Review: Sumo Omni Bean Bag Chair

I was recently offered the chance to try out one of these cool Omni bean bags from Sumo, and as I am somewhat fascinated by the evolution of these chairs, I gladly agreed.

As a child in the 70s, I dimly remember a an orange bean bag chair that I once sat upon, finding it to be rather unpleasant an experience. It was sticky and worn in places, exhibiting a kind of "chair mange" that accentuated its fundamental ugliness and telegraphed the expected lack of comfort. When you sat in the chair, it tended to sag out in unpredictable and unsettling ways. For the next 25 years, I assiduously avoided sitting in bag-like chairs with great success until I visited the home of my best friend from High School, Mark, who had one of those Love Sac bean bags. The key innovations that I noted was the use of shredded spongy foam instead of hard little plastic beads. This made the chair quieter, more stable, and eminently more comfortable. Also in the Love Sac's favor was sheer size, which made it a lot of fun to bounce on or use as a small bed. However, this also made it rather unwieldy for smaller rooms. I was hopeful that the charcoal green Omni I requested would work well in my own living space.

The image above shows the Omni laid out like a large pillow; you can see my first-generation iBook sitting on it for scale. It's half-filled with what the Sumo FAQ calls "Virgin Polystyrene Foam" beads, rather small. Because they're foam, the bag is quite light; you can very easily move the bag around. I must admit that when I first opened the box, I was rather disappointed with the material, which is ballistic nylon. This is the tough plastic fabric that's used to make contemporary luggage, and it's also used to strap guns and knives to the gear-bedecked legs of America's SWAT teams. While it's very durable and strong, it doesn't exactly scream CARESS ME. On the other hand, this means that you can safely spill a whole can of Diet Coke on it and laugh with maniacal abandon.

As you can see from the photo, I ordered the beanbag in Charcoal Green, which is remarkably just like plain old Grey. I examined the material under different light sources to see if I could catch a glimpse of whatever green might have been present, including bright sunlight, and I believe I saw a very slight tinting of it in the thread used to stitch the bag together. The amount of green present in the material is so subtle in expressing its verdant nature that you might mistake it for French Grey. Or in other words, it isn't nearly as green as the website would lead you to believe. I might have been shipped a Platinum model instead despite the markings on the box.

Bag Science

My enthusiasm somewhat deflated by both the material and color, I mustered up some energy and sat on the bag, not really expecting much to happen. However, I was surprised to note that despite the simplicity of the bag's construction and the lightness of the foam bead material, the bag was incredibly stable. The bag is rectangular, not square, which means that in addition to using it just as a big crash pillow, you can also prop it up on either the short or long edge and sit directly on top of it. When you stand the bag on the short end, you create a very comfortable single-person chair. When propped up on the longer edge, you can create a somewhat-lower loveseat for two. The bag, being filled only halfway, readily shapes itself to whatever pressure is being put on it. What seems to happen is this: the small foam balls inside the beanbag are very light and move around very easily when there isn't any pressure applied to them. The beanbag is only half-filled, which gives the balls plenty of space to move around inside. However, once you set the bag down and sit on top of it, the balls are compressed together, reach a kind of equilibrium in pressure, and stop moving. The result is that the bag conforms very readily to the shape of your butt and back as you settle onto it, the last few millimeters of movement nudging things into place. On contact, the weight of your body applies pressure to the bag and its content, and with no place to go the foam balls just stay put. The effect reminded me of finding really excellent snowball packing snow; this is the kind of snow that light but sticky, compacting well into an easily-rounded shape that is not dense enough to hurt someone.

I found the chair quite comfortable, and was impressed by how the combination of ballistic nylon, light foam beads, and ample sizing of the containing bag had lead to such a versatile solution. If the material had been something more elastic like suede or leather, the chair would not have had its excellent stability. If the material had been a hard leather or plastic, it would have been too stiff to readily conform to shape. The lightness of the beads and material also make the bag very portable, and the flatness of the design makes it easy to tuck out of the way against a wall or behind a chair. In that respect, it's quite versatile. It's not as stylish, in my opinion, as a more conventionally-styled piece of furniture, but it would be great for an informal family or TV room.

