Timing was a factor, said Pogoplug CEO Dan Putterman. “We were planning to integrate an archival service last year, and had started down that path, but when Glacier came out, we figured why not use that?”

Pogoplug CEO Dan Putterman

Pogoplug’s Team Service lets businesses use an existing server as shared and secure storage for authorized users, and a small Pogoplug device brings similar capabilities to home users. Now those Pogoplug devices, using the Amazon Glacier API, will integrate with Glacier and act as way stations for data as it is continually archived.

Pogoplug itself will aggregate Amazon Glacier storage charges– which can be as low as $0.01 per GB – and networking fees into its $199 annual subscription for five users. That plan covers 5 TB of offsite storage. A family plan starting at $29 per year offers unlimited home storage with 100 GB of offsite archiving.

As is usually the case with Amazon, it’s the networking fees that can bite you. For Glacier there is no charge for incoming data or for data retrieval up to 1 GB per month. But charges start applying at  $0.120 per GB for up to 10 TB of data retrieved. In other words, Glacier is for data that tends to stay put.

The existing Pogoplug service provides everyday backup but in the event of a fire or catastrophe, it ensures that the company’s data is always updated on Glacier.

Stefan Reitshamer, founder of Arq, an online backup provider, told Webmonkey his company is looking into Glacier integration as well.

Amazon provides inexpensive infrastructure services that many companies use for storage and compute power. But increasingly third party service providers — like Appfog in the platform-as-a-service space — are aggregating Amazon services, bundling them with their own services, and then billing for the complete solution.

Don’t expect this to be the end of companies aggregating and billing for Glacier along with their own value-added services.

Feature photo courtesy Flickr user pfly

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman

Backblaze, the 5-year-old company that backs up everything on your PC for $5 per month, has snagged $5 million in funding from TMT Investments, an investment house out of the U.K.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Backblaze will use the money to staff up and expand its marketing efforts — and attack the masses of people who still do not back up their computers, CEO Gleb Budman said in a recent interview. Backblaze competes most directly with Mozy, now owned by VMware (via EMC) and Carbonite.

Taking outside money was not done lightly. The company was bootstrapped for its first year and a half and then it took in $390,000 in seed money. The company has been profitable since the early days, Budman said.

“When we started we explicitly didn’t want venture funding for a few reasons — we worried that going through the process would get distracting and we worried about handing off too much control and equity and mostly we worried about the impact on our culture,” Budman said

Now, with five years under its belt and 16 employees, he feels the culture is set and the time is right to fund more growth. The company will remain stingy — it will take half of the funding now and the other half in a year.

“We run our own cloud, we do our own support. For the first few years we killed ourselves. We were lean and crazy and there was definitely a risk of burn out. Now we’re at good place. We all work hard, but at a marathon pace, not a sprint,” he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• When It Comes to Pain at the Pipe, Upstream Is the New Downstream
• Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?
• A near-term outlook for big data

1. Set up Time Machine

If you aren’t using Time Machine, it’s time to start. This is your first, best line of defense on a desktop or laptop. Backups made using the built-in OS X feature are non-intrusive, and recovery of files is nearly instant. Although external hard drive prices are high right now, most everyone will benefit with Time Machine. Hook up an external hard drive and OS X will ask you to use it for Time Machine. I generally recommend getting a hard drive 1.5 times the size of your internal drive.

2. Set up online backup the proper way

I suggest online backup services as your second line of defense. It’s important to keep backups offsite in case of a disaster or theft at your location. If you do your initial backup all at once it can take months and you’ll find you are missing a key file just when you need it — I wrote about how to optimize your strategy here – and be sure to leave your computer on and awake if you want your backup strategy to work. Also, please remember that sync software like Dropbox isn’t a true online backup system, since it has the ability to remove files.

3. Back up your online email system

If you use online email systems such as Gmail, you need to back that up as well. Don’t rely 100% on your provider. Your account could get hacked, or you could accidentally delete your email. Follow this guide on backing up your Gmail using POP access. A similar strategy would be applicable to Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo (though Yahoo may require a paid upgrade to do it).

4. Test your backups

I’ve written about this before, but if you aren’t testing your backups, how do you know if they’re working? Do you know how to restore in case of disaster? Trust but verify as they say. Simply try restoring files from your backups to make sure they work as expected.

5. Back up your iOS devices

With iCloud, backing up to your computer isn’t technically necessary because you can restore from the cloud. On a practical level though, that takes time, and there’s also no guarantee your backup will always be there when you need it. At least every month, it’s important to hook up your iOS device to your computer for a quick and immediate backup of your data. To do a manual backup via iTunes, follow these instructions.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?
• Why the Mac is infiltrating the enterprise
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?

