Review Your Backup Strategy

Take some time to review your current backup strategy and assess whether it’s still sufficient to keep your data secure. You need to determine how you will back up your data (either manually, or automate the process using an app), how often it gets backed up (periodically or continuously), and where it will be stored (on-site, off-site, or a combination of the two). Your personal backup strategy will likely depend on how much you value your data and how much time you want to devote to backing it up, but if you want to be absolutely sure your data is safe, check out Dawn’s Backup Strategies for the Paranoid, which outlines her two-pronged approach, combining both cloud and on-site backups for a completely automated and secure approach.

If you currently don’t use backup tools, or are looking for alternatives, here are some options:

Cloud Backup Tools

Cloud backup tools are attractive for a few reasons: They’re generally completely automated, relatively inexpensive and totally scalable with your needs; you won’t run out of disk space and have to add more physical storage. However, if you have a large amount of data, creating your first complete backup could take a very long time (one of our readers commented on a previous post that backing up all of his data to Mozy took an entire year!) Additionally, using a cloud backup solution means that you are relying on a third party to keep your data secure. Here are some cloud backup options:

• BackBlaze. BackBlaze offers unlimited backup storage for $5 per month. Restores are handled via a downloaded ZIP file, or having a DVD sent to you.
• Crashplan. Crashplan offers unlimited cloud storage with its Crashplan+ product, which costs $5 per month for a month-to-month plan. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and also offers onsite backup capability.
• Mozy. Mozy is a popular backup solution that we’ve covered extensively in the past. However, it recently dropped its unlimited plan for MozyHome users, which may make it a less appealing option. Two MozyHome plans are now available: $5.99 per month for 50GB of storage and backing up of one computer, and $9.99 per month for 125 GB and backing up three machines. Each additional 20GB of storage or computer to back up then costs an extra $2 per month.

Backing up your data to the cloud is one thing, but how about backing up the data you already have stored somewhere in the cloud, such as the emails in your webmail account, or documents stored in Google Docs? I recently outlined some techniques you can use to keep that data secure, too.

On-site Backup Tools

On-site backups allow you to quickly recover from a disaster like a hard drive failure. Aside from simply periodically copying files to an external hard drive, or burning them to a DVD or Blu-Ray disc, there are some apps you can use to create incremental backups to an external HDD, which means your data is continually backed up:

• Time Machine. Mac users are well provided-for with Time Machine, the backup tool included with OS X. It’s easy-to-use and allows you to “set it and forget it.” If you’d like to get up to speed with it, check out Beginning Mac: Time Machine.
• Paragon System Backup. Windows users have a wealth of free and paid backup options to choose from. One option worth looking at is Paragon System Backup, which costs $29.95. It provides automatic backups, with a range of customization options available. A free trial is available.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Insulinde.

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Dropping the unlimited plan represents a significant shift in the Mozy offering. The company says the change is necessary because its users are storing much more information now (particularly photo and video) and backing up multiple machines, and goes on to explain that for most Mozy users, the change will result in a price increase of $1 per month. I imagine that some users will now be investigating other cloud backup solutions still offering unlimited storage, such as Carbonite, CrashPlan (which won TheAppleBlog’s Mac Backup Smackdown last year) or Backblaze.

The new plans are effective immediately for new customers. For existing customers, the change will only come into effect from March 1, 2011, and monthly, annual or biennial plan holders will only migrate to the new plans at the end of their current term. MozyPro users will be unaffected by the change.

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The new local backup feature should help to address one of the biggest concerns of using cloud storage/backup, which is that you’re trusting your provider with your critical information. By having your own redundant backup locally, you’re minimizing the risk of data loss (and a local backup should be quicker to restore from in the case of a catastrophe, too).

The new Windows client is available for free for both MozyPro and MozyHome customers. Mozy 2.0 for Mac should be coming later this year.

If you’re a Mozy user, let us know what you think of the new client and its new local backup feature, in the comments.

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The idea of the “Pro” line of Mozy tools is to give network administrators a way to centrally manage backups, but they’re also useful for home users who manage more than one computer linked together – as many web workers do. They still use the same basic strategy of installing a resident backup application that ships your files off to Mozy’s servers, but the Pro version has additional features.

MozyPro adds the ability to back up open files with transactional simplicity. On the Windows side, this gives you backup for Exchange and SQL Servers; on the Mac side it can handle iCal Server, Mail Services, and Directory. You also get a unified online web control panel to centralize administration and scheduling across all of the computers that you have enrolled in MozyPro, as well as centralized billing so you don’t have to set up a separate account for each computer. The administrative console in MozyPro can also handle mixed networks of Windows and Mac computers.

This extra power comes at a price: $3.95 per each desktop per month, $6.95 for each server, plus 50 cents per gigabyte per month. That compares to a flat $4.95 per computer per month for the “Home” version of the product. MozyPro for Mac is in open beta right now, but even though it’s listed as a beta, you still need to pay the monthly fees to use it.

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