One interesting side effect of the design is that there is a lot of extra material that you have to tuck out of the way. The Omni is basically a pocket created from two rectangular pieces of ballistic nylon stitched together, and it's only half-full. You can see this in the middle picture above, which shows one of the corners. That means that there is a 2-3" flat ribbon of material going all the way around the beanbag, like the edges of a square ravioli. Aesthetically I don't particularly like the look---the stitching is very basic---but functionally these give you something to grab onto when picking up the bag so I can't argue with their utility. If you aren't as fussy as I, you probably won't even notice.

This is a pretty neat chair concept. If I had a large rec room I would certainly consider getting 3 or so of them, in bright colors, to crash on. They would also be useful for stocking a play room for kids, where the mucus- and drool-proof ballistic nylon will be a blessing to all cleanup staff. I am going to try sleeping on it this weekend, when I give up my room to invading relatives, as an alternative to the rock-hard futon I have spread out on the floor of my office. With a mix of traditional furniture, though, I'm not quite sure just where to put a single Omni so it "fits in."

I wasn't able to get any good shots of me sitting in the chair in the various positions, but you can check out the gallery on the SumoLounge.com website yourself to see it in use at various hip events. If you are particularly diligent in your research, you will also find pictures of wholesome girls demonstrating the myriad ways in which one can get comfy with the product.

Inka Pen

I've been writing way too much heavy stuff about focus lately, so it's time for a quick gear break!

I ordered an Inka Pen from ThinkGeek a few weeks ago, hoping to use it as a replacement for the flat pens I've been using. While I like the flat pens, they are not quite as durable in the pocket, and despite their relative thinness they tend to bulge out of my reporter-style Moleskine notebooks. Wear and tear is also increased because I carry the notebook in my back pocket, which makes the flat pen tend to chew its way out of the pocket. Not good.

Construction

The Inka pens are pretty cool, having been designed for extreme conditions by its inventor, Greg Adelman. From the website:

Lightweight, watertight and built to withstand harsh environments. The pressurized ink cartridge ensures the pen will write wet or dry at any angle, any temperature, and any altitude.

I was a little skeptical about the robustness of the pen, because I could imagine the steel barrel warping or other some similar disaster occurring. This post on Kickstart News, however, offers some heartening detail about the pen's machined outer barrel and carbon-fiber inner body construction.

I've been carrying the Inka around on my keychain for about a week, and I haven't yet noticed any warping or even scratching. We shall see how it holds up over the long term, but two small details give me hope: the end of the steel outer body, which you can see above, is utterly round and smoothly polished, unlike just about every mass-market pen I've ever seen. The pen also screws together without any scratchiness or scraping sensation, again unlike just about any other pen I've owned. This is a precision-made object.

The pen itself is comprised of several unscrewable components. You can use the pen in two ways:

• Pull the pen straight out of the outer body tube. It's held in place with friction from a blue o-ring. The pen is short, but usable.
• Assemble a full-size pen. Unscrew the pen from the key ring cap, then screw the mini pen to the end of the outer barrel. The result is a full-sized pen that feels pretty good in the hand.

The one down side I've found about the Inka pen is that it got me held up at the TSA security line. It didn't help that I was also carrying a stubby plastic pen shaped like a small cigarette and mechanical lead engineering pencil with a very cool double-clutch lead gripping mechanism on top of the usual laptop gear. My laptop bag must have looked like a bomb maker's tool kit. :-)

Myndology Notebooks

After I expressed an interest in Rollabind and Circa notebooks in a recent blog post, the folks at Myndology sent me some sample notebooks; they license the same a similar "disc binding" technology from Atoma, the Belgian company that I think is the originator of the system. This was the first time I had a good look at the system myself, other than having briefly fondled one of the leather notebooks at the Levenger Store in Boston.

I received two sizes of disc notebooks of various sizes (6.5" x 8" and 8.5" x 11"), some disc-bound 3x5" index cards, and two interesting bundles of small cards bound with a single ring. Also included were refills for the notebooks and card deck.

