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Backup Strategies For the Paranoid

Dawn Foster — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:00:35 +0000

When was the last time you backed up all of that precious data you carry around on your laptop or have stored away on the desktop? What if your house or office burned down — would your backups go up in flames, too? For many of us, making backups is like making a will: we know we’ll eventually need one, but we don’t really want to think about it, so we keep putting it off. It sometimes takes a catastrophe before we get our act together and come up with a backup strategy.

I started my career as a UNIX sys admin, so I know the importance of having good backups, and I’ve seen so many horrible things happen to good data. As a result, I’ve learned to be pretty paranoid about backups. I even had my own little catastrophe a few years ago, when I was using Mozy to back up my data. I was taking frequent backups, and I had even tested my solution by restoring a few files; however, when it came to doing a full data restore, Mozy failed me. I was eventually able to get my data out of Mozy, but it wasn’t an easy process, and it took too long to get my data back. Now I have a two-pronged backup strategy that even the most paranoid among us should appreciate: a combination of on-site, full system, incremental backups, coupled with cloud backups.

On-site, Full System, Incremental Backups

Your full system, incremental backups should be a way to quickly recover from a complete data loss due to hard drive failure, computer theft, flying computer knocked off of a tall table or porch, small child who dumps a whole glass of orange juice into your laptop, etc. Since I have a MacBook, I use Apple Time Machine to back up to a terabyte hard drive sitting on my desk. It does hourly backups whenever I am at home and hooked up to the drive. This is my solution for when I need to do a full restore of my entire computer. By having it on a local hard drive that I control, I can quickly do a full restore without having to wait for anyone else to find my data or deal with any network-related slowdowns.

However, this solution has some serious limitations. If I have a home disaster (fire, flood, volcano, earthquake, etc.), I could easily lose my computer and my backup at the same time. I’m also highly mobile and often working on local files from business trips, vacations and coffee shops between meetings, so I don’t want to rely on a hard drive at my house for backups when I’m on the road.

Cloud Backups

Now that the full backups are taken care of, you need something that will back up all of those critical files even when you are away for a week at a conference, at a client site, or even just working remotely from coffee shops all day. My second backup solution is using JungleDisk, which backs all of my important files up to Amazon S3 every six hours. I only back up my documents and a few other critical files. In a pinch, I can restore my operating system and applications from other sources, so to keep costs down, I only back up the things that I create and that could not be easily recovered by some other means. Because I’m careful about how much data I back up to the cloud, the whole solution only costs me a few dollars a month and only takes a few minutes to complete. In addition to being able to save my data from some terrible catastrophe, I can also save myself from silly little mistakes even when I’m on the road. If I accidentally nuke a file, I can still get an older copy from my backup.

Yes, I could always be a little more paranoid, but I have a backup solution that is practical, relatively easy to maintain and seems to cover all of the most likely data loss scenarios. On the other hand, I also find that backups are becoming a little less important as I move more and more of my information into the cloud. Gmail and other online data storage mean that I have less on my hard drive, but what I do have is important, and I want to be confident that I can recover it.

How do you back up your valuable data?

Photo by Flickr user gregw66, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

First Look: Drive Backup 9 Express

Imran Ali — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:00:41 +0000

Backup! Backup! Backup! This should be the mantra of all web workers! Our ability to earn and work is of course dependent on the digital infrastructure around us, but more importantly, the sphere of our personal and professional data that’s our digital DNA.

Today sees the public launch of Paragon Software’s Drive Backup 9.0 Express, designed for novice users to replicate and backup their entire PC – from OS and apps to preferences, settings and data…a little like Apple’s Time Capsule + Time Machine combo, but for Windows PCs and not quite as pretty.

What’s really interesting about Paragon’s software is that users can create emergency bootable media (CD, DVD, Flash drive) to recover an imaged machine quickly…something I could really have done with when I dropped my MacBook in San Diego earlier this year… Oh, Drive Backup 9 Express is also free and users are provided with an upgrade path to more sophisticated Personal and Professional editions that provide backup schedules, the ability to image individual files as well as drives, along with the ability to directly mount a backup image prior to re-installation.

Backup seems to be a perennially failure-ridden activity for most users- wavering between fatalist, zero-backup strategies and replicating data on multiple drives at home as well as at online services.

I have the feeling that no, one service provider is getting this right for users – do we need something with the ease-of use of Time Capsule+Machine, coupled with the distributed resilience of Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service. Come to think of it, why can’t a Time Capsule replicate itself to S3?

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Spinscape Rocks Mapping

Aliza Sherman — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:00:16 +0000

Every once in a while, I come across a site that just rocks my world. This week, I found two – Addictomatic.com, a search aggregator with a nifty interface (Mike G. reviewed it) and Spinscape, a site I learned about through a comment on my previous posts about mind mapping. After a flurry of emails to get past the closed beta gates, I was in and mapping away in no time.

If I had to describe Spinscape in one word it would be: Elegant.

From the dramatic dark gray and black backgrounds that makes the colored bubbles or “nodes” pop to the subtle tool buttons placed strategically about, Spinscape looks great. But elegant goes beyond looks. Spinscape functions well, too, with some features that were unexpected and surprisingly useful.

The Good Stuff

1. Building a map is easy. Just add nodes from an option in the menu or use the Insert button (must be a PC thing – heard it in one of the screencast tutorials).

2. Editing nodes is robust. You don’t just have the ability to edit the text, color or shape of the node but you also can add annotations with links. For example, a node can represent the hotel you will be staying at on a business trip and when you open the node, you can click on the link and launch a new window leading to the hotel’s web site.

3. Manipulating maps is cake. Moving your map around is as easy as dragging it up and down the screen. You can also select Balance Map from the Layout option on the main menu and your map pops into shape.

4. You can collaborate. Once the closed beta is over, you can invite others to collaborate on a map with you.

5. You can share maps. You can choose to make a map public or share with specific colleagues of friends.

The Really Good Stuff

The feature that really impressed me was their auto-discovery buttons to Amazon S3; Del.icio.us; Google; Google Documents and Spreadsheets; and Wikipedia. By clicking on the Google auto-discovery button, you can enter a keyword – such as “virtual world blogs” – and then choose which results from Google you’d like to add as nodes on your map.

In the tutorial, clicking on the Wikipedia button and searching for guitars gave you the option to choose “All” entries. The map instantly expands with nodes representing each type of guitar, from classical to electric. You can then see a visual representation of the content about guitars contained within Wikipedia. While that particular search won’t help me in my work, it does give real meaning to the site’s tagline “mapping your digital landscape.”

The Not So Good

Given that the site is still in a close beta, I don’t really have a lot of complaints. One hiccup I encountered was not being able to figure out how to zoom in and out of my map. There is a slidebar that says “Zoom Sensitivity” but there’s something I’m missing in terms of how to actually zoom. The tutorial says “use your mouse trackball to zoom” but what if you don’t have a mouse? The trackpad doesn’t work. Strangely, I did accidentally zoom in at one point and zoom out at another but could not reproduce how I did it again.

Also, when I tested out the auto-discovery buttons, I got an error message with the Wikipedia one, however, I saw how it works in the tutorial so am waiting with baited breath for the fix.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed tooling around Spinscape, not just because it made mapping fun but because it really inspires me to use maps to stay organized, visualize work flow, collaborate with colleagues, illustrate ideas for clients, and so much more. Maybe they’ll let me give out a few invites. If you are interested, let me know!

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