridden (as of Oct 2011), but the service still doesn’t make the cut to me.
3. Their file retention, four weeks, is minimal compared to CrashPlan.
4. While doing initial research, it was hard to find details such as whether excluded files could be overridden, or how often a changed file would be backed up.

Services Considered

This left two services that I considered:

• CrashPlan+
• Carbonite Home

I’ve been a paying subscriber of both for several months, now (some of my family on each). This gives me a fairly unique ability to make a thorough side-by-side comparison.

The information here is based on both documentation on their website (usually linked) and through my own use of their programs/UI. You are encouraged to double-check any factors that are important to you.

Overview

* Rating is out of 5, where 5 is best.

Details

Pricing

Carbonite Home is a very good value, period.

CrashPlan+, although only marginally cheaper, is an excellent value considering how much more data they keep for previous versions of your files. On top of that, they’ve had awesome promotions recently that brought their prices to a fraction of Carbonite’s.

Previous Versions and Retention

By default, Carbonite will backup your changed file once every 24 hours. They will then keep previous versions (including deleted files) for 30 days. You can also force a changed file to be backed up again immediately using the Carbonite submenu of its Windows Explorer shell extension.

CrashPlan, on the other hand, will backup your changed file within 15 minutes by default, but you can change this to as frequently as every minute! You can also choose how many copies will be kept from the last week, three months, year, and beyond. Further, files you delete can be kept indefinitely!

CrashPlan is the clear winner here, allowing you to not worry at all about whether your backup will be completely there for you.

Inclusion and Exclusion

Including Files on External Drives (e.g., USB)

With CrashPlan, you can choose to backup files on removable drives; something you can’t do with Carbonite Home. The caveat is that that the drive must be attached at least once a month so that CrashPlan can verify you still have that data that you want backed up.

While Carbonite HomePlus will backup files on external drives, it’s only available for Windows users and not cost competitive.

File Exclusion

CrashPlan backs up everything “excluding temporary files and caches.” This is great as long as none of your files look like temporary files or caches; a list that you cannot override. The list is not problematic for me.

Carbonite excludes many file-types by default, many of which can easily be personal files, and there’s no central place to change this. This is a significant annoyance to me because everything I keep in directories I’ve chosen for backup are files of mine that I want to keep and want backed up. At least it’s apparent within Windows Explorer which files are being excluded (more on this in the User Interface section, below) and from each one you find you can remove that type from exclusion.

Scheduling, Throttling, Pausing, Prioritization

To me, these factors are mostly just important during the initial backup period, which could just be a matter of days, or several months.

† Although Carbonite scores better here, Carbonite caps the backup speed, which means that your backup may take significantly longer. So, they need better configurability here more than CrashPlan does. More on this in the Carbonite’s Capping section, below.

Scheduling

When it comes to choosing when backups are allowing to run, both pretty much have just the essentials: create a daily time window (beginning and end hours) and choose the days of the week the window will be open. Carbonite was a little more thoughtful by adding an option that is essentially: “start at a particular time each day and run until finished.”

It would be nice to choose that backups simply go slower rather than not at all during the off hours. Maybe even give us advanced users a weekly grid by the hour (the seven days of the week on the y-axis, the 24 hours of the day on the x-axis) and let us choose ‘on’, ‘off’, or ‘throttled’ for each hour.

Throttling

CrashPlan allows you to cap your sending rate, allowing you to choose a rate for while you’re “present” and another for while you’re “away” (although they don’t communicate what those mean very well).

Carbonite’s approach is to give you the ability to easily set it into “low priority” mode from the tray icon (but you can’t configure it and only on their website do they explain what “low priority” actually does, and even then it’s not very clear). I turn this on when I know there’s other browsing that may be going on that I don’t want to adversely affect too much.

However, Carbonite will also cap your rate of backup more the further along you get (more on this, below)! At some point, you may not even need to throttle yourself.

Pausing

The ability to pause is important to me because I make Skype and VOIP calls fairly frequently. Others may find it important for playing games or uploading photos and videos.

Carbonite edges out here slightly because it has some nice small periods to choose from, like 10 and 30 minutes. It’s too bad neither allow you to enter a specific amount of time.

Prioritizing

Carbonite allows you to choose specific files to be backed up before others. Simply right-click on it and choose ‘Back up this file as soon as possible’ in the Carbonite shell-extension submenu. I use this often to backup my newest files first; the ones that haven’t made it onto my external hard-drive backup, yet. The UI to do so can be a little quirky, though.