DISC SYSTEMS

The paper is punched in this pattern, and you slip the paper into the rings. You can also remove the paper by gently lifting it out. Reinsertion is possible as well, though I imagine there is practical limit before the paper starts to fray.

One cool thing about the system is that you can add and remove pages pretty easily. You can also put in strips of paper that are at least 1.5" tall, so two rings can grip them. The Myndology notebooks use rings spaced about 1 inch apart.

Levenger and Rollabind sell punches so you can use your own paper. I didn't see such a product listed on the Myndology website, though you can buy refills. If you're thinking you might use the punch from Rollabind, the systems are apparently not compatible with each other. I haven't verified this for myself, though. It's too bad, because I would have liked to put my own forms into the notebook system without running the pre-punched stock through my printer and risking paper jams.

It's all pretty cool, nicely designed and available in bright cheery colors. The front cover is translucent plastic, and is pretty flexible. The rear cover made of the same material. I would have liked a more rigid back cover (a heavy cardstock) so I could use the notebook without a table, but alas, it is not to be. The index card binder, however, is pretty rigid because you're basically writing on a whole stack of cards. I'm trying to think of something useful to do with them

RING SYSTEMS

Another product that I found interesting, but couldn't think of an immediate use for, was the Japanese-style "one ring binding" system (image above). It's just neat to have a ring full of cards. Maybe pre-printed flash cards? Tickets? Business cards? They're just neat. Here's a closer look and the ring hinge:

I'm not quite sure whether I can use any of these disc-based binding systems for the Emergent Task Planner. I could see it maybe being useful for creating a customized ticket system, but the adding/removing of tickets would wear down the edges of the paper, causing failure or frustration. Also, the paper removal/insertion process is a finicky process, perhaps best used for infrequent updates.

On the plus side, you have a lot more flexibility in designing unusual form factors. I had spent quite a bit of time looking at ring binders, and the three ring format just didn' do it. I really want a 5 or 7 ring binder, so I can split the pages up into halves and thirds as need be. The disc system is almost as good, though, and if you have a puncher and a ring set to start with, would allow greater flexibility in designing a system. One minor drawback is that turning pages in the ring system feels a little "grabby"; pages tend to stick slightly at the ring, instead of sliding on smooth metal rings. It's like the difference between one of those GBC bindings versus a nice wire binding.

A Review of Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Work Week”

I had heard of The 4-Hour Work Week (T4HWW) at SXSW, where Tim Ferriss was presenting a panel on it. I was intrigued by the title (catchy!) but was skeptical; I passed on it to see something else. Then a couple weeks ago, I got a nice email from Ferriss offering to send me a copy of the book, no strings attached, because he suspected that we "shared some DNA". Newly intrigued, I agreed. I'm certainly glad I did, because I think Ferriss has saved me two years of stumbling around in the dark by providing clarifying principles to steer my life by. I've had some of these insights myself, but I hadn't been able to envision the logical culmination of change-producing action: the creation of a lifestyle that is both fulfilling and self-sustaining. What's remarkable about the book is that it presents a multitude of subjects---goal setting, time management, business, marketing, and the pursuit of happiness---firmly within the context of what Ferriss calls lifestyle design. Why burn ourselves out, deferring our enjoyment of life, when we can redefine the rules of the game and live the life we want right now? It sounds ludicrous and maybe even irresponsible, but Ferriss argues that this reaction is merely a product of social conditioning and fear. We don't need to play that game...we can beat it instead.

T4HWW is a remarkably transparent guide to achieving that lifestyle you've always wanted but didn't dare admit, rationally presented as a series of steps predicated on a fundamental rule: reality is negotiable...outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken. Amen, brother! What makes T4HWW more than the typical self-help book is that Ferriss also names the names of the outsourcers, services and brokers he's used successfully in the past to build the foundation of his automatic income-producing engine. It's all part of his meta-approach to planning and getting away with the ideal lifestyle...it's like the perfect crime!

