This will be the first post I have created entirely in DragonDictate. That doesn't have anything to do with the actual post, but it's an interesting side note, because I'm abandoning my keyboard for the remainder of the excursion.



The topic at hand is actually how to perform backups at your home. I become a fan of Internet backup applications. The two I most often recommend are Mosy and Carbonite. For my home I use Mosy , but for most businesses I recommend Carbonite. One big benefit of Mosy for the home consumer is that they offer free backups as long as you stay under a 2 GB limit. I of course I'm well over my 2 GB limit. Being the good consumer I opted to be lazy and just pay the five dollars a month for unlimited storage. The last time I checked I was up to 50 GB. The upside to Carbonite is that they treat business users and home users the same. This means that they are vastly cheaper than Mosy to backup a single server. If you are looking at backing up an entire office pool of computers I recommend shopping both, and choosing whichever is cheaper for your circumstance.



For my home, like many there are multiple computers. Laptops, media PCs, and the family computer. Even though I'm technically savvy enough to set up a nice system using rsync , robocopy, unison, Amanda, or just write my own program in Python to do it, I'm naturally lazy, and I try to set up things so that I can train my family members and my wife can understand them, and even make changes if necessary. I'm sure there are a lot of programs that would do the same thing but I'm going to just focus on of them. I was able to install, configure, schedule, and forget about the existence of Cobian within about a 30 minute time span. While sometimes I really joy playing with software, sometimes it's nice just to install something get it to work and forget that it ever existed.


Just navigate to http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm, and download the program. And it's easy to use interface will allow you to create a new task to back up whatever folders you need to whatever shared folder on your network that you wish to place them.



It isn't hard to see the benefit in backing up using this method. Not only do you have a quick backup in-house, but you only have to purchase a backup plan through an Internet backup company for one computer.





Well that's the end of the post. I'm not exactly sure what to think about DragonDictate. I played a little bit with my settings on my built-in microphone on my laptop because my microphone on my old half busted headset wouldn't work. Now DragonDictate says all over the software that you absolutely must have a good microphone to get good results. I've gotten pretty decent results just using the built-in microphone on my laptop. As I use the software it gets better at understanding my Texas drawl, and I get better at not slurring my words together. One of the things that has made my head hurt while using it is that although I'm a fast typist, I'm really not as fast typing as I am talking. That means I am able to fix my poor English that comes out of my mouth or runs through my head by the time the text hits the screen. One thing that DragonDictate has made me notice is how poor my spoken English truly is. I did find that I could not do without using a mouse.