Most of the world is aware that Apple released OS X Lion exclusively on the Mac App Store. While this model of digital distribution guaranteed enough copies for everyone who wanted one, and cut down on the possibility of heat effected lines. However, what this didn’t provide was a physical backup of the install files.

Lion natively creates a recovery partition on any Mac it is installed on. While that will be fine for most cases of simply reinstalling the OS, it has its negatives. If you hard drive becomes corrupted, or physically breaks, you will need to start over from Snow Leopard. That sounds very annoying, but developers have been working hard to make it a non-issue.

While it is possible to create a Lion install disk manually, it can be a little complicated. Thankfully, a French developer has made it a little easier with a free tool called Lion DiskMaker. In order to make use of it, you will need a copy of the Lion install file.

While that isn’t a problem if you have not yet installed Lion, it requires a little trickery to get said file on a machine already running Lion. In order to do so, open the Mac App Store and click the “Purchased” tab while holding the “Option” key. You will then be able to re-download the install file, and thus create an installation disk.

Once you have the Lion installer, you need to download and unzip Lion DiskMaker. Once that is done, you need to put your destination disk into your machine. You can use a DVD or a flash drive of size 4GB or greater. Once you are set up, run Lion DiskMaker. You will notice that the app is written in French, but its still very easy to use.

Step 1. – When you first open the app, you will see this window. If you are using a DVD, click the button that says “DVD.” If you are using a USB thumb drive, click the one that says “USB.”

Step 2 – The next window that pops up will be this one. Click the button on the right, and you will be taken to the selection window shown below. For this example, I used a USB key, so I picked that drive eon my system and hit “Choose.”

Step 3 – Once you choose a disk, the program will begin to run. It will unpack the needed files from the Lion installer, and then proceed to burn them to your disk of choice. This can take up to a half an hour, so be patient.

Step 4 – After the burning is complete, you will see this window. You can click the button on the right to exit the application, or the one on the left to create another disk. Once you are done, be sure to unmount/eject your drives correctly, and place the finished media in a safe place.

As you can see, its easy to create your own Lion install disk. While I hope an English version of this app is available soon, the French version does the job and is very easy to use. if you have any questions or comments, let us know in the comments section.

Update:  A version of Lion DiskMaker is  available  in English. You can grab it here. Thanks to  Guillaume Gete for the email and the link to the US version.

I love how Android syncs almost everything to your Google Account contacts, application data, WiFi passwords – to mention a few. However, it doesn’t sync your text messages. Given how  important  SMS can be and how frequently they’re used I’m not sure why Android doesn’t do that.

This, however, is remedied by the sheer number of SMS backup applications available in the Android Market. Here’s a look at 3 of them.

SMS Backup+

SMS Backup+ is probably one of the first apps that I had installed after learning the hard way that Titanium Backup doesn’t do SMS Backups. SMS Backup+ is free and syncs your SMS to your Google Account.

In addition to SMS, SMS Backup+ can also sync your call logs and MMS to your Google Account. These aren’t enabled by default and you’ll have to enable them by heading into Backup settings. SMS Backup+ also gives you a fair degree of control as to which particular group of contacts that you’ve sent and received messages from, can be backed up.

There’s also a handy scheduling system to allow for periodic backups – just set a period for backups to happen and your SMS will be backed up silently.

The only downside of the app is that it doesn’t backup your SMS to the SDCard. The app, however is free and without any ads or any other limitations.

SMS Backup Android

SMS Backup Android is another simple application to backup your SMS. Unlike SMS Backup+,  SMS Backup Android can also backup to your SD Card.

Deviating from SMS Backup+, SMS Backup Tool is a paid app.  There is a free version though, but the free version includes ads and seems to expire rather fast.

SMS Backup Tool also features auto-backup feature for scheduled backups, but is available only on the paid version. Considering that the free version has an expiration period, I have no idea why this was disabled. Looking at the settings menu, there are options to backup SMS to Dropbox, Evernote and to developer’s online service, but none of these features were implemented at the time of writing this.

The author mentions that he will hike the prices once these are implemented, so perhaps it’d be a good idea to purchase the app at a lower price and then get the features as and when they are implemented.

GO SMS

While GO SMS is not strictly a backup tool, it is, however an excellent replacement for Android’s stock Messaging app. Fellow Techie-buzz author Rajesh  had mentioned this app earlier, however I’ll mention about the SMS Backup features.

The option for SMS Backup and restore is hidden deep in the settings ( it’s available under Settings -> GoSMS Services -> SMS Backup and Recovery)

Like most other apps, Go SMS allows for scheduled backup and backup to SD Card. The send backup to mailbox is a  misnomer  though, you will manually have to send your backups via the email client. If you’re already using GO SMS however, all it takes is to go and flick a checkbox and you have your backups ready without using any other app.