Tim Ferriss' DEAL

A lot of self-help books follow a similar presentational arc: starting off with a good story, followed by the making an incredible-sounding claim, establishing the credibility of the claim maker, tying the claim to the reality of the reader, and then presenting the first of many mnemonic devices. In the case of T4HWW, the mnemonic is DEAL. Here's my vastly paraphrased synopsis of it:

• Definition: Figure out what you want, get over your fears, see past society's "expectations", and figure out what it will really cost to get to where you want. It can be surprisingly cheap, costing less than what you're paying now. Ferriss also provides a very personally-appealing insight regarding the nature of happiness:

The opposite of happiness isn't sadness. It's boredom.

Therefore, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of excitement. While this sounds irresponsible on the surface, if you can precisely define how you can take care of yourself and your commitments and then create a system to take care of that for you, then WHY NOT? You too can live the "eccentric billionaire lifestyle".

• Elimination is about Time Management, or rather about NOT managing time. Instead, apply the 80/20 rule to focus only on those tasks that contribute the majority of benefit. Also apply it ruthlessly to all aspects of your life to eliminate the small minority of factors that waste 80% of your time. Forget time management, focus instead on getting the really important and results-producing tasks done. There's a difference, Ferriss says, between efficiency and effectiveness. Choose to be effective!

• Automation is all about building a sustainable, automatic source of income. This is a section that is, practically speaking, about Business and Business Management. The trick is to avoid is building a business that requires your presence, because that just burns up all your time. Ferriss made that mistake once, generating lots of monthly revenue but ended up being chained to the machine to keep it working. Ferriss now has hundreds of people working on his behalf through multiple outsourced vendors, all operating under specific instructions that are designed to not create headaches for him while depositing those lovely monthly checks. This is a fascinating section of the book, and is well worth reading for its pragmatic approach to effective management. Ferriss also provides plentiful examples and resource listings; this is a mini-book in itself on how to define and operate a profitable business.

• Liberation: Once you've successfully automated your lifestyle, liberate yourself from your geographical location and your job. It's a lot easier than you think, once you've gotten through the previous three steps. With mobility comes the ability to leverage economic advantages across the world. Living in a tropical paradise and eating at 5-star restaurants everyday can be cheaper than watching TV in your house back in the States. Incidentally, Ferriss notes that if you're in a job, your order of steps will be DELA, not DEAL, and he provides specific examples for that case. Like the time his friend spend a month in China getting married, but was just as productive as if he were working remotely so no one was the wiser.

Ferriss calls practitioners of DEAL or DELA the "New Rich" (or NR), and practitioners of the more traditional "work really hard, save up and then retire" approach as "Deferrers" (D). He identifies three key ingredients of the NR lifestyle: time, income, and mobility. With them, you can take the time to travel the slow and enjoyable way, learn new languages. Learn how to salsa dance professionally. Live fully! You've arranged for the income to manage itself with minimal decision making required from yourself because you've built decision making into the system.

Ferriss notes that you're likely to freak out and get bogged down in a lot of soul searching before you really get settled. Is it somehow wrong to just do this? I liked his method of resolving those big life questions, which he observes tend to generate stress because they're just poorly worded. His solution:

1. Ask yourself if you have decided on a single meaning for each term in the question.

2. Ask yourself if an answer to this question can be acted on to improve things.

If the answer to either question is NO, then forget about it. Ferriss says that if you take away just one thing from his book, it's to follow those two rules; he believes that the top 1% of performers in the world live by them.

Many Insights

I could spend a long few days writing about everything that I found noteworthy in the book, but I'll just discuss some of the ones that have popped off my notebook.

PRINCIPLES

This is as much a book about Ferriss' philosophy of life as it is a guide to freedom. It's not an easy path, because we first have to rise above our preconceptions about work, responsibility, and society. THEN, once we're able to peek outside the cubicle walls to see what's really possible, we have to be BRAVE ENOUGH to do something about it. That's a tall order. Ferriss has the attitude of an enlightened hacker or game designer; he's fully aware that a lot of what we accept are rules are merely benefit-producing mass hallucinations. I first became aware of this principle when I was busy sucking at analog Electrical Engineering as an undergrad. After graduating and reflecting upon the experience, I had a burst of insight upon the nature of the field: IT WAS ALL MADE UP. The units, the processes, the conventions, the mathematics...these were merely convenient constructs that had evolved and/or stuck around out because of inertia and, in some cases, momentum. I had been seeking universal truths in the equations and the work, and couldn't perceive them. The people around me generally didn't care; they knew how to work the equations and extract the right numbers, and they were rewarded by the system with good jobs and big, stable companies. I always asked WHY all the time, and this was my undoing until I realized there was no WHY other than it was what people BELIEVED, what people had ALWAYS DONE, and that IT WORKED.

