Dropbox is a great backup solution. (If you want an invite, which gives you and the inviter extra storage space, let me know at the email below.) And recently, Skydrive from Microsoft, has pretty much caught up with Dropbox. The down side of Skydrive is the old Microsoft ideology that they need to shut out competing technologies — it won’t work with XP, even. MS wants you to have Windows 7. Still, Skydrive has great value to me, in that being backup-crazy, I can backup my dropbox there.

Yeah — I am backing up my backup.

Initially, I was just copying my Dropbox contents to my Skydrive folder on my Windows 7 machine. Skydrive loaded it onto the cloud invisibly. That was great. But then when I wanted to do that again, Windows, naturally, wanted to merge the contents. That’s not what I want. If I delete a file  from my Dropbox folder, I don’t want it on my Skydrive. I want a mirrored backup.

My solution? Download and install my old friend FreeFileSync.

In the settings area…

I chose MIRROR.

Run freefilesync and mirror the Dropbox contents to the  Skyline folder. Then Skyline completes the backup to their cloud.

I know — I am backup-crazed.

EDIT: One note — you might want to EXCLUDE your Windows Skydrive from Windows 7 search index. Otherwise, you may accidentally edit a file in your skydrive and then preform the mirror of your dropbox to skydrive and overwrite the edits. You can learn how to exclude a folder from Windows search here.

Again, if you want an invite to dropbox, email me. Being invited gives you greater storage space than just signing up.

There are several things that confuse me about this. First, why does Yahoo think May 5, 2012 is a Tuesday. And second why does yahoo think 10.xxx.xxx.xxx would be an internet IP?

In any case, I changed my password.

I had a little LED light I bought at a checkout in my local hardware store for $1.99. When I stopped at a local outdoors store, I found the device to attach it.

Initially I attached it down near the pump. That caused the barrel to cast a significant shadow. Moving it near the muzzle eliminated the shadow.

Total cost: $10 and change.

JuiceDefender tech support told people to remove the JuiceDefender.backup file in the download folder on the SD card, and then to install the latest beta of JuiceDefender. What I was doing was uninstalling JuiceDefender first, and then when I looked for the backup, it was nowhere to be found. Still – they were right. The culprit was the JuiceDefender.backup file. I just couldn’t delete it because the uninstall deletes it for you.

What I didn’t think of was that Google holds the file in the cloud. When I reinstalled any version of JuiceDefender, the corrupted backup was restored to the folder and the problem persisted.

The solution was simple.

1. I reinstalled the beta and did not run the app. The reinstall pulled the backup file from the cloud to my SD card.
2. I navigated to the download folder on my SD card (Sure enough, it was over a week old — about as old as this problem) and deleted the JuiceDefender.backup file. This action evidently deleted it from the cloud.
3. I uninstalled JuiceDefender and rebooted (power down and back up) the phone.
4. I reinstalled JuiceDefender.

I can now turn data off and on via the JuiceDefender “Toggle mobile data” widget.

After poking around the web, I found a suggestion that you login to Picasa and then it will work.  Yeah, right — how can that fix it?

I don’t know, but it did.

I fixed Google+ Instant Upload simply by logging into Picasa on my desktop.