So which one is recommended?

If you need an app which will save your SMS in the cloud, SMS Backup+ is recommended.  Besides being free, it’s rather simple to use and the auto-backup feature will ensure that even if you forget to do it yourself, there’s a scheduled process taking care of your backups.

SMS Backup Tool is a good alternative if you want a single app to handle both local and cloud backup. However at about $5, it’s hard to justify spending that amount, especially when excellent free alternatives exist.

If you’re already using GO SMS, then it’s just a matter of enabling the feature from the menu and you’re all set to have your SMS backed up.

Links

• SMS Backup+
• SMS Backup Android
• GO SMS

The worst possible time to make a backup is probably right after a computer crash, but that’s precisely the time when most computer users stop and consider doing so.

For most users backup isn’t a top priority, so they often forget to create regular scheduled backups, in case the worst happens.

However, with the introduction of online backup services, it’s now possible to create and upload backup of your files automatically, the software program runs in the background and uploads all your files onto the server whenever they are saved. This means you have a current and reliable backup to restore from.

There are numerous free online backup services out there, and in this post I will review 4 of the best.

SugarSync

Formerly known as Sharpcast, offers 5GB of online backup space, free for life, it supports automatic file synchronisation which allows you to keep your libraries updated across all your computers. Storage space is upgradable to 10GB if you refer friends, both gaining 500MB each.

Dropbox

Dropbox offers 2GB of free storage space, and is popular amongst computer geeks due to its support for Linux. While 2GB isn’t a lot of storage space, you can upgrade your free account by referring your friends; students get 500MB for each referral, and non-students get 250MB. The max free storage space allowed for students is 16GB and for non students it’s 8GB.

OpenDrive

OpenDrive offers 5GB storage space for free; it has features similar to SugarSync and Dropbox with automatic backups and synchronization abilities. Although it does provide ample space for free account holders, the space is not upgradable by referring friends. I also don’t like the fact that OpenDrive places a watermark on your images if you decide to share them on forums.

Mozy

Mozy is one of the most popular online backup companies out there, and offers 2GB of free storage space. We like the clean interface of Mozy, which is very easy to use. It has bandwidth throttling features to prevent it from clogging up your internet connection.

Out of all of these services, which I have personally tested, SugarSync is my favourite as it has a good 5GB storage space, straight out of the cuff, and is expandable to 10GB which is an impressive amount of storage space.

=== About the Author ===

Guest post written by Abdul Karim, a tech enthusiast, Windows fan and writer for the online backup services website

Disasters can strike at anytime, and you never know exactly how long they will disrupt your business or organization. In basic terms, there are two types of disasters that could damage your network and data systems: natural disasters and human error. There have been many documented cases of either of these situations causing serious (if not irreparable) harm.

We’re told again and again to backup our important data and make sure it is stored in a safe location. In fact, some concerned users actually got together and declared March 31st World BackUp Day. You may not have known this, and it may have passed you by this year, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take some time out of your day and look into (or establish) your plan for data storage and disaster recovery.

What Would Happen If…

What would you do if there was a fire in your office tomorrow? What about a flood? For that matter, what would you do if one of your more clumsy employees were to spill some coffee on the server? Any one of these situations could cause a lot of problems for a company, and yet according to the AFCOM State of the DATA Center report, 15% of the data centers in the study said they did not have a plan for data backup and recovery.

15% may not seem like a lot at first glance, but these are data centers. Their entire livelihood is based on the ability to provide safe and secure data storage and transfer solutions. If these companies haven’t taken the time to prepare for the unexpected, how many other businesses are going to be caught off guard when disaster strikes? History has shown us that most of those businesses will never bounce back after such a loss.

What Are the Options?

There are two basic options to manage your data onsite or online backups. Onsite options include manually backing up the information on various media like CDs, DVDs, or flash drives, while online options include all the cloud computing solutions for storing important data. The one you finally choose will depend on your individual situation.
Individuals and businesses that have small amounts of data or deal with email archiving on a regular basis often opt for the onsite option, mostly because this is something they have always done. The problem, though, is that if your business is hit by some natural disaster all those CDs and DVDs are going to go down with it. Online backup systems are providing a way for companies to get around this problem. Online backups are fast, easy, and can usually be automated to make sure it is done on a regular basis.

What Are the Benefits?

When you work with a reliable data center (one of the 85% that do have some kind of disaster recovery plan) to backup your information, you will be able to mitigate any of the losses that would otherwise result from a disaster. You will be able to save money as you rebuild and re-establish your company, and all that sensitive personal or company data will be safe and secure. You never know when a disaster will strike, so don’t wait for the next World BackUp Day before you start making preparations.

