Update 12/1/12: I made some minor revisions and improvements and described it at the changes in the Update section of this article.

Over the years, I have owned a number of “sporty cars”: a 1992 Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX, a 2004 Mazda RX-8 and most recently a 2002 Chevrolet Corvette Z06, which I drive today. I am also apologetically geeky. Over the years, I’ve wanted to be able to use various computing devices (Palm Pilots, Laptops, Smartphones, etc.) to display and capture data from my cars’ computers (ECU).

On each of my cars, this possibility existed. But it usually involved hardware, up to and including an entire replacement of the car’s computing system. Depending on the vehicle, I found that the hardware was generally expensive, difficult to use, not quite what I had in mind, and most of all a ton of labor to get set up.

Things began to change in 1996 when the ODB2 standard was adopted for all cars sold in the United States. A common universal interface made this data much more accessible and inexpensive for everyone to access. Combined with the explosion of mobile computing (smartphones, tablets, netbooks, cheap laptops, etc.) the functionality has really improved over the last 10 years.

This article is ultimately very similar to what I talked about in my Ultimate Car Dock series (part 1, part 2) however this article’s purpose is to use your Android smart phone purposefully for displaying and logging information from the car’s ECU.

Objective

To create and automate a Car Dock profile, which automatically opens an app to both display data read from the ECU and capture it to a log file and then sync that log file up to a cloud-based storage service like DropBox

Requirements

Hardware

• Phone Holder/Mount: I have written a bit about the different kinds of phone mounts that I have experimented with over the years. Hopefully this is a good starting point for shopping for your own phone mount. The holder certainly is not required but I definitely recommend one. At the very least, get a friend to hold your phone and keep his or her eyes on it for you when the vehicle is moving.
• Android Smart Phone: Just about any “modern” Android phone will do here the important features are going to be Bluetooth and a nice display.
• Bluetooth ODB2 Adapter: There are options available here: very inexpensive Bluetooth ODB2 adapters are readily available on eBay if you go this route. What you will want to search for is ‘ELM 327’. From what I have read and experienced, these are a mixed bag. I had one myself that worked most of the time, but whenever I really wanted to use it, I had to wrestle with my phone in order to get it to pair up. For my phone, I wound up going with the PLX KIWI Bluetooth based off of a recommendation from another friend and the fact that the location of the ODB2 port on the Z06 was a little inconvenient for the size and shape of my ELM 327.

Software

• Tasker: As I have raved about in a number of my articles, Tasker is my favorite Android app of all time. In order to create this Gearhead-themed Car Dock profile, I will rely on Tasker’s functionality to determine when the phone is in the car, enable Bluetooth and launch the ODB2 app.
• Torque: Of all the ODB2 apps available on the Google Play Store, Torque seems to stand above the rest. I have used it for quite some time and it definitely has the options to display and log the data the way I want.
• DropSync: The DropSync application can function as a Tasker Plugin. For the purpose of this blog, I have selected the free version of this particular app and I will work around the limitations of the free app.

Installation and Configuration

The next step is to mount your phone’s car dock and your Bluetooth ODB2 adapter, I covered my installation in an earlier article. Your installation will vary depending on your vehicle and your mounting hardware

Torque

Setting up Torque is probably easiest if the majority of it is done from your vehicle with it turned on. This will make sure all of the data that is being read from the sensors will be populated in Torque and give you a good idea of what is or is not available from your ECU.

Getting Started

First, head on over to the Getting Started page on the Torque WIKI to get Torque paired up with your ODB2 Reader.

Setting up your Torque Dashboard

1. Select the Realtime Information and it’ll take a dashboard of pre-set gauges. Press and hold on an empty part of the dashboard and it’ll bring up a menu.
2. Select “Add Display”
3. From the options available, select the gauge style you want to add.
4. Choose a sensor with the gauge. Items highlighted in green are things that are available. Keep in mind that some of the sensors are on your phone.
5. Select the size of the display.
6. Move the gauge to the position on the dashboard you want it at.
7. Repeat steps 2 through 6 until you’ve filled up your available dashboards with all the gauges you want.

Configuring Torque Data Logging Options

1. Use the back button to exit back to the Main Torque screen
2. Hit your menu button and select “Settings”
3. Scroll down and choose “Data Logging & Upload”
4. Hit Select What to log
5. Hit the Menu button and select “Add PID” to log
6. Scroll through the list of available sensors to choose to data log.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for as many sensors you want written to your log.
8. Make sure the following boxes are selected:
9. Log when Torque is started
10. Only when ODB connected
11. Rotate Log Files

Other Torque Settings

1. Under General Preferences, select the “Startup in Dashboard” option

DropSync

1. Open DropSync and click the “Link with Dropbox” button
2. Select “Allow” when Dropbox prompts you asking about permissions
3. Select the local folder where Torque is saving its logs (/storage/sdcard0/torqueLogs on my phone)
4. Select the DropBox folder to sync the logs to
5. Make sure Two-way is displayed for the sync method and hit “Next”

6. Select “Done,” and DropSync will begin syncing

   Note: The free version of DropSync will only sync up one folder on your phone with one DropBox folder, plus it will not transmit any files over 5mb. Based off the size of the Torque log files that I have created since starting work on this blog, I think the free version will work for this purpose.

Tasker

We have configured Torque to automatically open up in its Dashboard and also to start a new data log once it connects to the ECU. Additionally, we have used DropSync to pair up the local Torque logs folder with a folder up on your DropBox account.

What we need to do at this point is to use Tasker to perform the following: detect when your phone is in the Car, then open the Torque application to begin the displaying and logging the data from your ECU, and finally determine to force sync your data logs folder.