In order to prioritize some files to be backed up before others in CrashPlan, you need to use Backup Sets. While Backup Sets is great for grouping files to be backed up to different destinations (viz., CrashPlan’s servers vs external storage vs a friend), I don’t see this as a reasonable way to prioritize files backup up to CrashPlan’s servers

User Interface / User Experience

Here’s what’s important to me in an realtime backup User Interface :

• Are the files that I want to be backed up backed up?
• Can I get to the backed-up copies of my files?

What I like most about Carbonite is that they place a small indicator on every file and folder that is backed up (a green circle) or will be backed up (a yellow circle indicating in-progress). Just while browsing your own files you know that your files are (or will be) backed up.

Further, you can get to information about a file’s backup by right-clicking on it, and choosing ‘Properties’ within the Carbonite sub-menu. There you can see when it was last backed-up, and choose to back it up first if it needs to be.

When it comes to CrashPlan, if want assurance that your files are backed up, you’ll have to audit the file restore area.

Overall, both seem to barely get the job done. The UI works enough, full of quirks and not short of annoyances. Both have shown wrong information; CrashPlan has said “Less than a minute remaining” when it obviously has much more to go (probably hadn’t finished determining what files need to be backed up), while with Carbonite I’ve seen it say both “backup is up-to-date” and “backup is pending” at the same time.

Cosmetic

You’ll rarely win points with me creating a custom-skin for your app. It’s difficult to deviate from standard UI of the OS and create something that looks and feels professional. More importantly, such apps usually have usability shortcomings that would not have been present had effort been directed to making a more usable UI than a custom one.

For example, Carbonite’s Restore UI can’t be resized, nor can the upper area be given more space within the UI. So, you’re only able to see about 11 files in the Search Results at a time.

On a couple occassions, CrashPlan’s UI failed to clean up the canvas, resulting in a view with overlapping elements.

Carbonite’s Capping

Carbonite Home users’ backup speed is capped to 2 mbps for the first 35 GB, 512 kbps for the next 165 GB (200 GBs total), and then 100kbps for all data beyond 200 GB. At best, 250 GB would take over 11 weeks for the initial backup to complete. Add roughly 1 day per gigabyte and 300 GB would take over four months.

With their contempt for the safety our data that we’re paying them to protect, I have a hard time feeling anything more positive than animosity toward Carbonite for their bandwidth capping. The little money they’re saving in bandwidth and storage in the short term is costing them in rapport.

A couple notes about CrashPlan

Backup to Friends

This is a nice bonus to an already-great value! Instead of or in addition to backing up to CrashPlan’s servers, you can securely backup data to friends and family that have CrashPlan installed.

For my mom who has a very small amount of data, we use CrashPlan Free and have her data backed up to a couple of us rather than buying another subscription for her.

The Family Plan

The Family plan could have made a great value an unbelievable one, but there’s a caveat: Everyone in the plan shares one login, and everyone can access everyone else’s backed-up files. We love each other, but that doesn’t mean we all okay with each other being able to read all of our files! I opted to give each person their own subscription.

Impact on computer performance

It’s difficult to be sure about this type of thing, but it seemed like my computer performance was slower with CrashPlan installed, and was better when I uninstalled it. Further, the CrashPlan service managed to rack up the most CPU Time (according to Process Explorer) despite that:

• I only had CrashPlan set up as a backup destination for my mom’s data; it wasn’t even backing up my data, and
• as a software developer, I have a lot of other demanding software running on my computer.

Comfort

CrashPlan has built a well-featured service at an excellent price, but if the program’s UI, the website, and unsigned executables are a hint at what’s going on under the hood and at the data center side, it’s a little hard to feel completely comfortable that our data are in good hands with them.

The website overuses javascript, slowing down the site on mobile devices and causes it to be just about completely broken in Opera. I had a bit of discomfort going through the amateurish-feeling purchase path, and then once in the account console, certain actionable “hyperlinked” items don’t do anything.

Recommendation

Simply put, I’d recommend CrashPlan over Carbonite.

The one thing I really like and that’s clearly better about Carbonite is it’s shell integration, which gives a lot of peace-of-mind that each file is backed up. That peace of mind can take a long while to arrive with their capping, though. Right now, that capping is limiting Carbonite to less than 5% of my upload bandwidth so they can save a little money. Further, having to override excluded file-types one-by-one is another significant annoyance that makes me averse to recommending them.

