Amahi Newsletter No. 3 - Backups, Outlook July 25
In this newsletter
- HDA Install Counter: 17 installs and counting!
- Backups with the HDA
- Microsoft Outlook Compatibility
- Application Ideas
Hello!
This newsletter focuses on some of the Amahi Linux Home Server applications that we’ve released over the past few weeks.
But before that we’d like to take a moment to celebrate that we have crossed past our recent target of 15 installs and we’re at 17 installs at the moment! We want to get to 20 for next week! To keep tabs on the number of installs, check out the automatic install counter!
A great deal of our time goes to ease installation - where the HDA comes up fully function at the first try. Our last three installs have been with virtually zero incidents! That means we’re going BETA!
Tell your friends! If you know of someone who would like the Amahi Linux Home Server, we’re entering a beta phase now, and we’d like to get more and more users. Thanks for making use of the HDA in your home network and for telling your friends!
We have received nearly a dozen logo submissions from the call in our previous newsletter! We will post them in our wiki soon! Logo submissions are always welcome!
Back to the HDA apps. While we’re working on new applications, we would like to highlight a few of our applications.
Backups
Have you ever had that dreaded feeling that you may have lost a hard drive that you haven’t backed up in a while or that the system may be infected with a virus? You may have your music collection, your financial information and files or worse, your precious family photos and videos.
You have two very simple ways to do backups in your HDA.
If you use Windows Vista, it comes with a straightforward way to backup your files (not the OS) regularly to the HDA. To use it, go to the Backup and restore Center (Start -> Control Panel -> Backup & Restore). In it, you can do configure settings to make Vista do backups to your HDA daily, weekly or monthly. All you have to specify is that you want to backup to the network, e.g. to \\hda\files\backups. The first time it will back up all your files. Subsequent backups are incremental: only what changed since last backup is saved. We’re looking into how to use the HDA as backup device for the Apple Mac.
The other simple backup method is the Personal Backup Assistant (or PBA). PBA helps solve some of the backup headaches - you can now backup any of the computers on your home network onto the Amahi Linux Home Server by simply booting over the network. It does full-disk backups, including OS and all! It’s not unlike Norton Ghost, but open source, and better 
- No software to install. Comes preinstalled in your HDA.
- Fast: backing up and restoring entire drives at record speeds
- Complete: PBA saves your entire disk image, including operating systems and any data partitions
- Efficient: PBA makes use of on-the-fly compression to minimize the disk usage of backups in your HDA
For more details, explore the Amahi wiki and add your own comments, feature requests and notes and suggestions for other users.
Microsoft Outlook Calendar Support
Outlook is a pervasive email and scheduling application from Microsoft. Our users have requested the ability to sync their Outlook calendar with their Amahi Linux Home Server Calendar. With Outlook synchronization, users can now display their work calendar for everyone at home providing a true representation of their schedule. Our synchronization keeps the Outlook calendar titles and details private, for those majority of users that use it at work but like to share their schedule at home.
This feature also keeps with our motto of keeping things simple by not requiring any software at all. If you use outlook, you all ready have what you need to share your schedule with the HDA!
Get all the details about Outlook synchronization support in the Amahi wiki.
Amahi Home Server Application Ideas
The Amahi team would love to hear from you on your experiences with these new applications. If you have an idea for an application, please let us know and we’ll make it happen. We have received several ideas and at least two of them have made it to the HDA quickly!
For the latest and greatest, check out our home page, our blog and our wiki, with the latest technical details. For those with a day-to-day interest of Amahi Linux Home Server news, the mailing lists (the amahi-devel in particular) are the best resource.