1. Open Tasker and select the “Profiles” tab.
2. Click the Plus button to create a new Profile
3. Name your profile and hit the green check.
4. In the First Context menu select, “State”
5. Select “Sensor”
6. Select “Orientation,” then select the orientation that your phone will be in in its car dock.
7. Select “New Task,” leave the Name empty and hit the Green Check icon
8. Underneath “App,” use the Load App and select “Torque” from the list of apps. Hit the green check to get back to the Profiles screen.
9. Briefly touch where it says “Orientation: Right Side” to bring up the Context Options menu.
10. Select “Add”
11. Select “State”
12. Select “Power,” change the source to “Any” and hit the Green Check icon.
13. Briefly touch where it says “Load App Torque…” to bring up the Task Options menu
14. Select “Add Exit Task”, choose “New Task,” leave the name empty and hit the Green Check
15. Add a new task, select “Misc,” then “Send Intent,” and type the following where it says “Action”: org.prowl.torque.REQUEST_TORQUE_QUIT
16. Add an additional task, select “Plugin”, pick “DropSync”, hit the “Edit Configuration” button and select “Sync Now” from the dropdown; use your back button to move back to the Dropsync Tasker configuration and hit the Green Check

Demonstration

Here is a video I took of this in action. It was recorded at night in pretty poor lighting, so the video is a little out of focus and hard to see. However, you will see me put the phone into the car dock, it opens the Torque app which starts up in the dashboard with the gauges that I had selected. Because they wind up slightly out of focus, here’s the gauges I had selected:

• Top Row: Throttle Position, Coolant Temperature, Timing Advance, Voltage
• Bottom Row: Intake Temperature, Intake Pressure, O2 (Left), O2 (Right)

You cannot make it out from the video, but at the very end after removing the phone from the car mount, the DropSync synchronization functionality got kicked off and pushed all of the new log files up to my DropBox account.

Final Thoughts

At first, working with Torque seemed a little persnickety; every now and then when it starts up, the screen flickers a little bit (like you see in the video). Plus, I had some difficulty getting the app to quit nicely when undocking. I took some of these quirks to the Torque support forum and the developer was extremely responsive and helped me work around the ones that were bothering me the most.

I also wound up including some of the other features of my earlier car dock blogs into this profile plus one new one:

• Turn on my phone’s WiFi hotspot (new)
• Update my GTalk Status and custom Message
• Disable the screen timeout

While I really like how easy DropSync was to get working and I love that the Free version is functional enough to do what I wanted it to for this blog, this app got me searching around the market and I found there are lots of other similar apps that cost less than DropSync Pro. Primarily, I’ve been looking at FolderSync, which supports multiple cloud storage services than just DropBox and it is half the price of DropSync pro. I have been using FolderSync’s paid version now for awhile and I am pretty pleased.

If you have any comments, questions, or improvements or if you would like to share how you are using your Android phone in the car, please share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Updates

12/01/12: Thanks to the help of the developer responsible for Torque, I have been able to address one of my gripes about working with Torque. I could not find a reliable method when exiting the Torque app to exit the application. Tasker’s Kill App action did not seem to put the kibosh on Torque the way that I would have wanted it to. Fortunately for us, the developer created a quit Intent that allows me to force the app to quit. I have updated the blog above to add steps on how I did that.

Since the beginning of the month, I have been contemplating the spirit of Movember whose origins are to raise awareness for men’s health issues. If you are interested, you can donate directly on the Movember.com website. To a lesser and more entertaining extent, I thought this would be an excellent chance to make a fool out of myself, and I decided that I would grow a mustache, take daily photos and keep a blog up-to-date with my progress. Half of Movember had elapsed before I decided to join the fray, but I’m determined to extend my Movember on to the end of the year to make up for lost time.

I have made several attempts in the past at growing some sort of facial hair. In the past, I have not really had much success in said growth. Despite sharing some DNA with quite a few mustachioed fellas my attempts have always come up a bit short (or in my case thin). My brother grew a ‘stache in the last couple of years and I gave him a good-natured hard time early on. Since we will see him in a few days for Thanksgiving, I am preparing to take it as well as I could dish it out.

Warning: Before you read or scroll down any further, please be prepared for some particularly terrible self-photography. Not only that but the subject of that photography is my ugly mug. Please proceed at your own risk.

Week One

Week one seems pretty encouraging so far, which is par for course based on my prior attempts. Although despite tweeting and posting it on my Facebook page my darling wife asked me on the third day, “Is there some dirt or something on your lip?” and it was not until day five or six when a co-worker asked politely but incredulously, “Are you trying to grow a mustache?”

Week Two

The second week progressed slowly. I know it progressed slowly because now I have pictures of both day 7 and day 14, there is definitely progress in those seven days, but you have to look hard to see it. I took some good-natured (and well-deserved) ribbing from my family at our Thanksgiving gathering. On that theme, I thought I would give some mustache-themed thanks: I am thankful that my adorable niece could get a fistful of my mustache, I am thankful that food was ensnared in my mustache (it’s like portable leftovers!), and lastly I am thankful that I got to spend the time with my family. A great week of vacation and family and a less-great week of mustache growth.

Week Three

Week three can be summed up very well by this video, I could have used some encouragement from my friends like the encouragement that Nick Offerman offers to his fellow Movember-mates. Week three also contained the conclusion of Movember. I intend to keep this up, so I can gauge when my Movember should start next year (I am thinking August or September)

I am conflicted; I would really like to continue to keep growing the mustache. However, two very important factors came up during week three. Firstly my wife has begun objecting to the mustache protesting every time I give her a kiss. Seeing as how Christmas is in a few weeks, I am wondering if my mustache might keep some presents out from under the tree. Secondly, I have had a job opportunity (or two) pop up seemingly out of nowhere recently, and there is a very likely chance that I will have a job interview in the next few days. You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and I think my “middle-school lip dirt” might not go over quite the way I intend although, it may be a good conversation piece and a chance to set me out from the crowd—you never know. Instead of counting my chickens before they hatch, I plan to keep going at least until my wife is on the verge of exasperation.

Week Four

Well week four wound up being not much of a week after all. Originally, I said I was going to take this to completion or humiliation. Unfortunately, life got in the way of my mustache (and its blog). It looks like I will have a job interview or two in the next week or so, and rather than creep the poor Human Resources managers who have to sit in on the interviews, I decided not to creep them out. As superficial as it seems, I believe in making that positive first impression. All this being said, I plan to start next year’s Movember and document from day one again. This time, I also want to get involved and try and raise some money for the cause. This has been fun; I look forward to seeing what happens next year.

Progress in Pictures

I have been using my Samsung Galaxy S3 to take two pictures on a (mostly) daily basis: a picture of my fine self in the mirror, and then a close-up of my face using the front-facing camera. I may miss a day or two, or I may forget to take one kind of picture, but I plan to take at least one photo every day and update the slideshow on a daily basis until I have achieved my mustache.

Self-shot in The Mirror

Extreme Mustache Closeup

Catchup

About a year ago, I started wishing that I had some sort of reliable and redundant backup for the computers in the house. So much so, that I spent almost all of my 2012 computer budget on completing the project. Instead of replacing one of our aging computers, I went ahead and built a NAS. I wrote a series of articles documenting much of my process. Because the amount of time this project has been in flight a summary was in order. For those of you interested in the nitty-gritty details here’s a detailing of each of the articles in this series:

• Building a NAS: Choosing Hardware
• Building a NAS: Assembly & Configuration
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part One
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part Two
• Backing up Windows Machines to FreeNAS: Part Three

Hardware

Originally, I had started out by being very interested in the fantastic products that Drobo has been selling. Over the years I have been following what they have brought to market and have always had an eye on their products. Unfortunately for me, I felt that they were a little on the expensive side and outside of what I could justify spending.