CrashPlan, meanwhile, offers tremendously more value by storing all your files longer with less hassle while also throwing in features like backing up to friends. Their user interfaces makes me a little less comfortable with them, but not enough that I’m worried that they won’t deliver when it comes to what’s most important: a complete restore in the event of a drive failure or loss. Which brings me to …

… one final note

With both services, I can only assume my data is as secure as it’s supposed to be (that they’re doing what they say they’re doing, and that their implementation doesn’t have security flaws). And at this point, I can also only assume that a full backup would be a smooth process (I hope Carbonite doesn’t limit restore bandwidth!).

A Quick Look at How U-verse Usually Makes it to Your Home

AT&T primarily uses optical fiber as the data pipeline to deliver all of these services to your neighborhood. Somewhere in your neighborhood there will be a VRAD, a cabinet with equipment responsible for distributing the services to each of the nearby homes using the existing copper phone lines running to those homes. That is, fiber is the pipeline to the neighborhood VRAD, and then existing copper is used from there to your home. This is the most common setup and is called fiber-to-the-node (FTTN), illustrated below.

The total bandwidth over the copper between the VRAD and your home (which is usually VDSL) is up to 24Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. TV (while you’re watching or recording) will use up to 7 Mbps of that bandwidth, and phone calls use a negligible amount. Your Internet throughput may be limited by the service level you pay for or by the line quality/distance with the VRAD.

Introducing the 2WIRE 3800HGV-B Residential Gateway

The device they provide, a 2Wire 3800HGV-B “Residential Gateway”, is responsible for a lot:

• VDSL/ADSL2+ modem: The built-in modem connects to and communicates with the neighborhood VRAD. TV, Internet, and phone are all IP-based and go through this modem (usually). This modem works with either the RJ-11 “Phone Line” jack or the coax “Cable Line.”
• TV: Mostly just passes IPTV through from the WAN (the outside/modem connection) to the set-top boxes. The connection to the set-top boxes may either be over coax or existing Ethernet cabling / LAN.
• Phone: Providing VOIP-based phone service to the home. Internal hardware allows plain-old-telephones to be hooked up to the device (over your existing phone wiring) and calls are made and received just as they were before.
• Internet: Much like many existing DSL and cable modems/gateways, provides Internet for your computers and other devices using your wired Ethernet network, its Wi-Fi capability, or HomePNA over coax. It may perform routing, NAT, firewalling, DHCP, DNS, and more.

You might notice that there are a couple ways for U-verse service to get into this device — coax “Cable Line”, RJ-11 “Phone Line”, and the not-yet-mentioned WAN “Broadband” port. Then, there are two ways for TV to come out — coax cable and local Ethernet. And then there’s networking over Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or HomePNA. So, the device is very flexible; designed to make it easy to work with just about whatever current wiring you already have.

A Close Look at the 3800HGV-B’s Connectors

1. Power – Instead of the usual, plain AC/DC adapter, they’ll provide an AC/DC adapter with batteries. This helps ensure that the gateway continues to function during a power outage so that you’ll be able to make phone calls.
2. Reset – A reset button to reboot the device, or to restore all settings to default.
3. Cable Line – May be used for either:
   • Outbound TV: If U-verse is coming in through the Phone Line or Broadband port, then this will probably be how TV is delivered to the U-verse set-top boxes (STBs), because coax cable will probably be what already runs to TV locations.
   • Inbound U-verse: If U-verse is coming in to the home using coax cable, then this will be the DSL modem port. I think a splitter will be used if coax will also be used with the set-top boxes.
4. USB PC – A USB network interface allowing you use the Internet over USB instead of Ethernet on your PC or other devices. Very atypical.
5. Local Ethernet – May be used for either or both:
   • Internet for LAN – Internet to other Ethernet-capable devices (PCs, game consoles, Blu-ray players, etc.)
   • TV – An alternative to (or in addition to) using the Cable Line (3), TV can be delivered to the U-verse set-top boxes over Ethernet/LAN.
6. Broadband – An alternative to using the modem (Phone Line (7) or Cable Line (3) connectors). If another device is used as the modem or if U-verse broadband is delivered to the premises another way (e.g., Fiber-to-the-building in large multi-family buildings), then one may feed the broadband to the device this way, and this device acts as just a gateway instead of a modem and gateway.
7. Phone Line (in) – This is the RJ-11 DSL modem port (inbound U-verse).
8. to Phones (out) – Connects to plain old telephones in the home (usually by simply plugging into the existing phone wiring).
9. (not pictured) Wi-Fi – Wireless Internet to Wi-Fi devices (PCs, game consoles, Blu-ray players, mobile phones, etc.)

