I recently went to Disney with my girlfriend Amanda.  In Epcot, they have a minature train set setup I think near Germany.  I took this picture from the ground level view of the miniatures on that set (you can see a Godzilla like tourist roaming in the background). If you click the below picture, you’ll be able to see a 1920×1200 resolution version.

I recently implemented a triple redundant backup system to back up over 500 gigs of data.  After some reflection, I realized if I ever lost the data stored on my machine, I would be quite livid.  I ended up buying 2x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives – OEMWD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives – OEM and 1x Western Digital Element 1TB 3.5″ Black External Hard Drive – Retail.  The two Caviar’s are mirroring one another via Raid 1 while the external drive is backing up the entire raid about once a week.  My motivation for implementing triple redundancy is as follows.  Raiding the drives was because I wanted to have a live, real time backup in case one of the 1TB internal drives dies.  The problem with having an internal drive is if a power surge or lightning strike fries your computer, you lose both hard drives.  Given the fact that I have my entire dissertation, all of my research, thousands of pictures, and all sorts of other awesome data on these drives, losing both drives simultaneously would be unacceptable.  So, I stepped up my backup game and upped the ante to triple redundancy.  The pros of having the external drive are to overcome lightning strikes, power surges, or the computer being hacked and all the data deleted, etc.  The external drive is only connected once a week for a period of about 8 hours for the backup, and then it is disconnected the rest of the week.

Question:  So how do we sync the data onto an external drive?  Answer:  <Cobian!>

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If you have two windows based computers where you want to control both systems with the same keyboard, I would highly recommend the Input Director freeware over Synergy.  Input director has a whole slew of advantages over synergy:

1.  The mouse seamlessly slides from desktop to another without the use of hotkeys.
2.  Special mouse/keyboard functions for my logitech mouse such as the document flip not only work on the host but the client as well.
3.  Input director doesn’t cause the mouse input to flip out when a Direct X application is open (unlike synergy).
4.  Support for both computers (master and slave) having multiple monitors.

The only disadvantage about Input Director is that it works for only windows based OS’s (unlike synergy which works for multiple OS’s – ie Linux, Mac, etc.).  If you are controlling multiple computers which are all running windows OS’s, I recommend Input Director over Synergy.  Also, Input director had an update this past September whereas Synergy hasn’t been updated in years…I have tested both and got both working but I can only vouch for Synergy’s functionality on two windows machines.

Here are some other pages comparing Input Director and Synergy:  [1] and [2].