Fortunately for me, open source alternatives exist. A friend of mine wound up introducing me to FreeNAS, which offered me many of the features that Drobo offered and a number more. I wound up building a machine using a dual core 1.66GHz mini-ITX motherboard, 8 gigabytes of RAM, four different 2.0 TB drives for storage, a flash drive to house FreeNAS and tucked all of that into a nice little case from Lian-Li .

The Great Hard Drive Shortage of 2011

One of the things that really set me back in this build was that I wound up paying a premium for the hard drives. This is due to the hard drive shortage of 2011. I had bought a 2 TB drive almost a year prior for cheaper than I wound up getting any of the drives for my FreeNAS box. In total, hard drives wound up accounting for 61% of the total hardware cost.

Power Consumption

Typically, I would expect most FreeNAS users to be building their NAS boxes out of recycled hardware and spare parts. Because I’ve been on a laptop-buying spree the past few years, I did not have the cache of spare parts I would have needed to build the NAS. Because I had to buy new parts, I tried to pick a low-power motherboard and power supply. I did this primarily for one reason: to save electricity. Ideally, the power I save would eventually pay for my hardware. A friend of mine owns a Kill-a-Watt and he recently built a fascinating arcade cabinet out of recycled computer parts which he also uses as a NAS.

We hooked both his NAS and my FreeNAS machine up to the Kill-A-Watt ran some file read/write operations to each NAS and tried to make sure that all four drives were active. Over a two or three hour time span, my friend’s NAS was using around 99.2 watts and my FreeNAS was using around 41.2 watts. Based on my latest electrical bill that works out to a savings of nearly $75.00 a year by going with the low power motherboard. In comparison with the Drobo S the FreeNAS box uses 27% less power (41.2 watts vs 56 watts) with all four drives in action.

Software

Ultimately, I wound up obtaining two different types of software for this project. Firstly, the software which managed the NAS, FreeNAS and secondly Genie Timeline Pro for backing up the machines in my house. Of the two, Genie Timeline Pro was the easiest to set up and use, but I would hope and expect that to be the case. FreeNAS was more difficult to configure and get set up, but none of the difficulties I had were related to the product itself; my obstacles were a result of my general unfamiliarity with the Linux universe. I have not had to touch the FreeNAS configuration since I finished it back in the spring.

I have been running Genie Timeline Professional on my primary desktop since the beginning of March and this weekend,I went through and installed the software on my laptop and on my wife’s desktop. In addition to that, I created a “home” folder on the FreeNAS box for each user to store files on. Right now, there’s a little over three terabytes of free space still available. I have been both lucky and smart and have not had to recover anything from my backup. But now that I have made that claim I am pretty certain that a data disaster is in my immediate future.

Total Cost

I wound up splurging on an expensive case, and the shortage caused my four hard drives’ price to be inflated. In the end, I wound up spending just under $1000 total. This includes all of the hardware, which included nearly five hundred dollars worth of hard drives, three licenses of Genie Timeline Pro, and then three upgrade licenses to Genie Timeline Pro 2012 which came out recently.

In comparison, the comparable Drobo devices range between $400 and $850 dollars, which is between $100 and $550 dollars more than I spent on the hardware that is running my NAS. On top of that, my machine has gigabit Ethernet and room for at least two more hard drives, you have to move all the way up into Drobo’s enterprise product offerings to find one with a gigabit option with as many drives. If you bought the least expensive Drobo device available, spent the same amount on hard drives and the Genie Timeline Pro licenses you would wind up with a fancy 4 drive redundant mass storage USB device that would have cost around $100 more than I wound up spending and that device would not have any room for additional drives down the road. Plus that Drobo device would wind up costing around 35% more in electricity costs.

Conclusion

Because of FreeNAS being Open Source I was able to save a ton of money in this build. This savings enabled me to build a storage device that beats the pants off the devices I compared it to. If you are interested in building a device out of spare parts, I suggest strongly that you take power consumption into consideration and try to include that into your pricing calculations. Now that an entire year has passed, hopefully low-power parts have decreased in price and incorporated additional capacity. I would encourage everyone to consider FreeNAS for their own attached storage needs.

In part one of this series, I tackled talking about some of the particulars in picking out the hardware for your car’s phone mount. In this article, I am going to focus on unleashing some of the features that Android has to offer. I have made every attempt at building this so that every Android user can do it without having to unlock the features that are only accessible after rooting the phone.

For what it is worth, I own a Samsung Galaxy S3 from T-Mobile. Because there is quite a bit of variation between hardware and software in the Android universe, you may find that some options do not exist for your phone, or hopefully that better options exist for your phones.

What I want from my Docked Phone

Ultimately, what I want from my phone is a few things. In all my tinkering in the past, I’ve learned that some of it is just not possible, and some if it I will not be able to do without replacing things in my car, but before I get into that I wanted to describe my ideal docked cell phone. If you are thinking of doing the same thing, I suggest you sit down and describe your ideal as well:

1. The phone will wake the screen and unlock when docked. Because the dock is powered, I want the screen to remain on the entire time it is docked.

2. Car Mode will get triggered on the phone, which should enable Google’s Car Home app. This app is listed as not compatible with my device, so I had to follow these directions to install it manually.

3. The phone will pair up via bluetooth to two devices: my head unit so that I could listen to Google Music over A2DP and control the phone over AVRCP and my PLX Kiwi Bluetooth ODBII reader for data logging from my car’s ECU via the Torque app.

4. Update my Google Hangouts (fka Talk) status on the phone to busy and set my custom message to “Driving”

Limitations

Unfortunately, I do not (yet) have a bluetooth head unit. Bluetooth is becoming a pretty common feature in newer cars and it is also pretty common feature to find on aftermarket head units. More and more the music on our portable devices is much better than what is available in our cars, so why not strive to find a way to play the music from our phones through the car’s audio system?

Additionally, I am not aware of a method to automatically unlock the phone. I think I have a pretty creative way to work around this, but it is a workaround. Maybe some day Google will give us a method to unlock the phone that I can incorporate into my phone dock, but for now, my “workaround” will have to suffice.