My setup

Here’s what you can see is hooked up to this device in the photo above:

• 7. Phone Line (in) – Pretty much wired directly to the U-verse VRAD (technically, via my jack to the demarc/MPOE, which is wired to the VRAD through a cross-connect box; or service area interface (SAI)).
• 8. to Phones (out) – wired to all of the phone jacks (and thus phones themselves) in the home (using a 110 block as an oversized splitter).
• 5. Local Ethernet
  • One to my “Internet” switch, to which some personal servers are connected (routed; I have a public/static IP block)
  • One to my “intranet” switch, to which workstations are connected (NAT’d)
  • Two go to the TVs; two U-verse set-top-boxes.

More details about this device on my LAN at: AT&T U-verse — A Network Geek’s Perspective

And one last photo of it in my messy telecom closet:

Outlook and Google Calendars overlaid in one view. The color of an item indicates which calendar it's from.

If you’re a regular Gmail user, you may follow the directions at How-To Geek. However, if you’re using Google Apps for your domain/business (or organization, family, or whatever), you would likely run into a couple obstacles with those steps.

Note that this is for just viewing your calendar — you will not be able to add or edit events to your Google Calendar. This might be your best option when other solutions aren’t appropriate, for example:

• you’re not a Premium Edition user and can’t use Google Apps Sync or
• you can’t use Google Apps Sync because you need full use of Exchange at the same time

Here’s what you’ll need to do to add a Google Apps calendar to Outlook, which includes enabling this feature for your domain (needs to be done by an Administrator) and a tiny bit of URL hacking…

1. Allow Private Calendar Access in Google Apps for Domains

If you can’t see the Private Address of your calendar (next step, below), then it hasn’t been enabled for your domain. Your administrator will need to follow these steps:

1. Go to the ‘Google Apps control panel’ for your domain, which you can get to by clicking on ‘Manage this domain’ at the top of your email inbox.
2. Go to Calendar settings (under Service settings)
3. Under ‘Sharing Options’ / ‘Outside [Your Domain name] – set user ability’, choose: “Share all information, and outsiders can change calendars.”
   As documented at Google Apps Admin help, this will allow users to share their calendar information with people outside your domain. This includes guest list, location, and description.

2. Get the private iCalendar URL for the calendar you want to add to Outlook

1. Click on the down-arrow next to the calendar that you want to Outlook, and choose ‘Calendar settings’:
   
2. At the bottom of the page will be a ‘Private Address’ section. Click on ‘ICAL’:
   
3. A dialog will appear with the private iCalendar URL that looks like this:
   https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/you%40example.com/private-9a7b3ff028c79ea79aa8927bcb9dd810/basic.ics
4. Copy that URL to your clipboard by right-clicking on it and choosing ‘Copy Shortcut’, ‘Copy Link Location’, or ‘Copy Link Address’

3. Add to Outlook

If you tried to add the calendar to Outlook the regular way (add new Internet Calendar within Outlook), you might have gotten a message like this:

Cannot verify or add the Internet Calendar in Outlook. Verify the link is a valid calendar link:

We need to do a tiny bit of URL hacking and Internet Explorer’s help to add this to Outlook.

1. Paste the URL into Internet Explorer. Before pressing Enter or clicking Go, change ‘https’ to ‘webcals’ at the beginning of the URL:
   
2. Press enter or click Go.
3. You should get one or two security confirmation dialogs; click ‘Allow’ in both of them
   
   
4. Outlook will also ask you to confirm that you want to add the calendar. Click ‘Yes’:
   

Done!

Now, when you go to your calendar view, you can choose to view your Google Apps calendar at the same time as your Outlook/Exchange calendar by checking the box next to each:

If you want all of your calendar items to show up on one calendar in the Calendar view instead of having several calendars side-by-side (like in the first screenshot at the top of this article), you can use ‘Overlay Mode’. Click on the tab of the calendar that you want to join with the others then choose ‘View in Overlay Mode’ in the ‘View’ menu:

Turns out that both of my displays’ ports are DVI-D and that the cables were DVI-I.  Well, DVI-I cables have four extra pins that carry analog signal in case you want to use it to hook up an analog display with an analog video adapter. And you can’t stick a 29-pin DVI-I cable into a 25-hole DVI-D port (but you can put a 25-pin DVI-D cable into a 29-pin DVI-I port)!

