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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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.

Is It Worth It?

I’m generally not in a hurry to rush out and buy the latest and greatest OS. It’s always worth reading the reviews, and following reports of bugs. In this case, it’s been a while since Snow Leopard came out, and there’s already been a .1 maintenance release that seems to have dealt with most of its known issues.

Snow Leopard is, by all accounts, not that heavy on new features, but it’s also relatively inexpensive. Most of its advantages are under the hood, with 64-bit processing and better memory management. But one feature caught my eye: the ability to synchronize the Address Book (including pictures) with Gmail or Google Apps — a feature that’s been around for a while, but which, for some reason, was previously only available to iPhone users.

Can Your Hardware Handle It?

This is an important consideration. Windows, in particular, is notorious for increasing its memory and disk space requirements with every release. And with computer prices falling all the time, it’s often tempting to just buy a new computer with the new OS pre-installed. But I decided that my Mac could work with the upgrade.

Is Your Software Compatible?

Planning for an upgrade made me realize just how much outdated and unnecessary software I had accumulated on my hard drive. Luckily, a couple of sites have compiled lists of what works, and what doesn’t, under Snow Leopard. I looked at several of them; I found this one particularly useful. It even has an application called SnowChecker that can be used to find what programs you have, and display information about their compatibility.

When you discover programs that are listed as incompatible, you can either find an upgrade (sometimes a beta version), switch to an alternative app that is compatible, or decide that you don’t need the functionality it provides.

Do You Have Backups of Everything, In Case Something Goes Wrong?

When preparing for major upgrades, I probably spend more time making sure that all of my data is backed up than I do anything else. Of course, I use the OS’s built-in tools like Time Machine, and I store multiple copies of customer data on an external drive, in the cloud through Dropbox, on my smartphone through Missing Sync, and on my company’s development server (which itself gets backed up). But it never hurts to make manual backups of really irreplaceable data, so — for example — I made backups of my address book in VCF, CSV and Address Book Archive format. You might think that I’m overdoing it, but I felt that the time was definitely worth taking after learning of Sidekick’s data loss and an apparent bug in OS X relating to guest accounts that could cause it to lose data. As Kevin over at jkOnTheRun says: “Services fail…what are you doing about it?”

Do You Have the Time to Plan and Execute the Upgrade?

Of course, doing all of this takes time, which is why I prefer to undertake projects like this after business hours. Even if it means missing a beautiful fall weekend. That way, I don’t have to interact with clients or put out fires, and being offline for a while won’t make a difference. I picked up a couple of good books at my local college bookstore where I bought Snow Leopard, and got to page 50 of Terry Pratchett’s “Nation” while waiting for the installation, so it was time well spent!

So far, I have been extremely pleased with how much faster many of the programs I use run under Snow Leopard, especially those that are available in 64-bit mode. And I’m happy with many of the OS’s new features. So for me, the time spent has definitely been worth it.

Have you upgraded to the latest operating system? How has it worked for you?

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Carbonite has been a popular choice for Windows users for quite some time because you pay one price ($54.95) for a yearly subscription and that’s it. There are no additional fees for storage or bandwidth. It’s easy to install, easy to configure, and doesn’t seem to drag a computer down while it works in the background.

It makes a simple mirror of your files. Change a file, and the new version replaces the old one on the server. Rather than backing up on a set schedule, it detects when files change and automatically backs them up, meaning that there is little chance of losing an important file because it was lost before the next scheduled sync.

Carbonite has been teasing Mac users for well over two years with the promise of a Mac version. The wait is over. Is it worth it?

Carbonite for Mac installs (and uninstalls) very easily onto a Mac running OS X 10.4 or 10.5. While the PC version sits in the taskbar, the Mac version is configured via a system preference pane that you can set to access from the menu bar.

By default, Carbonite backs up every file it finds in the User folder, except for applications and system files. You can also manually select additional files to back up (or not back up) through the Finder, although in practice this didn’t work for me. To restore, you access the “Restore” tab in the preference pane and select the files you want to copy back.

Carbonite is not meant to create a full drive backup. For that, look to Apple’s Time Machine or SuperDuper and back up to an external or network drive. Online backup services are best for recovering specific files lost through corruption or accidental deletion, not for complete hard drive meltdowns.

The problem with Carbonite for Mac is that we’ve moved on. What seemed like a life-saving service two years ago now feels kind of ho-hum and a bit too pricey.

Carbonite’s big downfall is that it’s licensed per computer only. If you have a desktop computer and a laptop, you need to pay another $54.95 to back up the second machine. You can’t share common files between machines. You can have multiple machines on your account, but each needs its own license. Depending on how you work, that can get expensive.

New to Carbonite is the ability to browse and download backed-up files through a web interface. Unfortunately, in my testing I found accessing files this way to be painfully slow.

There are now more choices for Mac users for automated online backups, including my personal favorite: Jungle Disk. It provides a very easy-to-use interface for automatically backing up files to Amazon S3 storage space. It’s not quite as brainless to configure as Carbonite, and you have to pay Amazon for the storage (my invoices have been averaging $9/month for about 30GB of files from two machines). But it still has a very easy-to-use interface, and it’s far more flexible than Carbonite. For example, with Jungle Disk you can specify how many backups you wish to save, so you can go back and restore an older version of a file. Carbonite has no such option. Also, side-by-side, it feels like Jungle Disk uploads much faster than Carbonite.

I installed Carbonite a few years ago on my mother’s Windows-based computer. It was — and is — a perfect solutions for her, and was quite handy when she accidentally lost a folder full of important files. If your mom is a Mac user, I would recommend Carbonite for her, too. It does what it says it will do, and it does it well.

But for a web worker needing easy online backup, Carbonite is a bit too lightweight for its price to be taken seriously.

What’s your favorite online backup solution?

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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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