Apps Used to Build Ultimate Car Dock

In order to accomplish, I tried to focus on apps that were free in the Google Play Store. In some cases, I chose to go with paid apps only because they were critical to accomplishing the task at hand:

Required

• Tasker: Tasker is the app that is all of brains and smarts behind the Ultimate Car Dock profile. Tasker’s the only paid app in the list. I have used Tasker for an enormous variety of purposes and is by far the best app I’ve ever purchased.
• Google’s Car Home: Car Home works with the Android Car Mode and replaces your default Android launcher with a more driver-friendly version. It makes using the phone in the car much easier.
• Locale GTalk Plug-in: This plug-in app works with both Tasker and Locale and can be used to set your GTalk status and custom status messages.

Optional

• Torque: Torque is the app that works with the PLX Kiwi Bluetooth ODBII reader to do my data logging and displaying from the car’s ECU.

Creating the Car Dock Profile in Tasker

Profiles are my favorite feature in Tasker. You can use an event to trigger a profile. When that trigger happens, you can define entrance events and events when you exit that trigger. Here are the steps you can take to create your Car Dock profile.

Creating the Ultimate Car Dock Profile

1. Open Tasker
2. Select the Profiles tab.
3. Click the icon that looks like a Green Plus Sign to create a new Profile.
4. Name the new profile Ultimate Car Dock.
5. Select State for your first context.
6. Select Power, and then pick Power from the Select Power Action screen.
7. In the Source drop down, select Any and hit the Green Check button
8. In the Task Selection dialog, select New Task and press the Green Check (don’t provide a name)
9. Define each of the actions to be executed when the phone enters “Car Mode” for each new action hit the Plus sign button
10. Display > Stay On > With AC or USB Power
11. Plugin > GTalk > Click Edit > Change GTalk Status and Custom Message (Note:You will have to provide your GTalk credentials the 1st time you set this up)
12. Net > Bluetooth > Set:On
13. Display > Car Mode > Set:On, and Check Go Home
14. Press the Green Check when done adding actions to the Entrance Task
15. Add additional criteria to trigger the Ultimate Car Dock Profile by touching where it says Power Any underneath Ultimate Car Dock.
16. On the Context Options click Add.
17. Chose State from the Add Context dialog.

18. Select Sensor, select Orientation and pick the appropriate value for the position inside your Car Dock

    NOTE: I chose orientation, because it worked best with my setup. If you have bluetooth available in your car, it might be worthy to use it instead. (State > Net > Bluetooth Connected > Your BT Device Details Here)

19. Touch where it says Car Dock On underneath Ultimate Car Dock.
20. Select Add Exit Task then select New Task from Task Selection menu and press the Green Check (don’t provide a name)
21. Define each of the actions to be executed when the phone enters “Car Mode.” For each new action, hit the Plus sign button
22. Display > Stay On > Never
23. Plugin > GTalk > Click Edit > Change GTalk Status and Custom Message
24. Net > Bluetooth > Set:Off
25. Display > Car Mode > Set:Off, and Check Go Home
26. Press the Green Check when done adding actions to the Exit Task.
27. Turn Task off and then back on by toggling the On button
28. Dock your phone

Automatic Unlock “Workaround”

Because I can’t automatically unlock my phone when docking it, I decided to go ahead and workaround this by permanently disabling the Lock Screen. I was originally concerned with the phone turning on in my pocket continually as it might drain the battery unnecessarily and I may accidentally pocket dial someone from my contact list. But I felt the risk of this was low, since the phone goes to sleep after a short period of time.

I had really wanted to manage whether the lock screen was enabled or not with Tasker, but I found the Tasker option to change the keyguard to be really persnickety. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it would not. There was a note in the manual saying that you needed to disable the keyguard in the Android settings, but when I did that, the lock screen was just permanently off all the time.

For the time being, permanently off is fine with me when it means that my phone wakes up and is usable once I dock it in my phone mount.

Conclusion

And there you have it: a robust Ultimate Car Dock mode for your Android phone. What I have described above has worked well so far for me. Furthemore, using Tasker, it can be customized however you see fit. Regardless of your car mount, your phone, and your preferences, the possibilities are endless. If you refer to the Tasker WIKI, you can start to get an idea of the numerous options available to use.

Please feel free to use the blog comments to share your own Ultimate Car Dock!

Every day, more and more people are switching to smartphones and with every new smartphone they are becoming more powerful and more useful. I have been on a somewhat Quixotic quest to integrate the use of my phone into the use and operation of my car. This quest started out with with me attempting to add Bluetooth to my ‘04 Mazda RX-8 and recently lead me to experimenting with NFC tags with disappointing results. My continuing quest has resulted in what I believe to be a pretty remarkable phone dock.

For those of you who notice that there’s some incongruity in my car posts: I recently traded in the RX-8, so the photos are all of my “new” car, a ‘02 Chevrolet Corvette Z06. Please do not be alarmed.

Phone Mount Hardware

Because phones come in so many different shapes and sizes there are almost an infinite amount of choices when it comes to picking out hardware to mount your phone in your car. As long as you are pragmatic in the selection of your phone hardware it is pretty easy to pick the right option for you. In my years of owning Android phones, I have tried or researched a number of different styles of mounts.

• Binder Clip Phone Mount: Until recently, this was by far my favorite phone mount. Firstly, it was dirt cheap, we only had to rummage around in my office supplies and through my wife’s hair accessories in order to build it. Secondly, it worked really well and it worked for a number of different phones over the years.

• Windshield Suction Mounts: I have never been a fan of these kinds of mounts because of the obstruction that they are. I like having the entire windshield clear and unobstructed. But, on the plus side they are pretty easy to install.

• Gooseneck Cigarette-lighter Adapter: When I bought a mount of this style, I was originally pretty excited. However, what I found out was that when the phone was mounted it put an amount of weight on the end of that device and turned into a pendulum of sorts. When I was driving and using this mount it was not uncommon for the entire mount to rotate 90 degrees and have the phone either come out of the dock or land in the passenger seat. I am not sure if this is a common problem with this style of mount, or if I just had a low-quality model.

• CD Groove Mount: I found these during my most recent round of phone mount research. Unfortunately, it would not work for me, since I have an aftermarket head unit where the display flips down to expose the CD player. However, I found the concept intriguing.

• ProClipUSA: For my Galaxy S3, this is what I decided to go ahead and buy. They sell mounts specific to both the model of your car and the model of your phone. They have phone-mount options that include a 12-Volt adapter that you can hard wire into your vehicle’s electrical system to provide power.

