Dolly Drive

We got two questions again and again at Macworld. How are you different than Dropbox & CrashPlan? Both logical questions since many people told us they use either or both.

So for World Backup Day, here are some answers to that question, beginning with the most basic: Why use two programs (CrashPlan & Dropbox) to do the job of one (Dolly Drive)? And pay more? (Note: Some clarifications have been made since the original posting on 3/29/13. These are noted *)

DOLLY DRIVE VS. CRASHPLAN

If you use CrashPlan, that’s great. You know the value of backing up your files & it’s a fine backup-only solution. The question is, does it give you enough backup & access?

Cloud Storage & Access - Advantage Dolly Drive

CrashPlan only backs up a computer. It does it very well, but that’s all it does. Other than the app on your phone, it doesn’t offer productivity, computer-to-computer access, web-browser access, or collaboration tools—just individual computer backup. (*Clarification: Crashplan lets you restore files from the web but not upload them. Thus, it backs up a computer, but is not a cloud storage repository or sharing hub for working from other computers.)

Dolly Space lets you seamlessly access any-sized* files in the cloud on your iPhone or iPad, & edit/upload* on your other Macs, or in a browser.  You can close your Macbook at work, fire up your iMac at home, and get the same documents on either computer, without missing a beat. If you’ve used Dropbox, Dolly does the same thing.

Dolly Space cloud storage save tons of hard drive space. Let’s say you have a 250 GB Macbook. With Dolly Space, you could have 1 TB of stuff available seamlessly in the cloud. Or throw out your external hard drives and keep your photo or music archives safely stored forever. This isn’t part of CrashPlan’s service.

Share & collaborate. If you have more than one Mac where you access your stuff, Dolly Space makes sharing and collaboration simple.  CrashPlan gives you online backup and their app lets you get & share files on your phone, but it isn’t allowing multiple computers to share.

Immediate Disaster Recovery – Advantage Dolly Drive

Dolly’s Backup features include a bootable clone for immediate disaster recovery. Any expert will tell you the key to backup is  a bootable clone. Dolly Drive does that too. (*editors note: External hard drive required.)

A clone is an exact replica of your entire computer on an external drive that you can actually start a computer from. If your hard drive crashes, simply plug in the clone and –restart your Mac. It’s seamless and immediate.

Optimized for Mac – Advantage Dolly Drive

Unlike the other guys, Dolly Drive is made for Mac from the ground up.

No Java

First, Dolly Drive doesn’t use Java in any capacity so there are no worries of impact on your memory.

Restore by Application type

Second, Dolly lets you view & restore files by Application-type mimicking the way you work. No need to hunt down a file buried in a folder that you probably don’t remember.

Incremental backups of large files

Third, Dolly Drive does incremental backups of virtual machines like Parallels so you can sweep through your backups with minimal impact on your Mac’s speed or memory use.

Pricing: Backup & Online Storage – Advantage DollyDrive

If you want to pay as little as possible for Backup and you are happy moving files in & out of your Dropbox account so that you stay under your free limit, than you probably have a great solution already.  CrashPlan online is only $5 or so per month for unlimited backup of a computer. A Dolly Drive backup & cloud storage plan for a Macbook Air would be closer to $7 per month. You get more access & protection, but it’s still an extra $2/month.

Comparison based on specific usage scenarios

But if you are backing up multiple computers, than CrashPlan jumps to $149 per year. And if you pass your free Gigs for Dropbox and pay for their minimum plan, you’re now at $248 per year for both. Use 200 GBs of Dropbox and it’s $348! Crank it up to 500 GB and you’re paying $648 per year for backup & storage of your movies, pictures, music and work! All of a sudden, 500 GBs or 1TB of Dolly Drive’s complete Mac solution as low as $13 or $22/month is a cloud storage steal.

DOLLY DRIVE VS. DROPBOX

“How are you different than Dropbox?” was another very common question at Macworld.

Price

Let’s start with price. Your first 2 gigs of Dropbox are free and you could refer enough friends you’ll get up to 18GBs without paying. But once you start seriously using the cloud, Dropbox costs you $99 a year for 100GBs. Dolly gives you the same amount for $72!

For  500 GB, Dropbox charges  $499 per year! A full terabyte of Dolly(twice the size of Dropbox’s biggest plan!) is only $280! So price isn’t even close.

Ease of Storage

Dropbox’s default setting is to assume you want local & cloud copies on all of your machines. That means a single file could be taking up valuable hard drive space in two or three places. Dolly Space puts all of your files directly in the cloud and automatically caches documents locally for quick access. But unlike Dropbox, you’ll select when you also want local copies.