Yes, it was my bad for not looking at the display ports before buying these cables. I didn’t think to — all of the video cards I’ve used have DVI-I ports.

It sucks that displays have a DVI-D ports

It would be nice if digital displays and video cards only had DVI-I ports and never DVI-D ports — just have those 4 extra holes (and a wider analog ground pin hole) not do anything. I understand that it could possibly cause confusion (“Why is analog not working with my display over my DVI-I cable?”), but I think that’s much less likely and less significant than not being able to put a DVI-I cable to use with the display (don’t just take my word for it).

But really…

It should be very difficult to buy DVI-I cables

Really — why the heck would you want to use a DVI cable for an analog signal? I’ve hooked up a dozen analog displays to DVI video cards, and to do that it always involved a VGA cable (because any display I’ve ever seen that supports analog does so with a VGA cable or VGA port) and a DVI-I -to- VGA adapter at the video card.

I had three options…

… before me as stood there holding DVI-I cables in front of my DVI-D displays (well, technically I was behind them).

1. Exchange the DVI-I cables for DVI-D cables. Would have taken several days and cost return shipping.
2. Buy DVI-I (female) -to- DVI-D (male) adapters. Would have taken several days and cost as much as the cables themselves.
3. “Convert” my DVI-I cables to DVI-D cables.

I chose #3, which involved using needle-nose pliers to break off the four analog pins (twisting each back-and-forth until they break, then bending the remaining stubs down) and using wire cutters to cut off the sides of the big flat analog ground (pin C5 is wider in DVI-I than it is in DVI-D).

Rosewill and Newegg, shame on you for making DVI-I cables so easy to buy.

male DVI-I connector before analogcision

male DVI-I connector after being converted to a DVI-D cable

DVI-I -to- DVI-D conversion shrapnel

Perpolis gives you ownership of and puts you in control of your own data; whether it’s your blog posts, status updates, pictures, bookmarks, address book, calendar, to-do lists, medical records, or location/travel history.

• Personal: You own your data; all of it
• Portable: You can take your data with you (whether from one service to another, or physically on your own data drive)
• Lifetime: Use your data store to store everything that’s yours (address book, bookmarks, blog posts, pictures, etc.), forever
• Hostable/Accessible: You could keep all your data on your own data drive, but for easiest access, let a service host it for you
• Cachable / Syncable (Versioned): You should be able to use your data even when not connected with your primary data store, including on your phone, laptop, or through the web browser of a public computer
• Integrated: Your data are designed to be used, shared, and integrated across services, and giving you the flexibility to mix and match by whom or where your data are stored.
• Discoverable: If you want it to be, your data should be easy to find by other services or even other people so that they can interact with it.
• Safe: It’s easy to backup. Because it’s Portable, it’s easy to backup in a way that can be restored apart from the current host. By hosting your store with one service and backing up somewhere else (to your own portable drive, for example), you’ll never lose your data
• Secure: You define who gets to access what data, whether it be another service or another person. Data on your devices can be encrypted, of course, so if they’re lost or stolen, the data can’t be accessed.

Personal

The idea is simple: everything personal, such as a blog post or address book, should be yours. If you choose to have your blog hosted by, say, Tumblr, and your address book hosted by Danger (T-Mobile Sidekick), then this may not be the case. These data are difficult to take with you should you decide to move to another service, or if either of these services ceases operations.

You should be able to, if you wanted to, keep all this data on your own computer or portable data drive.

By separating data format, data, data hosting, and discovery, you can have control of the data that you own.

Portable

Essential to you being able to own your data is Portability – you should be able to take your data with you. Perpolis defines or relies on a wide range of open, extensible formats for all your important data, including address books, blog entries, to-do lists, messages, and blog posts.

By keeping your data in these formats (or at least being able to have it readily exported or imported in these formats), you can move your data from one service to another with no hassle.

Take an address book for example, and let’s say that yours is stored in Apple’s Address Book application on your MacBook. Many have already approached portability of address book, and Apple Address Book is no exception. You can export individual contacts as vCards and or the entire address book as an “Address Book Archive.” But neither of these options (which are options in just about every address book application, whether web or desktop based) gives you true portability. It’s not practical to move or access this address book from anywhere. You can’t take the address book to Outlook on a Windows machine and view, use, and modify the address book on there, then bring it right back to your MacBook (without cumbersome steps of exporting and importing, or complex software).

