Dolly Drive

2.0. Say it with me. Or spell it. Two-Point-Oh. Yes, DollyDrive’s online storage & versioned backup for Mac has finally hit the big 2.0. So what does that mean?

Without getting into all of the details, let’s just say the little lamb has grown up into one big, bad cloud storage sheep. You can see everything that’s new this Thursday in our 15 Minutes with our Dolly Drive webinar.

Since we launched in 2011, DollyDrive has improved so drastically that it’s hard to put into words. First the capabilities grew to include cloud storage and file syncing. Then we left behind Time Machine in the cloud for a more fluid, more stable, and more controlled platform.

Which led us to our holy trinity of questions:

1. How are people using DollyDrive?
2. How do people want to use DollyDrive?
3. How do we make it even easier to use DollyDrive?

So when you get to those answers, you get to DollyDrive 2.0.

• Improved and more intuitive look and feel for getting started.
• Seamless Finder integration & a more powerful menubar DropDown.
• Faster backups & transfers with near zero impact to the system.
• Enhanced file sharing for collaboration

2.0 will be available for download very soon. But to see what’s new for yourself, don’t miss the webinar! This Thursday. 15 Minutes with Dolly Drive

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Let me preface this by saying that if you are telling me that 2 or 3 free GBs of a cloud syncing service like DollySpace or Dropbox is enough for you, then you are missing a bigger concept.

Last week, a girl I know from work asked me if I had a tent she could borrow. (She knows that I like camping and of course, the answer was yes). Her boyfriend wanted to go camping and she very reluctantly agreed to go. She, however, wanted a hotel near the woods. I told her I knew a campsite she would love. It wasn’t too far a ride, and was right on the Delaware River. A beautiful drive-up campground that was better than any hotel. I hadn’t been there in about 5 years but it’s the kind of place that makes any newbie camper fall in love with overnighting by a river.

Now obviously, since I hadn’t been there in 5 years ago, my pictures weren’t on my phone, they weren’t on my PhotoStream and they weren’t on my new laptop. Except – they were. Because they were in DollySpace. So I pulled it up right from the cloud. A picture I had loaded on my iMac 5 years ago was ready and available on my new MacBook. It lived there with my entire Photo Collection. In Dolly Space.

Now she’s going. And pretty excited. Because the picture was beautiful. And may I say, so was the DollySpace experience.

Want to find out where this spot is & how to camp on it? Tweet us @dollydrive for details.

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As you know, we love Space. And while I’m partially talking about Dolly Drive’s Cloud Storage feature, I’m also talking about the thing from which was born Freeze Dried Ice Cream – Space Space.

This week, the H2M Humans to Mars Summit has been happening at George Washington University in Washington, DC and the event has, of course, focused on putting a colony on Mars.

There is no date set but between NASA officials and private venturers, most seem to be roughly throwing around the 2030s. That seems like a long time but think about it. If you had a kid today, by the time that kid is in college, we’ll have people on Mars!  That’s not so crazy. (Especially considering that 18 years ago I was in college and that feels like yesterday!)

Assuming that any mission will include internet connectivity between the colony and Earth, that means sometime in the 2030s, you’ll be able to access everything in your Dolly Space account on Mars. Your pictures, your music, your videos from today will be available for you on Mars. Even without your own Computer! You can borrow a fellow Mars tourist’s computer.

So, how’s that for one of the awesome benefits of Dolly Space? All you have to do is buy Dolly Space today, select files to archive, and your kid born today will be able to watch your iPhone movies and look at your iPhoto Pics in about 20 years from now on Mars. This is just the beginning folks. It’s Bigger than Backup.

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Since I was a kid, I’ve collected Newspaper front pages from major historical events, so when I was recently at the Wall Street Journal offices in Washington, D.C, I was very excited about the really cool “exhibit” in their lobby area.

They’d decorated the walls with framed Wall Street Journal front pages from some of the most important dates in American history. There was the WSJ from Friday, November 22,1963, which was, of course, the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. There was the WSJ from Monday, October 28, 1929, the original Black Monday Wall Street Crash. There was Tues, September 11^th, 2001 (the World Trade Center attacks), and a few other major events.

Historic Events aren’t always expected

Unlike this example of a Wall Street Journal Front Page Headline covering a major event that happened the day prior, the “exhibited” pages were from the actual date of the major event.

But at first glance, they were rather unremarkable pieces of art. You see, there was nothing on any of those front pages about any of those events. Only when you looked at the date on the page was there any sign of why the paper had significance.