Share within the app.

With Dolly, you can email or share file links directly from the app. Just right click and share single files or whole folders. Dropbox requires you login to a browser to share files. (*Update – Editors correction: This feature is available in Dropbox as well.)

Hands-on support

Dolly Together is a free service for any Dolly customer. Got any problems or questions about Dolly Drive on your Mac? Want to talk about setup or maximizing your usage? Our customer support team will get on the phone or video chat and actually walk you through troubleshooting. Yes, Macs are the easiest computers in the world to use. But that doesn’t mean it’s all snowflakes and milkshakes.  That’s why you want the Sheep.

Mac-Centric

Dolly Space is designed for the OS X Lion & Mountain Lion experience. You never need to leave the OS X aesthetic for cross-platform Java windows and it’s optimized for super-quick searches of your files.

CONCLUSION

Dolly Drive gives you everything you need to protect and access your data—clone, cloud & online backup – in a single application designed explicitly for Mac that costs far less than getting the same thing by mixing multiple applications.

We do it all, and we do it better. But don’t just take our word for it. Sign up here for a free full trial, or start with 10 GBS free, and see what the sheep can do for you.

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This year, World Backup Day, Easter & Passover fall on the same day. Could you ever have a better aligning of holidays?

Now, I am not trivializing these important days, although in a funny way, they do tie together. (Easter is about the miracle of returning to life and Passover is about carrying around your home, even when you’re away from home.  That’s pretty much what we do for digital life with Dolly Drive).

But what I mean is this: OBSERVING Easter and Passover is about taking action so the truly important things in life will never be lost which is what World Backup Day is about.

Think about it. Why do we observe Easter and Passover every year? If you’ve heard the stories once, why do you have to hear them again? Why do you go to Church or have a seder every single year? Because if you don’t stop & take action to hold on to their significance, they will eventually be gone.

If people stop going to Church every year to remind themselves of the story of Easter, then eventually it will no longer be known. When you take action to go to Church, you do your part to keep the message from ever getting lost. It’s the same reason why Jews hold a seder every year. Because if they don’t take action to retell the story of Passover year after year, then eventually it might cease to exist.

And that’s the point of World Backup Day. You can’t just assume that just because something is important it will be there forever.

You have to take action to keep it from going away.

Think about how much of your life is now digital?  Your job is to make sure it doesn’t go away. If you don’t keep it alive, no one will. That’s what backup is about.

Now, I’m not talking about your computer, your tablets, your iPhone, etc. They are all replaceable.

But what you have on those things is not. You cannot get back that video of great grandma kissing your newborn child. Apple doesn’t sell that.  You can’t recreate all of those blueprints and sketches you’ve been working on for years if that data is lost. That is your life, your memories, your digital soul. It’s not on iTunes.

As I said, I’m not trivializing Easter & Passover. (In fact, I’m lucky enough to celebrate both).  I’m just saying, that the reason we take a day every year to celebrate them is to take action so they are never lost.

That’s what World Backup Day, this Sunday, March 31 is all about.  Making a day special so we never forget how important the idea behind it is.

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Just do it!

It’s true. Like working out, backing up is one of those things you know you should be doing. And yet somehow, you still don’t. Believe me, you’re not alone. I’ve worked with some of the geekiest of Mac geeks, creating tons of important stuff every day—and getting them to take backup seriously often takes a bit of work.

But it’s a funny thing (or not). Once you suffer a data disaster, backing your stuff up is all you can think about. Lose the only copy of a 2,500-word article the day before it goes to press, precious baby photos of your kids, or three years worth of your company’s financial documents, and all of a sudden backing up is the most important thing you do on your Mac.

At Dolly Drive, we protect all your important stuff. We’ve created a whole suite of tools to backup your files, store them in the cloud, and access them from anywhere. And we really don’t want you to have to lose anything before you start taking this stuff seriously. So we created a brand-new Starter Guide to get you up and running with all of Dolly’s services ASAP. Download it now, and take it for a spin. If you have any questions, let us know. You can even set up a one-on-one session with our awesome support team, and they’ll get you going in no time!

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I asked a Mac user to give me two words to describe getting started with Dolly Drive. His first word was “exciting”. The second was “daunting”. But once he got going, he said “I was ‘Surprised’. Surprised that I could do all of that stuff so easily.”

