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mirra personal server review from usa today magazine
Must find a haven for a PC file? Look in the Mirra
January 15, 2004: USA Today
Written
by Edward Baig
What is the first thing that comes to mind when I say "server?" With any luck, your answers suggest an accommodating waiter or English butler.
But I wouldn't be shocked if you blurted out responses such as "complex," "geeky" or "systems people." It probably means you've been hanging around techies too long.
That's because server also is geek lingo for computers (or the software within them) that supplies data to other computers. To casual observers, these servers are the province of a company's tech department, not your typical home PC user.
A Mountain View, Calif., start-up called Mirra aims to alter that perception. The company recently began selling the Mirra Personal Server, meant to be a backup repository for all your word processing and spreadsheet documents, financial data, pictures, MP3s and other digitally stored keepsakes. It's an always-on, $399-to-$499 computer "appliance" targeted at families and small-business owners.
The company's noble assurance is that every time you edit or save a file in designated folders on your PC, Mirra automatically creates a duplicate on its 80GB or 120GB hard drive (depending on the model). Mirra is different from other backup devices you may have come across. You need not burn a CD or initiate any other action; the operation occurs in the background. It doesn't show up as a "letter drive" within Windows. Mirra even stores the eight most recent edits of a file, a potential lifesaver to a writer, say, who wants to restore a deleted paragraph.
Automatic backup is no small feat. To most consumers, backing up files is like visiting the dentist. We all agree the exercise is worthwhile and could bail us out of big trouble, but nonetheless find every excuse not to. I have learned the hard way: Murphy (as in Law) knows when you are neglecting obligations. The moment you've got stuff on your computer that you can't afford to lose is the moment when your PC's hard drive goes poof. By creating dupes on its own hard drive, Mirra serves as your safety net.
To retrieve a file, or entire folder, you merely click on "restore." You can even restore files to another machine, which makes it easier to transfer files to a new computer (though Mirra does not back up actual programs). Mirra can also back up multiple PCs on a network — three to four computers in a household should not pose a problem, though the practical limits are the size of the hard drive.
What's more, Mirra lets you access your files remotely, from any PC or Mac connected to the Internet (though copies of those files reside on Mirra itself and not the Net). Thus, you can download files from afar even when your main computer is shut off. Mirra files are protected behind your router's firewall and the device also employs encryption to protect your data. So when you're in the office or Starbucks and need to fetch a document you left behind, you visit Mirra.com, enter your e-mail address and password and download the file. The original is left untouched. (In this sense, Mirra competes against similar remote services offered by such companies as Laplink or GoToMyPC.) It is worth noting that presently, you cannot make changes to the document remotely and then upload the file back to the Mirra at home.
Mirra also lets you share certain files with family members and friends granted access to your account. You pick a folder to share and have Mirra send pals an e-mail inviting them to Mirra.com. They must register to view the files. The sharing feature is particularly helpful for photos that are too large to e-mail.
All that said, Mirra won't be an easy sell — I reckon insurance never is. Even though Mirra (the company) does a nice job explaining what Mirra (the product) is capable of, I can't imagine a $399 (or more) personal server will ever be much of an impulse purchase. The gray and silver box, which uses Linux as its operating system, looks like a small PC, minus keyboard and monitor.
To make it work, I had to plug in only two wires, a regular AC power cable and an Ethernet cord to my router. A speedy broadband DSL or cable connection is required, plus a 300 MHz Pentium III class computer (or newer) and Windows XP or 2000. Mirra's USB ports serve no purpose, though eventually they may allow you to expand the machine's storage capabilities.
Mirra earns kudos for being smart enough to detect my home computer network automatically and set itself up accordingly, though some users may have to tweak advanced networking settings. Nor did I run into any substantial hassles with my existing PC firewall.
But the installation wasn't completely snag-free. Mirra didn't quite live up to its best-case scenario (printed on the box), "can be set up in as little as 15 minutes." For no obvious reason, Mirra failed to at first copy the more than 3,000 files in my PC's My Documents folder, but it did copy My Pictures and My Music, which are subfolders in the My Documents directory. I called tech support. We discovered that a lone file Mirra didn't have "permission" to copy because of a security setting on my computer prevented the server from copying all the other files. Only after we identified the suspect file and mucked around with settings was Mirra able to complete its assignment.
I'm told an upcoming Mirra release to be "pushed" to the appliance free of charge would prevent this from happening. Once the folder was copied, Mirra worked without a hitch.
The coming upgrade, dubbed version 1.1, is supposed to address other shortcomings, including providing better user feedback (for instance, a ticker-tape progress bar reports on all automatic activities). Most notably, Mirra will also soon provide thumbnail images next to picture files stored on its server. That takes the guesswork out of trying to figure out which files you want to view and download. Unless you've labeled your picture files ahead of time, they likely will carry such unenlightening identifiers as DCP_0007.JPG. Thus, small thumbnails would help a lot.
For now, Mirra is relatively slow. One gigabyte of data takes about half an hour to back up. The device also can't back up an individual file larger than 2 GB, though that's the rough equivalent of 21/2 full-length movies.
In the future, Mirra may be automatically synchronized with a photo service to let you order prints. Another possibility would turn Mirra into a jukebox, perhaps by streaming music directly from the server to a home entertainment system. Currently, you can download a digital tune stored on Mirra but must rely on the media player software on the PC that grabbed the file to actually hear it.
Despite its limitations, Mirra is a decent product that should get better. If the company delivers on its promises, lots of people will come to appreciate the term server for a whole new set of reasons.
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