Why? Because in those early mornings, when those papers, dripping with fresh ink, found their way into readers’ hands, those historic events hadn’t happened yet. Those events were reported the following day – November 23^rd, October 29, September 12. But all those historic days started as just regular days. People reading the newspaper early that morning had no idea that the world would be upside down by nightfall.

Had the WSJ lobby been decorated with the next day papers, (the kind I collect) with well-known images and eye-grabbing headlines, that would’ve been cool. But what was  more powerful, and what the WSJ team was showing, was that you have no warning when tragedy will strike. It will happen and you must be prepared. That’s what those in the stock market have to do because by the time the story makes it to print, it’s too late to change. You see that in these pages. There is almost a vacuum, a silence before the storm. It’s haunting. You just look at it thinking—with almost an unfair pity on the readers and the writers—“They had no idea. They had no idea of what was about to happen to the world.”

Backup is one of the few things that lets you rewrite history

Staring at those framed papers, I couldn’t help of think of what Dolly Drive does. We give you do-overs. We give you the ability to change history so what could be a personal tragedy—the loss of your most important stuff—can be averted with a single click.

I don’t at all mean this to trivialize the meaning of those national and world tragedies. But, I’m saying on a personal level, the loss of every one of your pictures, videos and documents—the recorded history of your life—is a tragedy in your own world, as impactful, if in a different way, than those national events.

So imagine if we could rewrite history. It’s human nature to look back and think, “if only we had known, we could have done something to avert this”. To a great extent, that’s backup. The chance to hit “do-over” and change the course of history for the better so that the next day isn’t spent recounting your loss of your personal, digital-life tragedy. Instead, it’s just another, unremarkable, small headline day.

Don’t miss our next Webinar: 

Solving the backup challenge with Parallels, Fusion & other Big Data!

Weds, May 1- 12:30pm ET

See more!

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On Tuesday, we’re going to be talking about creating a Cloud-Down Backup solution in our webinar. But before we started, we wanted to explain a little about what that actually means.

- Want to join the free webinar, Tues, 12:30pm ET? Register here - 

Think of how backup has been framed up until now. 

Cloud-Down Backup versus traditional, one computer, Ground-Up Backup, looks at Cloud Productivity & Data Accessibility first, and then creates multiple redundancies of that content without being limited by local hard drive storage space. In other words, keep it in the cloud, access it all locally when you need to, in any variation you need, on any computer – current or previous version – or any iOS device. See more in our webinar!

It started because you had your computer and knew if anything happened to it that stuff would be lost. So, we were told, make a copy of everything on your computer, and store that copy somewhere else. First it was on a local drive nearby you.

But then someone said “Why not put it in the cloud?” And people laughed and giggled, but alas there was cloud backup of your computer.

We call that “Ground-Up backup.” Why? Because your Mac (on the ground) – stores copies somewhere else. Locally (on the ground too), or in the cloud (up).

But something changed – we started working in the cloud. Why? Because we no longer have one computer and we have a lot of data (pictures, music, movies, scans, etc). We have 2,3, 4 or more, between our iMacs at home, our Macbooks at work, our iPhones, and our iPads, and we are constantly creating more. Thinking about 1 single hard drive is archaic. So that’s why we created Dolly Space.

The Dolly team said, here’s a better way to look at your stuff – store it all in the cloud and have it accessible everywhere. Whether you have your computer or not, because you left it at home or it fell into a canal, you can still get those files anywhere or share it with someone wherever you are.

Then we said, “But people will still want it to be kept locally too, right? Whether for offline convenience or redundancy/comfort?” So, even though it’s in the “cloud”, they want a copy “Down” here too. So that’s a form of backup.

But, as we all know, versioning matters. If you are going to back things up, you may as well be able to go back to any version. So those versions can be kept locally on a hard drive (with Dolly Drive local backup) or they can then be kept backed up in the cloud too (Dolly Drive cloud backup).

And the whole system it’s running on – well let’s have a copy of that too so our actual computer is protected, not just the files. That’s a clone.

To paraphrase an old saying “Your stuff is worth more than the hard drive it’s saved on.”

So that’s what a Cloud-Down Backup solution does. Instead of relying first on your local hard drive, we say, let’s store it in our own personal cloud space, and THEN make sure it’s protected and available locally and online.

Does that make sense? Either way, let’s talk more about it on Tuesday!

Register here for the webinar!

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