There's nothing stopping you from creating another system that works for you, except your own perception of your limitations, and (to paraphrase Ferriss) the twin bogies of science and law. But even those can be gamed: witness the existence of the applied sciences and lobbyists.

Ferriss spends quite a bit of time deconstructing the nature of fear: by defining fear, you create the means to conquer it. A lot of us know that already, but there was one aspect of it that was new to me: fear disguised as optimism...the belief that things will get better if you keep doing what you are doing now, or don't do anything. Oh crap, that's me! I've been happily pushing forward on this blogging/writing thing, producing downloadable tools, thinking that if I keep doing this, thing will get better and take care of themselves. BZZZT! That's a losing attitude; it's far better to DEFINE and then EXECUTE to a measurable plan. I've started to do that with my Groundhog Day Resolutions and Review Days, though I think a large part of my motivation might be due to my amusement with large prognosticating rodents. A return to the basics of the original Printable CEO Concrete Goals Tracker might be in order.

TIME MANAGEMENT

One of my personal hurdles has been the need for better time management; I spend way too much time doing stuff that's probably not important in the grand scheme of things, and I procrastinate on doing the really important things because they're boring. T4HWW doesn't let me off the hook, but it does through a mighty wrench into the be more efficient path toward productivity. GTD fills that need very nicely in terms of an algorithm for processing tasks and information, but in my heart I don't think I want to be just a faster data processor so I have more time "later" to do something. T4HWW emphasizes prioritization over processing:

• Apply Pareto's Principle ruthlessly to everything, and eliminate the 20% that is causing 80% of the trouble. That could be troublesome clients, answering email, whatever. Evolve methods for dealing with them.

• Apply Parkinson's Law to task planning, which is to not let tasks absorb more importance than they merit by swelling to fill all available time. There's some similarity to 37Signals approach to less leading to more effectiveness, though T4HWW takes it further to its ultimate conclusion. Ferriss also notes how Parkinson's Law and the Pareto Principle in conjunction form an interesting recursive definition of effectiveness: Limit tasks to just the important ones to shorten your working time, and shorten your working time to limit tasks to the important ones. Groovy!

• Cultivating selective ignorance means reducing the number of inputs you're getting. More inputs leads to more distraction, and distraction is the killer of effective action. Most of them don't add to your immediate goals of getting free; they just trap you where you are by sapping energy. This destroys your ability to effectively act, and Lifestyle Design is impossible.

Ferriss identifies three kinds of interruptions:

1. Time Wasters -- things that are unimportant that can be ignored. Ferriss has a lot of interesting ideas about how to get rid of meetings and unnecessary time spent answering email. He also discusses how to train the people around you; when I read this section, I realized that Ferriss had the mind of a master game designer, which is perhaps obvious in hindsight.

2. Time Consumers -- things that must get done, but take a lot of time. Personal errands, laundry, going to the doctor, etc. His solution is essentially that of GTD: batch and do not falter.

3. Empowerment Failures -- if someone has to ask you for permission or to get approval before moving forward, you've become a bottleneck. It also limits the scalability of your operation. Ferriss' solution is to analyze the reason for the failure, then come up with a policy to handle it in the future. The example he uses is handling customer service complaints; by empowering the reps to fix the problem if it costs less than a certain amount of money, customer satisfaction went up and the time burden on him was vastly reduced. This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's recent article on customer service and bug fixing.

MANAGING PEOPLE and PROCESSES

One thing I had never considered was hiring a personal assistant, or rather a virtual assistant (VA) through an outsourcing company. Apparently, they cost between $4 and $10 an hour from India, and after you find one that works well with you you can multiply your effectiveness. Ferriss provides two very powerful rules of thumb to make sure that you're not just adding undue busywork:

• Refine rules & processes before adding people.
• Eliminate before you delegate.

