NETWORK BACKUPS

Q::I would like to ask Leo’s opinion on the best recommended NAS for home and home office use. I have four Macs, and four family members in the house (myself, my wife, and two teenagers). I have been trying the Maxtor “Shared Storage Plus” NAS, but I am not happy with the speed of the file transfers on it. What would Leo recommend? I’ve been a huge fan for years. Thanks.

David
St. Albert, AB

I use and Infrant NAS (www.infrant.com) with my Mac and Windows and it works like a charm. I recommend a RAID 5 based solution for maximum data security. For fastest backups use wired gigabit ethernet.

Look for new hardware based on the Windows Home Server. It looks very nice, but as of this taping it’s still in beta.

Apple also offers a form of NAS with it’s new Airport Extreme routers called Airport Disk.

Sean’s note: Network Attached Storage seems like a great idea for sharing all of your data among all of the computers in your house….until you start transferring a great big pile of data, that is. The big limitation with NAS is that it transfers data only as fast as the slowest link in the equation — so if you have a 10/100 network card in the computer, you’ll only ever transfer data at 100 Mbps, even if the NAS features gigabit networking….and when you compare that to USB 2.0, FireWire or internal SATA speeds, that’s very very slowwww. And remember that the speed drops even more if one or more of the connections is wireless.

The new Shared Storage drives from Maxtor should feature gigabit networking on them, so if you want to achieve maximum transfer speed, you’ll want to make sure that everything along the chain (computer, router, and the NAS drive) uses gigabit instead of the slower 10/100. That way you’ll get the maximum speed possible.

HIGH END VIDEO PRODUCTION

Q::I write and direct short films on no budget. I own a Sony Z1P HDV video camera and have a Lowell lighting system and boom microphone etc. I have purchased a software program known as DV Rack to monitor what is actually being recorded by use of a laptop. I would be very interested in your opinion on this software if you or any of the crew have had occasion to test it. Also any tips you can give to try and get the best reproduction on a 23 inch Apple monitor while editing with Final Cut Pro would be very helpful.

Trevor
Sydney, NSW

I have no idea. We need a video production expert to answer this one.

COOKIES ON FIREFOX

Q::I enjoy reading Fanfiction and keeping which story i have read and what ones i haven’t is very difficult when i loose the cookies after a computer formating. I recently switched to Firefox and i can’t find the folder nessasary to save the cookies from deletion. Also i can’t seem to transfer the cookies from Internet explorer to firefox. I’ve looked for an ad on to help and none will. Please help. Thanks Lisa Tomlinson P.S. I caught episode #1 and i’m looking forward to all the new and interesting things to come. Thanks for all the help.

Lisa
Edmonton, AB

Firefox is supposed to be able to import your cookies from IE.

Firefox saves cookies in a file called cookies.txt, which is part of your Firefox Profile. You might want to take a look at a cookie extension which will help you add and edit cookies to Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/573.

APPRAISING YOUR WEB SITE

Q::I have a web business, how do I find out how much it is worth, and how do I sell it ? I am concerned about who can be trusted on the web. There is I guess web site business brokers, but searching google gives you results of sites that I am not sure can be trusted ? Any ideas or help? Thanks.

Garry
Sydney, NSW

I don’t think there’s any easy way to assess the value of a web site. It’s worth what someone will pay for it, but unlike a house, there aren’t really any comparable sites to compare it to. There are some questions you can ask to try to gauge the value of your web site. Read the article at http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/02/20/website-valuation/.