The story is that the Nest company created relationships with Power companies to sell your data. Google acquired Nest and all of its business practices. Google is not in the game of selling your information to other companies. Google normally keeps that information in house and sells advertisements associated. They historically have not sold information wholesale to other companies.

I took a look at the HexInput and found it very fascinating.

It makes more sense to me than using a QWERTY keyboard.

BackupPC tries to copy a file only once by using md5sum to help determine uniqueness of the file. It then uses Linux's file linking to link multiple copies of the same file to one source of data on the drive. The idea is that you can create a snapshot of the entire drive every 5 minutes and only have to store the space for the original plus the changed files.

Unfortunately, BackupPC uses Windows file sharing to copy the data and Windows locks files. Meaning that Windows will make locked files unavailable for reading/ copying. That means missing critical files within c:\windows and the open database files will be missed. To get around this issue, you could always create an on-drive flat-file backup of the database and copy that file when the laptop is connected.

This system works better on backing up Linux systems because of the native rsync support and handling of locked files.

BackupPC is a great tool and has a nice interface where users can recover their own data based on the time of the backup, but you also need to know it's weaknesses.