Which is why I hope you’ll join us Wednesday at 12pm for “15 Minutes With Dolly” with Dolly Drive VP of Customer Relations, Mark Ross. Because we want to get you even more excited, get rid of any of the daunt, and be surprised by everything you can do with Dolly Drive.

You see, our research shows a pretty even split for why Mac users come to Dolly Drive these days. Half want Space for Cloud Storage, and the other half are thinking about Online Backup.

A New Solution for Cloud Storage

Those who want Space usually use Dropbox or iCloud, but they’re left feeling that there could be a more complete solution. Or they are tired of filling up hard drive after hard drive when there’s a perfectly good cloud at their fingertips for storing their stuff.

 Online backup of your Mac

The other half of Mac users come to Dolly for online backup. They may already use Crashplan or Carbonite and their looking to try something else. They may have heard about us as a Time Machine in the cloud solution (please note: for Snow Leopard only. Not for Lion or Mountain Lion.). Or they may have heard about Dolly’s Mac-inspired approach to backup.

And while they certainly have great appeal, Dolly users don’t necessarily come to us for just local backup or our bootable clone.

So that’s why joining us for our webinar on using cloud storage & backup is so important.

Because what makes Dolly so amazing isn’t that it doesn’t any of these things, it’s that it does all of these things. And it’s actually pretty easy.

Anywhere Access & Everywhere Backup of your Mac

If you truly care about being able to access your data whenever you want, and never want to worry that you won’t be able to, then you’ll be surprised to learn that nobody does more to give you access & protection of your data than Dolly Drive.

And we make using Dolly Drive exciting. Because the risks you are exposed to when  you use anything less than Dolly’s anywhere access & everywhere backup is actually pretty daunting.

Join us for “15 Minutes with Dolly” Weds, March 20 at 12:15pm ET.

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It’s 2013. We are two years away from 2015, the year that….Doc and Marty travel to in the future. Which begs the question, do you ever see things that make you stop and realize we are living in the Future? I’m talking about things that if you saw in a Sci-Fi movie as a kid you were like “What a weird futureworld!” Well, let’s look at a few technologies and see where Dolly Drive ranks with them.

Dolly Drive

Imagine it’s 1996. I write a paper on my Mac color classic. Now, where do I keep it? On that Mac. Maybe a Floppy. That’s it! But what if I write that paper today? Now it’s available anywhere I want. On my three Macs (“Hold on!”, says 1996 me. “Who has more than 1 Mac?”), my Phone (“you mean the one tethered to my car?”), or even when I’m on my mother-in-law’s PC when I’m over at her house (“Wait, I’m gonna get married?!!!”). That’s where we are now. I can always get my stuff, even without having my computer. We’re a long way from 3.5 inch diskettes. Plus, it’s all backed up, so all of these zeroes and ones that mean so much to me are never going to be lost. Sadly, I wrote an awesome paper my senior year in high school that I will never get to read again because the floppy it was on was lost and the computer doesn’t turn on.  An occurance like that doesn’t need to happen now. With Dolly Drive, I could still access every paper I wrote 20 years earlier from anywhere, at anytime. Not just the ability to Google sports scores, song lyrics or old fast food commercials. I can access my entire digital life! That’s pretty futuristic.

Dolly Drive: Future Rating: 4 out of 5 Jetpacks

Google Glass

Then, there’s Google Glass. I wrote recently about how there wasn’t much excitement around CES this year, because the past few years have brought us 3D TVs, iPhones & iPads and we need to take a break from cool things. But I’m wrong. Google Glass is literally the future.  If you haven’t seen it, you must.  And if you haven’t seen this parody, I encourage that too.  Every bit of information in the world, layered over every single thing in the world. (And the start to my theory of time travel that if we record our lives digitally, and create virtual composites, we can go back to digital recreations of that moment, or be in someone else’s moment.) But I digress…Let’s start with “Ok, Glass, show me nearby coffee shops”.

Google Glass: Future Rating: 5 out of 5 Jetpacks

Chewy Fruit Snacks

We feed my 5 year old daughter these little bags of 80-calorie chewy fruit snacks. Mixed Fruit, Island Fruit, Strawberry. They are little pellets of what we assume to be fruit. I mean, the packaging says they are made with real fruit & fruit juices. And it says they contain no preservatives. But they are little pellets of non-fruit shaped fruit! In 1975, if someone asked, “In the year 2013, will kids still eat fruit?” the answer is “Well, they eat these little compressed, gelatinous, fruit-tasting pellets.” Bizarre then, normal now. I’m not saying that’s good. I’m just saying futurists called it.