Anything that makes it through that filter then must follow his GOLDEN RULE #1: be both time-consuming and well-defined, otherwise you're not really doing anything. The presumes an ability to define well, of course, which may be the ultimate challenge in following all of Ferriss' course of Lifestyle Design. A lot of people have difficulty defining things, because of a discomfort with writing, or because they don't fully understand the nature of what they're doing in context of other people. I'm not sure what can be done about that. However, GOLDEN RULE #2 also dictates have fun with it, as a reminder to not be so dire. So you screwed up the first directive...big deal. That's how you learn. Ferriss provides an example of his first failed attempt to delegate a task to his Indian VA, and how he cleaned it up. It comes down to establishing metrics for success and limits; essentially, you are programming behavior in the most elegant manner possible.

CREATING AN INCOME MACHINE

This was the section of the book that got me to sit up straighter and take note, because it outlined what seems to be an excellent crash course in product test marketing, outsourcing, and fulfillment. The proof will be in my attempt to follow it, but certainly it's given me a valuable reference case study against which I can compare my own product plans.

I hadn't had the insight that the reason I wanted to create product was so I could spend more time doing something else; I was still half-clinging to the notion that my work would be my identity. Maybe instead it can be something I like that supports my adventurous lifestyle, to become an "ultravagabond" like Ferriss.

In Summary

I was just thinking that this is the rare book that I am going to recommend to all of my friends. This is probably a reflection on the kind of company I keep: I like to be around empowered, positive-minded people with dreams they're actively pursuing.

There are some challenges in implementing Ferriss' plan:

• You have to define that end game unflinchingly
• You have to be be able to communicate solutions.
• You have to be a focused, hard worker when facing all the essential tasks.
• You need to be a discerning person, otherwise you can't tell if you're moving or not

At minimum, I think one needs to be able to define a dream, and be able to measure the distance from and progress toward the goal of being one of the New Rich. Then, relentlessly following through with elimination, automation, and liberation will be possible. If you even get through one or two of these phases, I think one's life will be measurably more productive. And remember: if you can't measure it, it doesn't count.

There are some very helpful Q&A---Question and Action---sections after each chapter of the book, filled with great exercises designed to jog you out of your old perspective of fear and complacency. The entire dreamlining process, for example, is particularly delightful; it guides you through the difficult "uh, so what is it that I want to do?" part of the Definition phase.

There's lots of good stuff in the book, and I feel that my personal bar has been raised. You can listen to Ferriss' SXSW 2007 Panel Podcast for a taste, and visit the 4-Hour Work Week website for more information. It's has a kind of "marketing" vibe to it, but you can download sample chapters and order the book via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and 1-800 CEO-READ. This review just scratches the surface.

Paid Review: Data Deposit Box Continuous Online Backup

This is my first "real" paid review through the ReviewMe service. Today's topic: easy online remote backup! The product in review: Data Deposit Box from Acpana Business Systems Inc., a Canadian company based in Toronto.

Um, Where's my Files?

I'm pretty meticulous about backing up my data. When I was a happy-go-lucky kid in high school, I remember working all night on some paper or program, only to accidentally LOSE HUGE TRACTS OF IT because I forgot to save. Or I would accidentally save over the wrong file, destroying a critical fragment of my personal history. Small disasters of this kind would occassionally crop up even through grad school; I might be working on some Photoshop file on a System 8.x Mac, and then the entire computer would lock up for some unknown reason. Hours of work lost, much cursing and swearing ensued.

So I evolved. I have an automatic "save" habit that kicks in everytime I pause to reflect. I automatically save new versions of files, with new filenames, using a versioning system. I archive and copy across multiple disks on multiple computers when possible, and burn to CD. I use version control software. I've gone through great lengths to separate the operating system, applications, and data onto physically separate drives; that way, if I have to restore my operating system due to some catastrophe, my DATA will not be erased in the process.

