540: Interview With Mike Bombich of CEO and Developer of Carbon Copy Cloner

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Topics:

-We are pleased to welcome Mike Bombich, creator of Carbon Copy Cloner.

-He tells a story of losing data that inspired his creation of Carbon Copy Cloner.

-Mike spent 8 years as a creative with Apple.

-CCC was initially donation-ware.

-He never wanted to put any barrier between you and your data.

-macOS Big Sur started the downfall of bootable backups.

-Mike talks about how that affected CCC and his customers.

-We talk about Time Machine’s reliability and alternatives to built in solutions.

-Mike is not a fan of backing up to disk images.

-Jerry talks about the new Quick Updates feature of CCC.

-Mike talks about his feelings on cloud storage.

-Migration Assistant is another hot topic and we get into methods of restoration.

-Mike has always had a concern about releasing software that can delete data.

-We love the fish (it’s a tuna!) that guides us to privacy settings.

-He shares a bug from the Mojave days that affects helper tools, that has now been corrected in Ventura.

-Carbon Cooy Cloner’s update will not be subscription based.

-Check out the latest release of Carbon Cooy Cloner and the list of new features.

Best Of CCP - 009: Welcome new members - part 1 2013

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An extended water cooler chat with Jerry, Sam, and Joe, discussing issues facing new ACN members, featuring tips from seasoned pros.

Followup:

- Gary Hustwit, director of the Helvetica and Objectified documentaries tweeted that the correct pronunciation of Helvetica Neue is "noya"

- Command-Control-power "Have you tried restarting?" first generation shirts funded!

Topics:

- hybrid Managed Services offerings; Joe's "Tech Checkup", Sam's "Wellness Visits"; Jerry's offering periodic monthly maintenance to check backups, check disks, run updates; discounted rate when paying for six or twelve months in advance

- the advantages of sporting an Apple logo onsite and in public; whether or not to advertise on your car; great sources for logo merchandise aside from the ACN-direct options: Zuse, Queensboro

- Apple Professional Services; operating as an arm of Apple; how to get involved with APS? face time with Apple, building a reputation over time

- Francois Daumard, formerly heading up Mobile Technology Competency at Apple in the Apple Consultants Network, left Apple a couple of weeks ago to join Fiberlink, sellers of MaaS360, a cloud-based Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution

- Apple Remote Desktop frustrations; Jerry coins a phrase for dealing with the black screen of doom: "cleaning the windshield"

Memorable lines:

"There's just these big black chunks of blocks and you have to open up a new Finder window and drag it around to have it clean the windshield." – Jerry

Mentions:

- Passenger

446: Interview With Luis Giraldo - CXO at ScalePad & CEO at Ook

Topics:

-This week we welcome back our friend, Luis Giraldo. Luis is CEO at Ook Enterprises and Chief Experience Officer at ScalePad. 

-A long standing MSP, Luis started Monkey Box in 2013, which carried him over to IT Glue.  

-Luis speaks about managing his time between his MSP company and time with ScalePad. 

-Luis discusses the hero complex that consultants face, where we just want to do right by the customer but have trouble billing appropriately for our time. 

-ScalePad addresses this head on and approaches conversations with customers as a service activity as opposed to a sales pitch. 

-As Sam recalls learning about scheduled client meetings from Luis’ appearance in years past, he talks of more automated and regular reports. 

-Jerry wants to hear about Luis’ business story through Covid times. 

-Somehow he has not opened Apple Mail in months. He has moved to web mail clients and talks about the hardware being of less importance as cloud is the focus..

-Both Sam and Luis have been having trouble hiring new employees. They discuss the employee driven market. 

-Joe has had thoughts about stock options or profit sharing. Luis also brings up what small businesses have to think about to retain employees for the long term. 

-IT consultancy acquisitions and personal brands are hot topics as of late. 

Care to reach out to Luis Giraldo or learn more about him? Look no further.

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisgiraldo

Paul Dippell Interview
https://www.n-able.com/studio/paul-dippell-on-operational-maturity

ScalePad - Chief Experience Officer (CXO)
https://www.scalepad.com

Ook Enterprises - CEO
https://ook.co

Luis’ Jazz albums on Apple Music
"It's Always You" - 2008 - https://music.apple.com/ca/album/its-always-you/285522012
"Day Dream" - 2002 - https://music.apple.com/ca/album/day-dream/58606887
(New album coming in 2022 with the New York-based Ben Paterson Trio!)

