With the start of a new year, I’m taking a little time out of my vacation to make sure everything is safe, secure, and backed up.

First is the local backup copy. Being an OSX user, my application of choice is SuperDuper. If you are a PC user, Acronis has excellent backup software. SuperDuper is $30 and worth every penny. It lets me duplicate my hard drive to an external drive. In the case of a HD crash, I can simply boot of my external backup drive with no down time.

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper’s built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically.

A local backup copy is great, but that isn’t worth a shit if someone breaks into my house or a fire engulfs my residence. The second move is to have a remote backup copy. Online backups are really important, and up until about 3 days ago, were left out of my backup scheme. Not anymore. I am not backing up all important documents over the interwebs using BackBlaze.  If you are a PC user I recommend JungleDisk. Regardless you can look at this handy chart of online backup services to decide which is the best for you.

You download a tiny application that installs in three clicks and doesn’t require a credit card or any information to start using it. This online backup application automatically finds all your photos, music, documents, and other irreplaceable files—no matter where they are on your hard drive—and compresses and securely encrypts them. When you’re not using your computer, it sends them over the Internet to the remote Backblaze datacenters.

BackBlaze gives you unlimited storage and a handly little OSX to assist with backups for only $5/month.

So do yourself a favor and start off the new year right – make sure your data is backed up. I know I sleep better at night knowing that in the worst case scenario I can recover my files.

We use Entourage, which is Microsoft’s wanna-be Outlook app for OSX, along with Exchange for all our e-mail needs. Normally things work without a hitch, however recently a few people using Entourage started experiencing some oddities.

What started happening:

• Inbox will not sync. At all. A quick check to the webmail interface shows all the mail is there.
• Other folders such as Deleted Items, Spam, Drafts synce without issues.
• E-mail can be sent without errors.
• No errors, warnings, dialogs, etc shown.
• Other users with the exact same config experienced no problems.

After doing some quick research there is a quick fix:

• Right click  the Inbox Folder (in your Exchange account) and choose “Folder Properties”.
• Locate the “Empty Cache” section in the middle of the window.
• Click the “Empty” button.

That’s it. It will take a few minutes to resycn but once it is done things should be back to normal. Since this has only happened – randomly – to a few users I’m still not sure what caused/causes it.

Now if only Entourage wasn’t so terrible.

The downside is when you try to use IMAP instead of POP3. Things get funky – real fast. This is not a application problem, but is because Google IMAP is very non-traditional in the way it handles labels as folders as well as some other quirks.

I love the Gmail web interface, but at the same time I need a stand alone application. I use the OSX address book and need an application that can tap into that. If I want to use the Gmail web interface my only option is to regularly export my address book and import it in Gmail – something I shouldn’t have to do.

That said, I have tried a few mail apps for OSX and figured I would share my results.

Mail.app

I love Apple’s built-in Mail.app and have been using it since I switched to OSX full time over 2 years ago. It’s fast and sexy. Unfortunately it does not play nice with Gmail’s IMAP workings. If you want to use Mail.app be prepared to do a fair amount of searching to figure out the best tricks to get it working sort of working. Mail.app’s downside is handing Gmail’s labels-instead-of-folders method. From my expereince it can get ugly. At one point in time I had a configuration that worked well enough to use, but things such as my Sent folder often got out of sync just ended up causing a nightmare.

Have Snow Leopard? Good luck. I made the upgrade to Snow Leopard hoping the newest version of Mail.app improved on things. In reality, it actually got worse. A quick search revealed the new Mail.app is even more difficult to get working with Gmail IMAP. After reading this I decided not to waste more time tricking things to work right and started looking for other options.

Mailplane

If you have used Google Chrome – which means you own a PC since there is still no official Mac release (they say by year end!) – you might have played with the ability to create a “stand alone app”.  This is what Mailplane does but with a plethora of extra features. What extra features?

• Drag and drop attachments
• Use multiple Gmail accounts
• Get new mail notifications (Growl)
• Send screenshots
• Enjoy Gmail shortcuts
• Integrate with OmniFocus

If you want a stand-alone app and like the Gmail interface this app is likely for you. I used it heavily for a month (there is a free 30 day demo) and had no problems at all. Ultimately I decided not to use it because, since it is still based on Gmail’s web client, there is no address book integration.

Thunderbird

The last app I tested out, and the one I decided to ultimately stick with (for now) was Mozollia Thunderbird. I’m all for open source and use Firefox, so it seemed logical.

First I tested Thunderbird 2. This is the version you get if you just go to the main website and download. It worked, but wasn’t pretty, seemed very aged, and again – no address book support.

Then I began to Google. What is this? Thunderbird 3 you say? OSX Address Book support? Completely redesigned interface? Works with Gmail? I got excited fast.

Well here I am 2 weeks later happy to report that I am using Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 preview and it’s kicking ass and taking names. Gmail IMAP is working with minimal tweaking. Just download T3 beta 4, setup your account using the Gmail IMAP Thunderbird 2 instructions, and finally tweak a few things to follow the recommended IMAP Thunderbird 2 settings.

Hopefully this might help anyone who has been trying to get a Google IMAP usable in OSX.

My old Macbook Pro had Leopard installed on it and most programs transfered over to Snow Leopard without a hitch. One of the apps that did give me some issues was Quicksilver. The main problem I had is the preference panel was blank.

After some googling it was revealed that this was a pretty common problem. Users performing a fresh install of Quicksilver also are experiencing other problems as well.

To get Quicksilver and Snow Leopard to play nice just downloaded the latest build, Quicksilver-b56a7.tar.gz, from their Google code repo. Everything was smooth sailing once I used that build!