Frankly, I'm kind of a nut about data archiving and redundancy, but normal people have better things to do with their time. Occasionally, one of them will ask me how they too can not lose all their mail every time they upgrade to a new computer, or perhaps they've experienced for the Nth time some horrible loss of an important file due to a hardware failure. I tell them what I do, and their eyes glaze over. Most people find this to be a chore, but I actually like it, for some perverse reason. It's my version of gardening, I guess.

Which is why I found the prospect of reviewing Data Deposit Box interesting. It claims to be designed specifically for non-technical people, secure via its on-the-fly data encryption, and affordable at 2 bucks per gigabyte a month, paying only for what you use. While I don't have a particular need for it, I know lots of people would rather have a service take care of this for them. Let's take a quick look.

The Basics

Data Deposit Box (DDB) runs on Windows PCs, and installs as a program that monitors certain folders of your choice. Whenever a change is made to the contents of that folder (say, your "My Documents" folder), DDB detects that and then uploads the file to their encrypted server over the Internet. The cool thing is that once you tell DDB which folders to monitor, you don't have to do a darn thing except leave your computer on long enough so it can do its thing. If you're in the habit of turning off your computer every time you are not using it, then this program will probably not work for you. I leave my computer on overnight so it can run its daily virus check, so it works well with me.

Strapping In

Because DDB runs in the background, I was particularly concerned about how well behaved it is with respect to other applications. I'm constantly running big apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Dreamweaver with Excel, Thunderbird, Firefox, and Word open in the background. I am very sensitive to any program that gets slow and bogs the computer. There are several things I check for when installing a new system-level utility like this.

1. How big is the installer? Smaller is always better. In this case, the installer was about 3.83MB, which is fairly small. Compactness is often a sign of good and lean software engineering, though it's no guarantee. If I'd seen anything greater than maybe 7MB, I would be suspicious...an overzealous marketing department perhaps loading up the software with giant images and video files in an attempt to make their product more consumer friendly.

2. Create a System Restore Point. Windows XP has the ability to create a "snapshot" of your system before you install something. You can go to PROGRAMS -> ACCESSORIES -> SYSTEM TOOLS -> SYSTEM RESTORE to access the tool and create a restore point. After I'm done experimenting with this, I'll do a restore and rollback to the state my system was in before.

3. Turn on Performance Monitoring. This is an computer administration tool, available at CONTROL PANEL -> ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS -> PERFORMANCE, that lets you monitor some of the inner processes of your computer. The ones I was watching was % Process utilitization overall and by the Data Deposit Box program itself, and also network bandwidth used. If DDB was a process hog, I'd see this plotted in real time on my monitor.

4. Turn on Process Monitoring. I just like to know what's going on, so I installed Winternals Process Monitor to watch as the program did its various things. ProcessMon tells you secret things about the computer, showing you what programs are doing at the operating system level. Perhaps I was being a little bit overzealous in my monitoring, but hey, I'm a nerd.

Then I ran the Installer, and braced myself.

The Particulars

The first thing the installer asks (after making you accept the End User License Agreement) is what folders to watch. By default it will monitor:

• My Documents
• Desktop
• Favorites
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Outlook Express
• Windows Address Book

That's a pretty good default list for most people, and you can modify it later if you wish. Since I keep all my data elsewhere, I unchecked the defautls set the folders manually after installation.

DDB installs a task tray icon that allows you to pull up the main dialog. Here's some screen shots:

The main dialog box. The main options I used were OPTIONS (to select which folders to back up and how) and RESTORE (to check that it really worked).

Here's the settings for the program. You can see you have some options on the number of versions to save per file (you can have up to 21, though I was unable to determine how to access any particular one) and how aggressive to be in terms of bandwidth and CPU hogging.

This is where you set which folders to watch. When a file changes, DDB will start uploading the changes in the background using your Internet connection.

In case you're wondering, the Advanced tab allows you to set Proxy Internet settings (if you have a proxy server that sits between you and the Internet, like at work) and where to store temporary files.