In the immediate future, he will be in Phoenix Jan 18-20 for the IoTSSA conference
https://www.iotssa.com/cybersecurity-expo-phoenix/

433: Part 2 with Tim Nyberg of The MacGuys+

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Special Thanks to our friends:

Topics:

-Joe ponders the question, what about requiring a monthly plan?

-Everyone debates the merits of a managed services only approach.

-One of Jerry’s customers mistakenly deleted mass amounts of Gmail data synced with Apple Mail. Retrieval wasn’t a simple solution due to how Google “labels” items in comparison to folders in Apple Mail.

-One of Tim’s clients that stored everything in Apple Mail had a catastrophic issue.

-Is Apple Mail a professional mail client? The ongoing debate continues.

-Backupify offers native server side backups for Google and Microsoft 365. 

-Backblaze affiliate accounts can be an additional revenue stream for consultants.

-Alerting customers to issues that come from services like Watchman Monitoring is one thing. But getting them to take action is another.

416: Interview With Annie Chen VP Of Product At Splashtop Inc

Topics:

• This week we are joined by Annie Chen, the VP of product management at Splashtop.

• Splashtop is a Silicon Valley company founded in 2006 that started off as a browser based product.

• Today they focus on remote access to your devices, working closely with GPU manufacturers to optimize and leverage hardware encoding to achieve high performance.

• Jerry commends Splashtop on the feature parity and he talks about how Mac had seemed to always receive the short end of the stick with other remote access products.

• Splashtop has three major offerings: Splashtop Business Access, Splashtop Remote Support - useful for MSPs looking to replace their RMM products, and Splashtop SOS for quick remote access.

• It is easy to try out and adjust to Splashtop, which Jerry found really helpful.

• Sam recently tried to use SOS with a customer and ran up against macOS security settings but was able to deal with it by blindly typing in admin credentials on a Mac

• Annie explains how the Safe Reboot feature works, which will help you reboot a computer remotely without losing access.

• Jerry likes how the screens that Splashtop SOS presents to the clients because it makes it easier for them to know what to do.

• Joe has been really happy with the consumer side of Splashtop as well.

• With Splashtop’s next version release, Mac Streamer will support native hardware encoding.

• They have recently formalized their MSP support group and an advisory panel.

• Splashtop is also working on having a specific build for M1 that they hope will be a universal binary and installed on Mac as a whole.

• They have just launches a monthly subscription plan for Splashtop’s remote support product.

• With Splashtop your subscription can grow as your business does.

• The group is impressed with Splashtop’s feature set in general.

• Jerry mentioned how Splashtop’s competitor would show advertisements even though you paid for the product.

• Focusing on security and protection, Splashtop has set up a security advisory counsel as well.

• Annie says the remote support and SOS products are really great for MSPs and service class teams.

• Visit Splashtop.com to set up a free trial and see what all the fuss is about.

357: Interview WIth Chad Keith Of Atlas Solutions

Topics:

-Chad Keith of Atlas Solutions joins the show

-Chad originally called his company “Behind The Mac” but decided to change the name to work well with Apple Business Manager and the Apple Consultants Network

-A listener since the early days of the show, he shares how moved to a monthly services model and hearing fellow consultants was very encouraging.

-At one time, Apple had run a ‘Behind the Mac’ ad campaign: https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/14/apple-behind-the-mac-ad-campaign/

-Chad discusses how it did not take much convincing for most of his clients to move to the MSP model, explaining how the even keeled billing approach appealed to them.

-Calculating monthly pricing for new clients can be difficult and needs ongoing attention

-Having mentors that have been through this is key to developing a plan for pricing

-With clients reaching out, defining a point of contact will help streamline requests

-In the current climate, Chad discusses how his business has been affected with support and travel

-He also talks about how local businesses and communities are affected by COVID-19

-If you haven’t seen John Krasinski’s “Some Good News” broadcasts, you are missing out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5pgG1M_h_U

-Joe shares some ideas for contactless food distribution

-Jerry goes to get pizza dough for the family and quickly changes his mind after seeing the conditions

-A short discussion brews about the loans available from the Small Business Association: https://www.sba.gov/page/coronavirus-covid-19-small-business-guidance-loan-resources

-The healthcare industry has changed through all of this and technology has been making more possible while keeping our healthcare workers safer

-Chad Keith has a podcast of his own called “Overcoming Average” http://overcomingaverage.libsyn.com

-Link Tree is where Chad has all his available contact and social media information: http://linktr.ee/atlascarolina