=== About the Author ===

This author writes about a range of technologies for large and medium business units which include cloud computing, servers and other infrastructure solutions. These products and services along with email archiving can reduce management costs and create a flexible infrastructure.

One of the best features that makes online backup incredibly practical is their use of the Incremental Foreverparadigm. In order to understand what an Incremental Forever paradigm is, let’s take a look at the way backups were previously done.

Because data is constantly changing, multiple copies of all files must be kept on-hand in case an older historical file version needs to be restored or rolled back. Although an obvious solution would be to create a new backup tape every day, this was a slow and expensive process.
The main problem with this methodology was that you had to copy lots of redundant data, while blocking access to the computer while the backup window was taking place.
In order to fix this problem, 2 incremental backup paradigms were created: Differential Incremental and Cumulative Incremental.

With the Cumulative Incremental approach, a full system backup is performed once per cycle. (A cycle is usually 30 or 40 days) After that, a daily incremental backup is performed. This incremental backup only contains the data which has changed since first full backup was performed. At the end of the cycle, a new full backup is made and the process starts over from the beginning.

Although the Cumulative Incremental paradigm offered fast, simple recovery, the backups would start to get very large towards the end of the cycle. Large backups eat up lots of expensive storage, and create long backup windows where the computer can’t be used.

The Differential Incremental was designed as a time-saving and space-saving improvement over the Cumulative Incremental paradigm. With this approach, you still have the first full backup at the beginning of the backup cycle. But every subsequent incremental backup only copies changes from the previous day.

Although this approach was much faster and more economical than the Cumulative Incremental approach, it still had one major drawback. The emergency recovery process was much slower and more error-prone because there were so many different backup fragments to track and load.
If you had to recover a backup from day 15 of the backup cycle, you’d have to load 16 different backup tapes: the first full backup from day 0, and the following 15 incremental backups which made up the final active version.

The Incremental Forever paradigm is a software-based approach that combines the best of both worlds. You get the elegance and simplicity of the Cumulative Incremental paradigm with the speed and efficiency of the Differential Incremental paradigm.
An Incremental Forever backup only requires a single full backup of your data. After that, you can perform perpetual incremental backups without ever requiring another full backup. (Hence the name Incremental Forever)

This approach works by taking your latest incremental backup and using software to combine it with your most recent full backup version. And every day, the latest incremental version is appended to the previous day’s backup to artificially form a new full backup.

From the end-user’s perspective, it will appear as if you just created a new full backup every day. However, the backup server is smart enough not to store any of the duplicated data. This way, 30 days worth of full daily backup copies each 10GB in size will only amount to 11 GB in total storage.

But in the event that you need to recover, you can just pull whichever full backup copy is required without worrying about managing multiple tapes.
When this methodology is delivered as part of an online backup service, it has 3 main benefits:

• Faster, simpler recovery
• Fully automated backups with minimal backup windows
• No backup tapes to fiddle with or ship off-site

If you’ve grown tired of the manual labor involved in full daily backups, Cumulative Incremental backups, or Differential Incremental backups, you may want to consider automating your data protection using an online backup service with Incremental Forever technology.

=====

About The Author: Storagepipe Solutions is celebrating their tenth year as the leading Canada online backup provider.

For those in the unknown, Burj Khalifa is the the tallest structure every created in the world. It’s height according to recorded stats is 828 meters or 2,717 ft. The next highest man-made tower is the Taipei 101 which stands at 1,671 feet. So can anyone beat the Burj Khalifa as the tallest structure in the world?

Yes, but that is if you stack hard drives which account for 10 Petabytes of data. As you can see from the above illustration, which was created by the folks at Backblaze; who provide online backups/cloud storage to customer; after they reached 10 petabytes of backup data. They also stated that the amount of backup data they have is bigger than the internet archive.

So we finally have something to rival the man-made structure with man-made data. What do you think? Can you imagine that someone would create a tower bigger than 10 petabytes now?

Also it would be great to know how much data storage you have online and offline. Make sure to tell me about it through your comments.

(h/t @arpitnext)

Twitter provides a way for users to favorite tweets they like. This provides users a good way to reference tweets they want to read later or also look back and read those tweets again.

Also Read: Find When Someone Favorites your Tweets on Twitter

Just like backing up your tweets and Twitter profile, you can also also choose to backup your Twitter favorites and store it someplace safe. The Twitter favorite backup service is provided by Diigo, one of the companies I am coming to love for their products which include a note taking and sticky notes Chrome app for Google Chrome.

First off, you will require a new Diigo account to backup or save your Twitter favorites. Creating an account is simple, go ahead and register here. Once you have done that, log into Diigo and click on this link. On this page, you can now connect your Twitter account with Diigo and it will automatically save your twitter favorites to Diigo on a daily basis.