Over the years, I have learned a few things about buying Car Mounts:

1. Avoid anything “Universal” like the plague. I have yet to own a “universal” car mount that worked well universally. Sure, it may have held my phone, but never particularly well (especially if your phone was not close to iPhone dimensions), and the mounts are always entirely too bulky.

2. Find your comfort level for installation. Do not buy the mount that requires taking apart your dashboard in order to install it if you don’t feel comfortable doing that work. And on the flipside, try not to buy the phone mount that installs the quickest if you are inclined to do a more complex installation. In the event that you buy a universal mount try and research to find other users with your same model phone to see how well it has been received.

3. If at all possible, do your shopping in person. The quality of the materials used and the assembly are much easier to determine when shopping in person. This is one of those cases where you benefit from going out and holding it in your own hands before you buy it. If you are an online shopper, then find a model that you like, note it down and shop online.

4. Read reviews, scour forums, etc. This is how I found my mount from ProClipUSA. I bounced around a few phone forums and a few car forums. This mount seemed to be the one that people recommended most frequently.

Installing the ProClip car mount hardware was pretty painless. What we wound up doing was splicing into one of the cigarette lighter sockets wiring to power the phone mount. We ran the wires for the ProClip AC adapter into and out of the glove box. I picked the glove box in the hope that, if another phone required a different AC adapter, I could avoid taking apart the car’s center console again. But even if I had to, it would not be a tremendous amount of effort.

Coming up Next

In this particular case, the really neat and fun part of the Ultimate Car Dock for Android Phones all lies within the software on the phone. In the next article, we’ll tackle using a few different Android apps and complete the ultimate Android Car Dock.

When Near Field Communication (or NFC) was announced as one of the hardware features for the next generation of mobile phones, I was first really excited because I like new toys and gadgets. But as more time passed between the announcements and the expiration of my wireless contract, I had a hard time getting excited about what I would wind up using NFC for.

The prospect of cardless payments, like with Google Wallet is somewhat interesting. Because I very routinely root, flash and modify my Android devices, I am more than a little hesitant to link my credit cards to my phone. Plus, I am always misplacing (but rarely losing) my phone, and it is already stressful enough when the phone goes AWOL. I would hate to compound that stress with having to worry about credit cards linked to the phone.

My common sense was tingling and it seemed to be telling me the same thing that Apple has said by leaving NFC off of the iPhone 5. NFC is nifty, but not really a significant feature for mobile devices. Samsung has been bombarding us in recent weeks about what an important feature NFC is:

Some of the social aspects of NFC advertised seem interesting but if I need to share a picture, playlist or other file with someone, it seems like there a bunch of easier ways to share it than opening an app and touching the phones together.

As I usually do with new purchases I’m excited about, I ignored my tingling common sense and I bought both a Nexus 7 and a Samsung Galaxy S3 pretty much on Day 0 of both devices, mostly because I wanted a new tablet and a new phone but partially because I was excited to tinker with NFC. And for those months, I have been trying to think of how I can make use of NFC.

I eventually decided that I thought NFC would allow me to be able to automate things when I put my phone into my car mount. If you are a frequent visitor, you’ll remember that I recently blogged about manually installing the Google Car Home app.

I went to Tagstand and I bought an assortment of NFC tags just to play with them. Specifically I was after a durable NFC tag that’d match the color of my phone holder without being too obvious. I wound up settling on the Laundry Token Type 2 NFC Tag because it seemed like it would be the correct size and color. In my shopping for NFC tags they all seemed to hover right around $1.00-$1.50 per, depending on how durable it was and how much memory the tag had available. The Laundry Token tag was a bit more expensive, at $2.05 each.

After that, I collected a few Android apps that I thought would wind up being useful:

• Tasker: Hands down one of my favorite apps in the entire market. I cannot really summarize the endless numbers of things that Tasker can do to
• Trigger formerly known as ‘NFC Task Launcher’: There are a great number of things that this app can do, but the most important feature that I found was that it could be used to launch Tasker actions, which is at the root of what I wanted to use. This app would be used to write to the tag and would determine what gets triggered when the device scans the tag.
• Locale GTalk Plugin: This little app can set your GTalk status and update the custom message.

This is what I wanted to happen when I placed my phone in the car mount:

1. Unlock the screen
2. Disable the screen timeout
3. Open the Google Car Home app
4. Set my GTalk status as busy and a my custom message to say “Driving.”

This is where I began to start running into a few different troubles.

What I Wanted does not seem to be Attainable

The most frustrating thing that I wound up running into is that I could not get the phone to unlock itself when docked. This was something that I was really hoping I could find a method for (kudos to anyone who shares a method). The closest I got was disabling the keyguard that disables the lock screen but that does not take effect until after you unlock the phone. From a security standpoint, it makes perfect sense that you would want to prevent someone from circumventing the lockscreen by toggling this option but it was disappointing nonetheless.

Devices Detect when an NFC Tag is near but do not report when the NFC tag goes out of range

Tasker’s best feature is its Profiles. You create a profile based on an event, like, a location, a time of day, the proximity sensor, etc. (the possibilities are almost endless). When that event is met, Tasker performs certain actions, and when that event is no longer met, Tasker performs the exit actions. For example, I have a profile for when I’m near work. It sets my ringtone and notifications to things that are work-appropriate, turns the volume way down and sets my Google Talk status to “@Work”. When I get far enough away from work, it sets my ringtone back to the Knight Rider theme, my notifications to something annoying, notches the volume back up a few ticks and clears my Google Talk status.

My original hope was that I could use the proximity of a particularly coded NFC tag to be the driver for my Tasker profile. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I could use the proximity of the NFC tag to trigger a Tasker task, but I could not easily build a profile around it.

In theory, you could use the NFC tag to set a Tasker variable for the Car Dock is true. Assuming that you’ve also plugged the phone into power, you could create a profile whose criteria was that the phone was powered and that the Tasker variable was true. One of the exit steps of that profile would be to set the Car Dock value to false. In that scenario, as long as you plugged the phone in and were close enough to the NFC tag at the same time, you would enter your Car Dock profile. This would work in theory but there were enough likely scenarios that made me think this might not be useful. For example, depending on how your phone is being powered by your car, it is very likely that you would briefly lose power when you cranked the ignition. If the phone lost power, the exit steps would trigger, which would include clearing the Car Dock variable. Once that happened, you’d have to reseat your phone in the dock to get it to re-scan the NFC tag and set the Car Dock variable back to true. Which lead me to my second concern.

