I’ve been connecting it to my machines via Firewire and it’s been rocking for about a year and a half. I even took it to San Francisco with me although it ended up putting me way over the luggage limit. But I had my data with me.

Carrying my data around like that is really annoying. It should be in the cloud. But we’re talking almost 600gb of stuff which takes a little while to upload.

About two months ago the Iomega ‘UltraMax’ started to make funny noises. Uh oh.

“I’ll just get my data off it,” I thought, before finding that it was screwed. Completely screwed.

So having used it as a backup for a lot of my data, I begun looking around for hard disk recovering services in the area.

Until this afternoon. I plugged it in — this time via USB 2.0 — and had a look.

It’s still making horrible noises now and again, BUT I am able to access it. So I’m taking as much as possible off it right now. Phew. I’ve got the data back. Time to stick it in the cloud.

I’ve been arsing about with Encoding.com to try and see if there is a simpler way of managing the Mobile Industry Review videos. We are publishing a video-per-day at the moment and each video is produced in four formats. Which means muggins here has to sit and click export four times from iMovie.

This is annoying. Every day.

Then I have to upload the files. Almost a gig. A day. Ultra annoying.

Both Dan and Ben have been suggesting I use HeyWatch or Encoding.com. The ideas sound great — but the reality is somewhat different.

I logged into Encoding.com after registering for $10/month. And found the shittest SaaS interface I’ve seen. It’s definitely not consumer. Or prosumer. Or anywhere near that. I had to arse about hunting for the right ftp format and after a few minutes fiddling, managed to get the stupid Encoding.com system to retrieve a demo video file from a server, process it in ‘Apple TV format’ and send it back to a different directory on my server.

Only, the sound was screwed on the video. And the aspect ratio had changed.

There are a billion different sodding options on Encoding.com for all this. I just want it done and I can’t be bothered trying to learn how it works.

Very disappointing for me — but I’m sure it’s perfect if you’ve got a degree in nuclear physics or a team of techies ready to sit and play.

So I’ve stuck a dollar’s worth of credit on to HeyWatch and I’m now trying the same experiment.

I want an original video produced in three other formats. Can’t be that difficult, can it?

I discovered HeyWatch is a lot more consumer/prosumer friendly. Nicer interface that I can understand without having to dig into the support options. However, after playing around, I think I will just stick with what I’ve been doing.

The array of export options is bewildering. iPod 16:9 iPod 4:3? I simply don’t want to sit and spend an afternoon testing.

So I shall sit and press export four times every day for the foreseeable future.

I’m active online, particularly on SMS Text News.