Fruit Snacks:  Future Rating: 5 out of 5 Jetpacks

FaceTime

You could probably categorize FaceTime in Google Glass since video calls are part of it.  But in 1975, the Jetsons had video phones. The first incarnation I ever saw was just that someone’s picture would come up when they called. Now we can talk to them, Face to Face, wherever we are. Phone, Computer, iPad. And we don’t even make a big deal out of it! Spoiled we are!

FaceTime: Future Rating: 5 out 5 Jetpacks.

Hoverboards

Ahem…..still waiting.

Hoverboard: Future Rating: TBD

Cloned Sheep

In 1997, Scientists in Scotland cloned a sheep. They named her Dolly. It was certainly an incredible breakthrough in science and created lots of conversation about whether it was a turning point in mankind. Would the world be full of  genetically modified human clones who could be manufactured by science? Well, its been 15 years and while I can’t speak to everything about technology in the world, I can tell you I don’t know anyone who is a clone. 15 years later, we’re still all human. Which is actually, coincidentally, why we love Dolly Drive.

Cloned Sheep: Future Rating: 2 out of 5 Jetpacks

Test drive the future.

Get 14 days free to experience

your life with Dolly Drive.

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You’ve heard of Dolly Space, right? Well, we’ve been hearing from Space users. Instead of limiting data to just one Mac, enthusiastic Space users are putting everything in the cloud. So there’s no more forgetting that crucial file back at the office, and no need to worry about the disk space on your hard drive. Keep everything in Space, and you can access it from any of your computers, iOS devices, or even via the web. Cool, right?

One of the top requests we get is for easier ways interact with Dolly Space. We’ve just released version 1.7 of Dolly Drive, with some cool new tools built-in to help you manage your data in Space.

First, we’ve added a Trash can. Even though we’re big on backup, sometimes you really do just need to get rid of stuff. So we added Trash to Dolly Space. It works just like your Mac Trash. Drag stuff in, and it disappears. If you need to, you can dig stuff back out of the Trash, or you can empty it and your stuff is gone for good.

To activate Trash in Dolly Space, you’ll need to toss something out. So go ahead. Right-click on something and choose Delete. Then, scroll to the bottom of your Dolly Space window, and you’ll see the new Trash can. Just in time for a little spring cleaning.

The other thing we’re really excited about is better Finder integration. Now, you can right-click (aka Control-Click) on any file or folder, and select Archive to Space. Poof! Dolly moves your file to Dolly Space. You’ll free up drive space, and instantly store your stuff in Dolly Space. Best of all, you can still access everything, no matter where you are.

We’re hard at work on even more great features for Space, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, we’d love to hear what you want to see in upcoming versions of Dolly Drive. Comment here, or tweet us: @DollyDrive

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Take a trip back in time with me for a moment.  We launched Dolly Drive at Macworld 2011.  At the time, we had no idea how people would react. We assumed that Mac users who loved Time Machine and knew the value of backup would be excited by the idea of taking that experience to the cloud. But we had maybe 50 beta users. So, on day two, when the editors at Maclife came to our booth to inform us that they’d awarded us their Best of Show, we were mind-blown.

In hindsight, I look back and I can tell you that Dolly at the time really wasn’t that special. I mean, it was cool, and it was important, but Dolly Drive was not a window into the future.

This Thursday, I can honestly tell you that we will have the most important product on the entire floor. In two years, you will look back and realize it was almost a “World’s Fair-ish” view into the future of your computer life.

Now, I’m not saying we’re going to win any awards. Most likely we wont.

And I’m not saying everyone on that floor will leave their current backup or file syncing for Dolly Drive. I’m sure they’re content.

But in two years, I believe Dolly Drive is the one product that you will look back at and realize that you saw Tomorrow-land.

Here is why. Because this is the first year that you will realize your computer’s hard drive doesn’t matter. Your iPhone or iPad doesn’t matter. People are backing up their Macs under this belief that what’s on your computer matters. It doesn’t.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Your data matters. Your files, photos, music, etc matters. But just because, for the past 20 years, we’ve kept that stuff on our computer, and then copied it over when we got a new computer, doesn’t mean that we should still think that way.

Your Mac, your phone, your ipad, these are vessels that temporarily house your digital life. But over the next 10 years, you are probably going to go through over a dozen devices. In the past 3 years, I’ve had 6 phones/computers!

If they were so important, would I have had 6 in 3 years?!!! Why am I burdening them with holding everything that matters to me? Why am I still acting like I will only have 1 computer and 1 phone for the next 10 years?

