Boxcar & WHSTweet

I don't use Twitter as an immediate type of communication. I generally don't receive direct messages from people that I know, as I know that other people do. I still see Twitter as a passive communication medium.

Boxcar is an iPhone application that enables Apple's push notifications to be sent when your Twitter account receives a direct message or a reply. At first I didn't see that this would be useful for me. But then I remembered that I have installed WHSTweet on the two Windows Home Servers that I maintain. This add-in enables the server to send Twitter messages when the server has an error or warning.

Using Boxcar with WHSTweet is a perfect combination. Now my phone will let me know as soon as my server has a problem. There is less of a chance that I will miss the tweet from the server now.

Windows Home Server Backup

Now that our MediaSmart Windows Home server supports backing up our Mac OS X computers with Time Machine, I freed up the 1.5 TB USB drive that had been connected to our Mac mini.

I am pretty happy with our current backup situation.  All of our computers are backed up to the Windows Home Server.  I use HP Online Backup, to backup some of this data to Amazon S3 for offsite storage.  But there is still a chance that I can loose data.  Since, I don't have all of our data stored offsite, if the computers and the server are damaged, then I will lose data.  I could have all of the content on the server sent to Amazon  S3, but this would take too much time and cost too much money.

I figured that I could use this now-available 1.5 TB drive to backup the backups from the other computers.  Then I could take this drive to a safe deposit box for safe keeping.

Windows Home Server supports using a drive as a backup for the server, instead of increasing storage space.  When you do this, you can specify which shares you want to back up.   You can't schedule unattended backups, but you can do manual backups (I assume this is because Microsoft assumed that these drives would be stored offsite, and would need to be physically connected to perform the backup.)