The Range on NFC seems to be Less than Half an Inch

When I initially researched NFC, I was finding that the range is anywhere between “4cm or less” and .2m (.5 inches to 8 inches.) One of the first things I set out to do was to determine the range of my NFC tags. On both devices (Nexus 7 and Samsung Galaxy S3), the range is easily under half an inch. This was unfortunate because what I had really wanted to do was to conceal the NFC tag within the interior of my car somewhere rather than stick it directly to the mount. Furthermore, my car mount has a bit of a gap between the back of the phone and where the NFC tag could be affixed. And even more troubling, the NFC antenna appears to be at the top half of the phone, which is right around where the car mount ends. In order to make sure that the NFC tag gets read each time I dock the phone into the mount, I was going to have to find a way to mount it at the very top of the dock and possibly even have to use something like spacers to make sure that the tag was as close to the back of the phone as I could make it.

The Device has to be On and Unlocked to Read an NFC Tag

This was one of the more startling and disappointing discoveries on my phone. In order for an NFC tag to be read, the phone had to be on and unlocked. From a security standpoint, it makes some sense that you would not want an unlocked phone to be able to read NFC tags. But when you consider what I wanted to happen when I docked my phone, this is a significant obstacle. It looks like over on XDA that people have already modded the Galaxy S3 to allow NFC to function when the screen is off or locked, but I am not sure if that is compatible with my device and I was hoping to find a method which did not require a user to flash any kinds of modifications..

Because of these three problems, I decided to scrap my efforts at using NFC to build the ultimate Android Car Dock. Not necessarily because it cannot be done, I think it could be done but it would not necessarily meet all of my criteria. I was hoping that it would be a really simple task, simple enough that it would encourage the car dock manufacturers to start building NFC tags into their hardware.

As for me, I am headed back to the drawing board. I’ve already got other ideas that will help me build the Ultimate Car Dock I just probably won’t be using any of these NFC tags to do so. In the meantime, I have got my brain in gear, trying to dig up other interesting uses for NFC. The best couple that I’ve come up with so far is for sharing WiFi Access Point details with your guests and fancier ID tags for your pets, luggage, etc.

Conclusion

After spending some time tinkering around with NFC, I think that it is mostly a gimmick. The marketing departments at Apple’s competitors are going to try and make the most they can of this gimmick, but right now, NFC is not much more than an improved QR code. This is a new technology, and I am attempting to be an early adopter. If NFC tags can be created that are accessible from a greater range, and if the hardware & software used to read the tags can be improved upon, then I think there are a tremendous number of different uses that would be beneficial. I will continue to seek these uses of NFC and share my results.

In my years owning Android devices one of my favorite applications has been Car Home from Google Inc. Unfortunately, since I rarely have purchased AOSP devices this application is frequently hidden in the Play Store for compatibility reasons. I did a little reading on the subject and it seems that either Car Home is listed as incompatible with newer versions of Android (ICS and newer) or that it’s listed as incompatible as a favor to manufacturers who have competing apps (ie: Samsung’s Car Home).

At any rate, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 when they first came out. Since then, I have been busy rooting, flashing and modifying the phone to my heart’s content. In the process, I lost the Samsung Car Home app and wanted to see if it could be replaced by installing Google’s Car Home app. But this application is not listed in the Play Store as compatible with my device. Therefore ,I had to find a way to manually install it which inspired me to write up this blog article in case it was useful to other Android users.

The only thing that I can think of in these directions that is unique to the SGS3 is the path to the external SD Card. I was able to follow these same directions on the Samsung Vibrant, and Asus Nexus 7 Android devices without too many problems, even though the app layout of the Asus Nexus 7 is not tablet-optimized. I imagine that these steps should work for a variety of other Android devices. If these steps work for your Android device, please let me know in the comments and I’ll keep an updated device list below.

Note: Rooting your phone and tinkering via ADB (and the like) are potentially dangerous and could cause permanent damage to your phone. In addition, it likely voids the manufacturer’s warranty on the phone. I make no claims beyond the fact that I did these steps and it worked on my phone(s) and tablet. Please proceed at your own risk.

Pre-requisites

• Your phone must be rooted (to install it as a System App)
• ADB must be installed and functioning on your computer.
• You need to be a little fearless

Because the app is available over the market, it should also be safe to install this as a user app if you wanted. In my research, some users who installed it a User App had some difficulties with the settings getting wiped out on each reboot. I very quickly tested this by installing as a User App, making some changes to the app, and rebooting my phone a few times. I did not have any of the problems that were described. Because of that, I chose to install it as a User App. If you wanted to install this as a System App, there are steps below to describe how to do that.

Installation as a User App

1. Download the Google Car Home APK and Car Home Launcher APK.
2. Install the apps using ADB:
   • adb install signedCarHome.apk
   • adb install signedCarHomeLauncher.apk
3. Optional – Reboot your phone (adb reboot) to ensure your launcher has a current list of installed apps.

Installation as a System App

1. Download the Google Car Home APK and Car Home Launcher APK.
2. Copy the APKs to your phone’s SD Card using
   • adb push signedCarHome.apk /external_sd/
   • adb push signedCarHomeLauncher.apk /external_sd/
3. Use an ADB shell to mount /system and copy the files to /system/app
   • adb shell
   • su
   • mount -o remount,rw /system
   • cp /external_sd/signedCarHome.apk /system/app/
   • cp /external_sd/signedCarHomeLauncher.apk /system/app/
   • exit
   • exit
4. Reboot your phone (adb reboot) to ensure your launcher has a current list of installed apps.

Congratulations! You have now installed the Car Home app from Google on your device. Of the few similar apps I’ve tried it has always been my personal favorite. I am hoping the popularity encourages Google to resolve whatever outstanding incompatibility issues are out there and make it available for more devices via the Play Store.

Devices

• Samsung Galaxy S3 (SGH-T999)
• Asus Nexus 7
• Samsung Vibrant
• Samsung Galaxy S2 (see notes)

Notes

Commenter, biggjeff5 followed these steps and had this note to add about getting it working on his Samsung Galaxy S2:

“Just an FYI, To get it to work with my Galaxy S2 running JellyBean (CM 10) I had to rename the files to com.google.carhome.apk and com.android.cardock.apk (carhome and carhome launcher, respectively). It wasn’t showing up in the apps list and I was getting a package parsing error when trying to run it from the file explorer. After that it worked great. So, if you run across a similar parsing error on a package, you might fix it by re-naming it to the internal name.”