Uploading Files

After I set the folders to watch (about 35MB of files), I did some reading while watching the uploads out of the corner of my eye. The first thing DDB does when it activates is do a version check of all the files under its care; this can take a while. Then, it uploads the changed files to the server. On my cable modem connection, my upstream rate (i.e.: the fastest I can upload) is about 50K a second, so 35MB takes a bit of time to sync up. This is the kind of thing you'd probably want to run overnight, or if it's running during the day you would probably want to set the Bandwidth/CPU Allocation on the Options dialog to less than 100%.

The files are all encrypted, though I'm not sure what key it uses to encrypt them.

Restoring Files

After you've uploaded the files, you can click on the RESTORE button and get a list of files you can recover back to your computer. This seemed to work. As I mentioned, I couldn't determine how to access the versions of a file. I edited a text file a few times to see how quickly DDB would pick up on the changes and upload it. I wanted to restore the very first version, but didn't see how to do it immediately. It might be a buried option somewhere.

Sharing Folders and Files

Once your files are uploaded, you can choose to share them with people. This is not a file sharing service for MP3s, mind you (this is expressly forbidden in the EULA), but if you have a client that you'd like to provide a file to, you can do that on either the folder or file level. You can do all this through the online interface.

This part of the experience, actually, was a little less robust than the rest of the application. When you delete files, the tree view showing all my folders didn't update, so I was unsure if anything actually had happened. I forced a page refresh to see that it worked. A couple times I saw a database connection error, which was less than reassuring. The interface could use a little smoothing out, I think, but it was otherwise pretty usable.

One other note: the file sharing URLs that the system generates are ludicrously long. They're prone to wrapping in an email message, which creates problems when distributing links to people.

The Experience

Because the ReviewMe terms allowed only 2 business days to write this, I can tell you about long-term stability of the program. However, I can tell you that the experience was not bad. I didn't experience processor issue or problems with the installation, and the program did seem to work as advertised. I didn't notice anything that would make me uninstall the program immediately, which is actually kind of unusual. Any of the following are grounds for banishment from my system:

• bloatedness relative to function
• sluggishness
• ugliness
• excessive marketing
• bad UI
• excessive bugs
• unclear function
• unclear feedback about operation

I didn't experience any of that, so I would say that the desktop component was surprisingly good. There are a few confusing UI spots, but it behaved well and seemed to do the job. The help button isn't context-sensitive, for example...that's a minor quibble. I was happy that my system didn't get bogged down with this running continuously. And, it's not ugly or filled with questionably-useful graphic imagery, and I didn't get cross-sold on "other wonderful products you might be interested in".

I was a little less impressed with the robustness of the Internet side of things. It looks like a solid "Web 1.0" application, but seeing an ODBC database connection error on the "My Data" page does not fill me with good cheer. The experience is almost there, and may be above average for services of this kind, but my daily web experience revolves around Web 2.0 apps like BaseCamp, and they are shockingly robust. The bar has been raised!

What about the Cost?

This isn't a free service, so you have to weigh the cost/ease of use between their service and just buying a big external hard drive.

Data Deposit Box Pros: Works in the background, and it behaves with the rest of the system (at least, in my limited experience). Don't have to think about it, and data is sharable with other people. Backup is also offsite, so if something happens to your office, your data is safely somewhere else.

Data Deposit Box Cons: Costs money, online interface could use some tweaks, takes a relatively long time to upload data compared to using a local hard drive.

There are some other uses I can think of immediately:

1. I could set something like this up for family members under a single account (there can be as many users as you want). No relative of mine would ever lose their email again.

2. If you think of the service as file hosting, $2/gigabyte isn't that bad compared to regular web hosting. Factor in the ease of backup and sharing, and it seems quite reasonable.

So while I can't make any long-term assessments on the product, my initial impression is quite favorable. Certainly worth a look. It lasted on my system way longer than Adobe's Version Cue software, which was so slow I thought my computer had crashed. All that process monitoring software didn't raise a single red flag in my brief session.

There's a 14-day free trial available. I think I'm using it now. That reminds me, it would be nice to see some kind of feedback about how the free trial works before you hand over your credit card number...that is offputting enough for me to not even want try the service.

Again, this was a paid review booked through ReviewMe.

» Link: Data Deposit Box