Imagine if this address book were stored in a standard format that you kept on a small USB “key” drive. While plugged into your MacBook, you can use (view, add, modify, or remove) your contacts (whether looking up a phone number, or sending an email using the Mail application). Then, when you want to use Outlook instead, simply take that USB key and connect it to the Windows machine instead. There you can also use your contacts for the same tasks just as easily.

Better yet, rather than have to make sure you have this USB key with you all the time, what if your address book lived online and your Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook could both access them? We’ll get into that more in the “Hostable” section.

Portability gives you two things:
The ability to use your data in multiple places, using different software
A better ability to keep your data forever.

The main thing is that by being stored in a standard format, you have the ability take and use this data wherever you want it. And this is an essential aspect if you want to be able to keep your data forever.

Lifetime

How many times have you left behind contacts in your old computer’s address book or in your previous web-based email services?

Particular software and services may not stick around forever (probably not, even). If, for example, you keep all your contacts (address book) in Palm Desktop, you will likely find yourself (if you haven’t already) needing to find new address book software, and exporting your data there. If you don’t export your contacts to other address book software before you lose Palm’s desktop software, you may it difficult or impossible to get to your contacts.

By keeping your data in a standard, software-agnostic format, you’ll always be able to use your data regardless of software changes – forever.

Hostable/Accessible

The best way to keep your data easily accessible and forever is to have it hosted.

By having your data hosted, it’s easy to access the data from any of your computers (work and home), portable devices (smart phones), or while at someone else’s computer. More on this in the “Cachable / Syncable” section, next.

Further, by being hosted, your data’s life will easily outlive your computers, phones, and portable drives. All you have to do is ensure that you have a backup and that your data is moved if your host discontinues service.

It is important that your data can be accessed and interacted with when it’s hosted, and for this to be able to be done in a portable way (any software or service can use it), there must also be a standard way to interact with this data. Perpolis defines the operations that may be performed on your data – an implicit API both when operating on a locally available data store, or remotely (likely a RESTful service).

Cacheable / Syncable (Versioned)

Because your data is most likely hosted it’s important that the data is cachable. Your phone, for example, should be able to keep a copy of your address book so that you can use it even when your phone isn’t actively communicating with your host (“connected”).

And since you’ll be making changes to your address book while your phone isn’t connected, and/or because you’re likely to want to use your data with multiple devices or services, it’s important that the data be syncable so that changes can be exchanged with the host, so that all of your devices can see and make use of changes made elsewhere.

Implicit in Syncable is version control. Because devices may update data while not “connected,” there must be a way to determine what has changed and needs to be synchronized. This is accomplished with version control. With a Subversion or git-like structure, changes are tracked and browsable, and clients may be able to store the entire repository with history (git-like, for backup or desktop clients), or just a current snapshot (svn-like, for portable devices or 3rd-party services).

Integrated

Because of the myriad of types of personal data that you’ll want to store, you should be able to use one type of data from another service. This is actually implicit in the fact that the data should be hostable/accessible.

For example, if you use Gmail for email and Perpolis.com to host your address book, Gmail should be able to use your Perpolis address book when you want to choose email recipients. Gmail could choose to either rely completely on your address book host for all contact-related operations (see “accessible”), or it could keep a snapshot of your address book and make sure it stays in sync (see “syncable”). Further, Gmail could provide only read-only access to your address book, or pass changes to your host via “accessibility” or “syncability”.

Discoverable

It’s very likely that you’ll want different hosts to host different types of your data. Gmail, for example, may host your email, while Perpolis.com hosts your address book, and Blogger2.com hosts your blog entries. When you log into your email service, it should be easy for it to find out where your address book is.

It’s worth clarifying here that everything that you own — your address book, email, and blog posts — all belong to one entity. This entity is likely to be something like OpenID.

Perpolis facilitates discoverability by defining a directory associated with your OpenID. So, when you log into your email service with your OpenID, your OpenID can be used to make it quick and easy to use your address book.

Secure

You define who gets to access what data.

All permissions to data is managed with keys and stored with your OpenID.

For example, when Gmail wants to use your address book, you can grant it the ability to access it. You could, at any time, revoke access.

Further, you can define what kind of access other services get. For example, you would allow your own smartphone full access to your calendar, but you could grant just free/busy information to your coworkers.