Catch Up

First, a bit of catch up. As a bit of full disclosure, my blog was offline for around six months. Nothing major, just a hardware migration that wound up taking longer and falling off the priority list for awhile. Parts one and two of this blog were written and posted prior to that migration. Part three was 90% written and was waiting to be completed.

In the first and second articles in this series I expressed my desire and plan to create a “stupid easy” backup process for our PCs at home using FreeNAS to store the backups and Genie Timeline Pro to create and sustain the backups.

So far I’ve covered, configuring a compressed share on the FreeNAS box, installing and creating the first backup using Genie Timeline Pro, and how to recover files in a couple different scenarios.

Disaster Recovery

Some of the times, there’s been some sort of a disaster: you lose a hard drive or delete your Windows directory. Or you might be doing something like upgrading your primary hard drive or restoring your old backup to a brand new PC. In these cases, you will need to use the Disaster Recovery option.

I thought about doing something dramatic on my own PC to demonstrate the disaster recovery option. Perhaps deleting my Windows directory, or throwing my hard drive from a moving car but I thought that might have been a bad idea and would open myself up for all sorts of e-ridicule. Ultimately, I decided it might be easier if instead I created a brand new Virtual Machine using VirtualBox. However,I suspect because of the drastic hardware differences between the VM and my desktop PC it caused some problems. Instead, I took the time to build a brand new Windows 7 installation on the Virtual machine, I installed a couple of games from my Steam Library, copied over some of my random files from My Documents and finally backed up the entire machine using Genie Timeline Pro. After brushing off the six months of dust that my VM had accrued, I renewed my Windows 7 Trial Key and installed all of my system updates. To simulate a disaster, I deleted the primary partition and confirmed that the machine would not boot back up.

I booted off of my Disaster Recovery ISO I made earlier. From the main screen, I mapped a drive to my Backups share on my FreeNAS machine. After that, I partitioned and formatted the virtual hard drive. From there, I followed the disaster recovery wizard. I selected the backup, then picked which restore point to use in the restoration. Beyond that, I selected to restore the master boot record and to replace everything. The backup began copying. After giving Genie Timeline some time, the machine was restored and ready for a reboot. The machine booted right up into Windows without any issues.

Upgrade to Genie Timeline Professional 2012

A new version of the product, Genie Timeline Professional 2012 came out while I was working on this post. When the new version was available I decided it made sense to keep it current. The upgrade was effortless. According to the product sheet, the new version is two times faster and features machine level de-duplication to save both disk space and time.

Next Steps

My next steps are to “roll out” Genie Timeline Professional 2012 to my other computers in the house (three total) and get them backing up as well. I plan to wrap up this series of blogs with a summary article where I can talk about the amount of money I spent, the features of my solution, and how much time it wound up consuming get it set up and sustained.

Summary

My original intent was to write an article mostly targeted at people with Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, like my FreeNAS device but because the NAS supports CIFS so well, the majority of his article can easily apply to just about any storage device on a Windows machine.

In my previous article I talked about my desire to have backups be “stupid easy.” What I did not want to have to do is worry about scheduling backups, or digging through obtuse applications in order to restore from my backups like all the more traditional backup software I have had experience with.

With that in mind, I fired up my incredibly exhaustive, patent pending research process. I punched my different criteria into Google and he told me that the product I wanted to use was Apple’s Time Machine, but because I do not want to buy an Apple, Google also recommended that I check out Genie Timeline. As usual, Google was correct.

Genie Timeline comes in several flavors, including Free and Pro (comparison) and one of my criteria was a cheap (preferably free) solution. However, another one of my criteria was also full Disaster Recovery capability. I wanted to be able to restore an empty computer from my backup in the event of a total worst case scenario. Ultimately, I decided that I would download Genie Timeline Pro and buy licenses for each of my PCs if I liked it.

In this article I’ll talk about creating a share on my FreeNAS box with compression enabled, installing and configuring Genie Timeline, completing your first backup and restoring files from a functioning machine.

Installation and Configuration

Firstly, I leveraged the configuration I had already done to my NAS. I already had a volume created, which was configured using a ZFS file system and RAID Z2, which is most similar to Raid 6. The purpose of this configuration was to be able to survive the loss of two drives simultaneously. On that volume, I created a folder for Backups and then a sub folder for each machine I intended to back up. I set up a CIFS share on the Backups folder, and I mapped a drive (B: for Backups) to the share I created for my primary PC. Because of the number and volume of files to be backed up, compression was an important consideration for me. FreeNAS is quite handy in this arena. My entire Backups folder is a ZFS Dataset and there are compression options you can set on each ZFS Dataset. In my case, I decided to go ahead and use gzip-6 for compression in that dataset. I know that that extra tiny little bit of compression comes at the cost of more time and CPU cycles, but I felt that after the first backup was done the incremental activity would be occasional enough I could afford taking a small performance hit in writing data to the NAS.

Installing Genie Timeline Pro was a breeze, like most applications these days. It was mostly, double click the installer and then mindlessly click “next” and “I Agree” when appropriate. About the only alarming thing is that at some point in the install, your Windows Explorer will restart.

Upon successful installation, Genie Timeline will launch directly into the Backup Setup Wizard. Of all the features of Genie Timeline, this is the one I appreciated most. The wizard comprised of three steps:

1. Selecting the Backup Drive: This was pretty easy. Since I had already mapped a drive to the Backups folder I created on my FreeNAS box, I just went ahead and picked that mapped drive (B:)
2. Selecting the Data: In this step, there are two options: Smart Selection and My Computer. Smart Selection features “categories” of files (see page 20 of the Genie Timeline Pro User Manual for details). My Computer allows you to go through and check boxes for what you want to back up. You can mix and match between these two screens to pick your ideal backup. Because “stupid easy” is my objective, I chose Smart Selection and grabbed the following categories; Disaster Recovery, Email, Desktop, My Documents, Office Files, Financial Files, Pictures, Music, Videos, Bookmarks, eBooks and PDF, and Miscellaneous.
3. Set Backup Options: On the third and final step, you get to choose whether to compress and encrypt your backups. Since I was doing compression on my FreeNAS box, I decided to go ahead and leave this option unchecked. I found out later, that leaving the compression and encryption options disabled made it very easy for me to poke around and look at the backup files. In the event I needed to restore something manually, I could do it.

After the wizard completes, the backup begins automatically. As the backup is running, there are some more advanced configuration steps that you can do via the Timeline Pro dashboard. For example, via the Dashboard’s Preferences menu, there’s an Auto-Exclude option. In here you can create rules for folders you may not want to be backed up. To test this feature out, I added some folders to that list like my Dropbox folder and other folder(s) that had files in them that I had backed up elsewhere or that I just do not care too much about..