Once you have connected your accounts, you will be able to select whether you want to save all favorites or only favorites which contain links and whether those should be saved publicly or privately on Diigo. In addition to that Diigo will also convert those tweets into bookmarks or notes and can be organized using #hashtags.

P.S. You can also import your Delicious bookmarks to Diigo.

When trouble strikes your PC, you might need to re-install or repair Windows. Sometimes, after re-installing,   you find out that hardware such as the sound system or   a network card is no longer working. That means that the correct device drivers are missing.

When you don’t have the proper device drivers for hardware, you often have to spend time looking online for the correct drivers. Sometimes the drivers are very difficult to locate. Is there something you could do to prevent this problem? Yes, you can back up your drivers now, before you have a serious problem.

There are several free applications that allow you to back up system drivers. One of them is Driver Magician Lite.

You can find Driver Magician Lite at Download.com. When you run Driver Magician, it quickly scans and locates all of the drivers that your PC uses. All you need to do is place check marks beside each driver you wish to back up, then hit the Start Backupbutton.

The drivers will be copied to any location you specify. Each driver will be located in a sub-folder having the name of the driver. Also inside each sub-folder, will be an INF file which allows you to re-install the driver in the future. Double clicking an INF file will re-install the driver.

I usually store my backup drivers in a zip file, somewhere online, such as DropBox. Never leave your backup on the same hard drive that your Windows is using. After all, your hard drive could crash and you’d lose the backups along with Windows.

Download Driver Magician Lite

Techie Buzz Verdict:

Driver Magician Lite is a simple way to back up your critical system drivers. Although you may not need those backups, if you ever do, you’ll be glad you have them.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5 (Good)

If you are planning to jailbreak your iPhone or jailbreak your iPod Touch on the latest iOS 4.2 update, you might want to backup your SHSH blobs so that you can restore your iDevice in case something goes wrong or if you want to downgrade your iDevice.

Though a jailbreak for iOS 4.2 is available, it is untethered, so you will have to jailbreak your device when you restart it so backing up your iOS SHSH blobs might be beneficial in the future. Backing up the iOS 4.1 SHSH blobs is similar to the earlier guide for backing up iOS 4 SHSH blobs.

All you need to do is download Tiny Umbrella from here. Once you download the software just follow the instructions and back up your iOS 4.1. Though a jailbreak for iOS 4.2.1 is already  available it is always better to stay on the safer side. Tiny Umbrella is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The update is a one click process so it should be fairly easy.

[Sponsored] Consider this. Back in 1995, a 2GB hard drive used to cost a bomb, today you can get 5GB space online for free without having to worry about losing your data. There are several such online storage providers who provide users with free storage space, one of them is IDrive, who provide users which a simple and safe way to back up their files online.

So how is IDrive different from any other backup service? They provide 150GB of storage space for only $4.95 a month. I haven’t seen any other providers who provide so much disk space for that low. Secondly, you get 2GB free for life and can refer the service to friends to win an additional 10GB free space.

IDrive also provides several important features such as file archiving and versioning so that you can restore a previous version of a file even if you have changed it. It also backs up USB drives, external hard drives and mapped drives which are not physically attached to your computer.

Another interesting feature about IDrive is that you can backup any files, including music, videos, photos and more and do not have any bandwidth limits. Considering how good all this sounds, here are my tests of the IDrive client.

Once you download the IDrive client, you can either sign in to it, or create a new account, the process is simple and hardly takes a minute. If you are signing up for the first time, you can choose to use a encryption key or choose to use a default one. It is advisable to create and use your own encryption key. Please remember to store you encryption key somewhere safe or you won’t be able to retrieve your data.

IDrive also provides users with a plugin using which you can access you IDrive content in Windows Explorer.   You can browse and access all your files from your IDrive just like would be browsing a regular folder on your computer.

As I had told earlier a free IDrive account provides users with 2GB free storage space, however, IDrive also provides a referral program using which you can earn an additional 10GB storage space.

Once you have setup IDrive, it will automatically choose the folders to backup. Of course you can change all the folders and allow choose a scheduling time to backup your files. After you have backed up your files, you can access them from anywhere using the IDrive client or a web browser.

Overall, IDrive provides an easy way to backup files to the cloud and access them from anywhere. The service is free to use and you don’t have any obligation to pay unless you want to upgrade your storage space. Also IDrive seems to have good ratings from both users and the PC Mag editors where the PC Mag editors rated them as 3^1/2 out of 5 and users rated them 3 out of 5.

IDrive is available for downloads on both Windows and Max OS X and can be downloaded from here. IDrive is also running a promotion, where they are offering a free 5GB account and a $10 iTunes card if you download their app for iPhone, BlackBerry or Android and follow certain steps. To learn more about the promotion visit this page.

Disclaimer: All views in this post are unbiased and true.