• Free entry and parking at over 300 historic sites
• Free parking at countryside and coastline locations
• A members guide book to all NT sites
• Newsletters about special events
• 3 editions of the NT magazine
• Free access to National Trust for Scotland sites as well as others around the world.

If you’re not yet a member of the National Trust and considering signing up then you might like to know that you can currently get a free pair of binoculars by using one of the many promotional links scattered around the web. To find one of these links just use Google.

Membership costs represent good value as long as you’re prepared to make good use of it.  If you pay by Direct Debit, you’re eligible for a 25% discount off the first year’s fee which works out at just £34.50 for an individual or £57.75 for a joint membership.  Considering you could easily spend £5-£10 per day on parking at a NTsite, the membership fee should easily pay for itself over the course of a year.

You don’t even have to wait for your welcome pack before you can use your membership as a temporary voucher is emailed to you for printing if you sign up online.

The time to start backing up is now and what better than a totally automated backup solution that keeps an encrypted copy of your data safely away from your computer.

You can get 10% off an annual and biannual MozyHome Unlimited account simply by signing up at Mozy entering the the following discount code into the referral box; JULY.

I’ve got MozyHome automatically backing up my important files whenever my computer has been idle for few minutes. Knowing that a copy of my essential data is stored safely online means less worrying about hardware failures.

At right this very moment, your data is at risk from any number of different ways of being destroyed, lost or overwritten. In an ideal world, computer hardware would never fail, laptops would never get knocked onto the floor and burglaries would never happen in your neighbourhood. In reality, these things can and do happen, often with serious consequences.

Fortunately, making back-up copies of your important computer files is easy and having a back-up can mean the difference between days of lost work and a few minutes of restoration time.

Whilst a simple replication operation is all that it takes to back-up your data, there are endless ways in which you can actually carry out the procedure with varying degrees of automation. From copying and pasting files to an external hard drive, to distributing encrypted copies of files burnt onto DVD at your friend’s house.

The weakest point of many back-up solutions often lies with the user. A common problem is when back-ups are carried out irregularly or are poorly organised making the restore process difficult at best.

When it comes to back-ups, automation, security and good management are all key components to an effective disaster proofing solution. In today’s Internet age, being able to maintain remote copies of files without leaving your home is fast becoming a popular option. There are currently dozens of providers of remote back-up solutions and the one I can recommend meets all of the key criteria for an effective back-up service, even going so far as to offer a free 2GB of storage space alongside paid options aimed at home and business use.

The remote back-up service I’d recommend is Mozy.

No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

In the past, I was a bit sceptical about purportedly free online file storage of any sort. I would always wonder how secure my data was, how the services were able to keep running without financing and what would happen if the company went bust.

What I found reassuring about Mozy was that it came recommended from people I trusted and also their parent company was EMC; a huge name in the corporate IT industry and beyond. They’re also responsible for Retrospect, a desktop-based back-up suite, so they’re well versed when it comes to data back-up and management.

Easy Mozy

Using Mozy for back-ups is a very straightforward affair and first of all involves installing a desktop application which controls and schedules when back-ups are performed. Just point the Mozy desktop software at the folders you wish to back-up and tell it when you want it to carry out the back-ups (either at scheduled times or whilst your computer is sitting idle). It literally is set and forget.

Your data is first encrypted on your computer before being securely transmitted to Mozy’s servers. Depending on the uploading capability of your Internet connection, backing up 1GB of data could take anything from minutes to hours.

Initial back-ups tend to take the longest because none of your files would have yet been transmitted to the secure storage location. After the initial back-up has transferred, subsequent back-ups are incremental meaning only files that have changed since the previous back-up will be transferred. This is a great way to reduce the amount of data needed to be transferred over your Internet connection and speed up the saves.

When it comes to restoring your saved data, there are several options available:

• Right-click Restore – Right-clicking on a backed-up folder on your computer gives you the option of restoring files within it.
• DVD Restore – If you’re restoring several gigabytes of data then having them onto physical media might be a better option.
• Web Restore – Backed-up files can be restored from within your Mozy account.
• Virtual Drive Restore – Browse your backed-up files as if they were on a drive insde your computer.

From a digital photographer’s point of view, Mozy’s unlimited storage MozyHome plan represents fantastic value for money as it means you can keep a complete archive of your images safe by storing remote back-up copies online. At just USD$4.95 per month, Mozy’s unlimited plan is amazingly good value for money considering you never have to worry about maintenance of the hardware your data is stored on nor about the electricity bill for making it available 24-hours a day. I’m currently signed up to a free account, but I can see me signing up for MozyHome soon.

Free 2GB Online Storage Space

If you sign up for a free 2GB account using my referral code, 6V4QE8, we’ll both get an extra 256MB of free storage space to use.

Canon having been running their Cashback promotions for quite some time now, but I was always going to buy Canon when I once again became a SLR user however, it’s a certainly a nice sweetener to receive a cheque in the mail.

When I purchased my EOS 40D body and EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM standard zoom, Canon were offering £100 cashback on the body and £40 on the lens. I went on to purchase another two Canon lenses in Hong Kong, but they weren’t eligible for the Cashback offer. That doesn’t bother me too much since I saved well more than the £85 I’d have received if I’d bought them in an eligible country.

If you’re wondering how long it took to process my Cashback claim it was received into the system on 20/03/2008 and I’ve just received my cheque for £140 today (14/04/2008).