While the backup was running, I decided this was a good time to go ahead and create a recovery disk. In the Dashboard, beneath Tools there is an option for Disaster Recovery startup Disk. Selecting that gives you three recovery disk options: a Virtual Partition, USB Drive, and ISO Image. For my purposes, I decided to go ahead and create an ISO image. However, a Virtual Partition would be handy in the event of anything short of losing a hard drive and I may install that down the road.

As is expected with every first full back up you do, the initial backup took quite some time. After that backup completes Timeline then monitors your system as things change and it backs them up as they change. For some of the Smart Selections (e.g. Disaster Recovery), it does backups less frequently, since those files tend to be more static. When it was all completed, this backup took up roughly 170GB on my FreeNAS box. Overall, the size of the backup was roughly 5% to 10% bigger than the total space used on my primary hard drive.

Restoration from a Functioning PC

Typically, most of your restorations are needed while your computer is still working. Sometimes it is because you accidentally deleted something or that you somehow you managed to mangle some file so badly that it would take you days to repair it.However in other situations you have suffered a disaster or inflicted a disaster upon yourself. Every backup program should handle both of these scenarios. And I will cover restorations of each type in this and the next article.

Restoring a Deleted File

Restoring a deleted file was simple. In the Windows Explorer, browse to the location where the file was located, right-click and select the Genie Timeline Explorer context menu and select “View all Deleted Files.” A dialog pops up, with the deleted files and a restore button. Once choosing restoration, you’re prompted to restore to the original location or a new location, which you can provide.

Restoring a Mangled File

Restoring a mangled file was a pleasant surprise. I created a text file before the backup, then made an edit to it after the backup completed which promptly got backed up. I made a third change to that file and then used the right-click context menu to select “Timeline Explorer”. A new Windows Explorer window opened up with a timeline across the top. By selecting different points in that timeline, you are able to view the document, and when you find the correct version, you can elect to restore that file as well. Again, when doing a restoration you have the option to restore to the original location or provide a new location to restore to. In this way, Genie Timeline Pro works very similarly to a revision control system and it is incredibly handy.

Coming up Next

In my next article (hopefully in a day or two), I will cover restoring a machine in a simulated “disaster.” Plus, I’ll touch on a few other observations, including my final thoughts on creating a pretty simple plan for managing backups of our computers at home and using FreeNAS in order to store those backups.

Introduction

As you might remember from my articles about building my own Network Attached Storage (NAS) using FreeNAS(part 1, part 2), my primary motivation was to come up with a redundant solution for storage of backups.

As a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to PCs for nearly two decades, I’ve grown relatively unattached to much of my data. Generally speaking, my “disaster” recovery plan was to replace failed hardware and cope with losing all of my data. Thankfully, I have very rarely needed to use this plan because it is very stupid and useless.

I am not ignorant; for years I have realized that my disaster plan at home is stupid and useless. But, I have always wound up doing an analysis. In every scenario that I imagined, it always wound up being more work to create, maintain and recover than it would be to just start from scratch. As long as I only had one or two PCs devoid of irreplaceable data and I was the only user, this would work out just fine. Ultimately, this paradigm is not sustainable. I have accrued multiple computers, these computers each contain more and more irreplaceable files, and most importantly, I got married and now I’m supporting two users.

It was inevitable for me and ultimately it is inevitable for everyone – you will lose data. It is not a question of “If” but a question of “When?” Your data is constantly at risk, whether caused by a hardware failure, a careless revision or a reckless deletion. Too much can go wrong, and the data is too important to ignore doing backups.

Requirements

At the very least, I’d think the bare minimum would be for every computer user to periodically back up their “user profile” type folders. These are the folders on your computer which contain documents, pictures, music and videos that can not be easily replaced. Hopefully, everyone’s made it to the point where they are saving those files in a central folder or at the very least everyone can find those folders pretty easily on their computer. Operating Systems have gone a long way to forcing you into doing this. That way, if you ever lost everything on your computer it’d be a matter of re-installing the Operating System, any missing applications, and restoring your profile(s) from the backup.

In my particular case, I require a more robust backup solution. In my brainstorming on backups, I made a list of features that I considered to be “must-haves”:

• Redundant, fault tolerant backup storage (solved by the FreeNAS machine)
• Low Cost ($0-$75 per license)
• Automated and Scheduled
• Integrated into the Windows Explorer
• Differential backups to provide version history on backed up files
• Restore an entire machine in one-step

Aside from the first requirement, none of these should be extraordinarily rare. I anticipate that the more of the features I want that are included in a product, the more the cost will go up. This is about the only concession that I’m willing to make in this regard.

Research

When discussing this with a friend, he said what I needed to do was to trade my PCs in and buy an Apple instead. Apparently Time Machine comes default with MacOS and is the gold standard of what I call “stupid easy” backups. From what I have read, this feature sounds great and sounds like it would be easy to have Time Machine write its backups out to a Network-Attached-Storage like FreeNas. However, I am not nearly creative or hip enough to own any Apple products, and more importantly, I am an old dog to whom it is difficult to teach new tricks. For the foreseeable future, I will continue to be a Windows user.

Off and on, I’ve been reading other blogs, Internet forums and PC publications looking for “free” backup software that does what I want. In researching products, I focused primarily on things that had free versions or were completely free. Ultimately, there are literally dozens and dozens of free or low-cost backup solutions out there. Because of the numerous options, I focused my research in on the following products.

• DriveImage XML: I started off with DriveImage XML because it was a package I had tinkered with in the past and it was free. It ticked off the majority of my must-haves, but lacked nice Windows Explorer integration or the ability to do differential backups.
• EaseUS Todo Backup Free: A very simple to use backup utility that ticked off all of the check marks on my list except for Windows Explorer integration.
• Windows Backup and Restore: Pretty simple to use and set up, I like that it has some of the Windows Explorer integration features I was after, but this software is only included in certain versions of Windows Vista, and all versions of Windows 7. Because I still have older PCs, I chose not to use this.
• Genie Timeline Free: I found this product through a page on Superuser.com. It seems to be the best Time Machine equivalent for the average Windows user.

Ultimately, I have decided to to purchase Genie Timeline Pro, the more feature packed version of Genie Timeline. As of the time this blog was published, Genie9 is running a 50% off promotion on this software.

To Be Continued

All the “fun” work is over and this is where the rubber meets the road. Over the next week I will work on installing and configuring Genie Timeline Pro and blogging about how it works backing up to the FreeNAS machine.