Every night, I leave the office, leave my Macbook at the office, and then come home, open Dolly Space on my iMac, and go back to my stuff.  If I crash, I have Dolly Clone ready for instant recovery. If I need an old file, I know Dolly Drive is backing up every version of my files so I search and restore.

But the point is, my life is no longer about keeping things on my devices and Macs. It’s about having those things available when Im on those devices or Macs.

There’s a difference. And that is the difference between the way you’ve been doing things up til now, and the way you’re going to do it moving forward.

See Tomorrow-land at Macworld2013. Visit the Dolly Drive booth.

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When I tell people I’m heading out to Macworld this week, people always get excited with questions. They always ask “Is it so cool?”

Don't miss Dolly Drive at Booth 442.

My answer is usually, no. Not that Macworld’s not awesome, but it’s not awesome because of all the new gadgets or Apple products. Frankly, there are none.

People used to go to Macworld to see the next great thing from Apple. Mac computers. iPods. The iPhone. You could touch and feel the future. But thanks to Apple retail stores, I can do that at the mall 6 minutes from my house.

Going to Macworld is no longer about seeing the next big piece of Apple hardware.

Going to Macworld is about discovering you have SuperPowers you never knew you had.  It’s like Luke learning to harness his Jedi powers. Or Bruce Willis discovering he’s unbreakable.

Think about it, if you’re at Macworld, you likely already own a Mac. But you might not realize all the awesome stuff you can do right now with your Mac. Some are tools that are already built into your OS (which you learn about in talks) and some of it’s stuff you can add really easily (which you see visiting the vendors and developers at the show).

That’s what I love about it. It’s like being Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. “You mean with these ruby slippers I had the power to go home this whole time?”

Macworld will be the first time the public sees our new Dolly Backup & Dolly Space virtual storage face-to-face. Not a webinar, or a Webex session, or a Mac user group presentation.  It’s the first time we’ll see 1000’s of people take their first live look at their Mac through the all new Dolly Drive.

And when they see that Dolly Space’s cloud storage turns their 32 GB iPhone into a 250 gig powerhouse or how we’ve turned online backup into a more Mac-like experience, or even how we make physical hard drives irrelevant, they get excited. Even when Dolly customers find out some cool features they hadn’t been using, it’s an awesome experience.

There was a time when going to Macworld was about seeing the future of Apple.

Now, it’s about seeing the future of your Mac.

Don’t miss the all new Dolly Drive featuring Space, Live at Macworld 2013.  Booth 442

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You want to see something amazing? Look at the picture on the right. That’s one of the earliest interfaces for Dolly Drive. Pretty basic, now that we look back, wouldn’t you say? Now, here’s what’s even more amazing. That was a mere thirteen months ago. That screenshot was taken November 25, 2011 when only Dolly Drive offered Time Machine in the cloud & a bootable clone. And that’s it!

Now, fast forward (or ahem, ahem – Time Travel!) one year. Look at the image on the left. In under 14 months, we’ve released the most beautiful cloud backup & storage application this industry has ever seen, and especially for Mac users.  We took what we knew about Time Machine,  what we learned about cloud storage, and our unrelenting passion for the beauty and elegance of the Apple experience, and built the all new Dolly Drive. And it’s awesome.

Whatever you knew about Dolly Drive before, this ain’t even close to the same thing.

Not only can you create versioned backups of everything on your Mac, but you can actually elevate all of your files & folders off of your hard drive, and store them completely in the cloud, for instant access on any computer and any iOS device. And if that’s not enough, every file you use is then cached locally so that the only thing taking up space on your hard drive, are the things you need most frequently.

I will lay down this challenge. Show me ANY Cloud solution, and I will show you why it doesn’t compare.

People always say to me, well I already backup with (Fill in the blank). Or I already put my files I need to share or access in (fill in the blank).  And my media is synced to my phone with (fill in the blank).

I will tell you what. NONE of those services, gives you as much versatility, as much data access, as much data protection, as much control, and as much pleasure to use on your Mac, than Dolly Drive.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

Join us this Tuesday, January 15 at 12:15pm Eastern for “15 Minutes with Dolly”, a new weekly webinar series showcasing how to make the most out of your Dolly Drive account.  You can watch it live or catch the replay on dollydrive.com/webinars.

If you are just getting started with Dolly and still want to know everything you can do with it, or you don’t believe that Dolly Drive blows the doors of your current solution, you won’t want to miss this.

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