Get settled in for the long haul

One of the key downsides of online backup is the time it takes to actually get your initial backup into the cloud. Some companies such as CrashPlan and DollyDrive allow you to ship a physical hard drive to “seed” your backup, greatly reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred online initially.

If you aren’t with these companies or want an alternative, you can create a tiered backup strategy. If you do it all at once, it can take months and you’ll find you’re missing key files when you need them. Here’s what I typically recommend in terms of a staged approach for the average user:

1. Work first. Realize that while most people say pictures are the most important items to back up, those typically take the longest to upload. I prefer to start with the Documents folder. These typically are probably the hardest to recreate, as well as being time sensitive. This is the folder you’re also working in most often, so you may be more likely to accidentally overwrite things. If you use Outlook or Entourage, exclude the Microsoft User Data as the database for those email programs tends to be huge.

Keep an eye on the backup program, and make sure it not only successfully backed up that initial folder, but is also correctly backing up changes daily. Typically this takes just a few days. Once you have that folder backing up, the next folder I suggest is the Desktop folder. For convenience (and a bit of poor training), many users keep documents on the desktop rather than the Documents folder.

2. App and system settings. Next is the Application Support and Preferences folder in your user library folder. These contain the settings for your various programs as well as some supporting data files.

After you’ve got those critical files happily updating it’s time for the bigger folders such as email and the rest of your library folder. Email, of course is very important and annoying if lost, but often it’s already stored elsewhere, like on your email provider’s servers.

3. Photos and home video. Once you’ve got the documents and various support files and folders, it’s time to tackle the photos. More and more users keep copies (albeit at a lower quality) on services such as Facebook and Flickr, as well as sync photos to their iPhone, so it probably isn’t so urgent for most. What I do recommend is to spend some time and back up your photos manually by periodically burning them to disc from iPhoto. Be sure to keep these disks offsite in case of disaster, maybe with friends or family.

4. Music last — or not at all. Finally, after these elements are successfully updating each day, it’s time to back up the rest of your hard drive and can go with the software’s suggested recommendations. You might think about excluding your iTunes folder, however. With iCloud and iTunes Match, you might consider waiting on these folders or not backing it up at all. A large media library can choke a backup system for months without a large return on investment. While Carbonite or Mozy is trying to back up a movie you ripped off of DVD to entertain the kids on your last road trip, it’s missing the actual pictures from the trip. Which are more important?

General tips

A general recommendation I have for the initial load is to upgrade your broadband speed, at least for a month or so. Most companies will give you a free trial period of around 30 days at a higher speed in hopes you keep the service. Take advantage of that and upload like crazy, although be careful if you use a metered service not to exceed your monthly bandwidth limit.

Make sure your Mac doesn’t go to sleep during the initial backup period. I’ve seen clients subscribe to an online service and never get an initial backup because the computer is shut down when not in use. Unfortunately, they often learn this when they try to restore after a disaster. Ouch.

Each hard drive is unique, so your data may not conform to these guidelines, but consider a game plan for your initial backup and make sure that you stagger that backup so at least something new is being backed up every month. Nothing hurts more than to have a data disaster and find you’ve been paying for a service and it hasn’t been backing up the stuff you want.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?
• The Backup Barrier: Obstacles to Online Storage Strategies
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

1. iTunes gift certificates and apps. If you have an app, TV show, or songs you’d like to share, you can quickly and easily gift them to someone right from iTunes. Generic iTunes gift certificates are available in amounts of $10 to $50 in $10 increments if you’re not sure of a person’s exact tastes.

2. Online backup. Nothing says “I love you” like the gift of preventing data loss. If someone you’re buying for hasn’t developed an onsite backup strategy, you can both give a gift and do a good deed. Both CrashPlan and Backblaze (two of my favorite online backup services) offer gift subscriptions for $50. Sure, it isn’t a very fun gift, but it’s practical, and when a recipient accidentally lose a file, they’ll hopefully remember how you helped them.

3. Audible. I’ve been an Audible fan for a very long time. Someone who has a long commute to work will appreciate the wide variety of books that they can listen to via the service. You can give an individual book (the geek on your list will love “Ready, Player One” narrated by Wil Wheaton) or give a monthly subscription that allows for multiple purchases. Three month subscriptions start at $45.

4. Pandora One. For the audiophile who loves their custom stations and playlists but winces when they hear an ad, how about a gift subscription to Pandora? No more pink cupcakes. I’d suggest Spotify, but gift subscriptions aren’t available in the U.S. yet. Coal in that company’s stocking for sure.

5. Hulu+ or Netflix. If the hard-to-shop-for person on your list loves TV or movies, a gift subscription of Hulu+ or Netflix will allow for streaming of video content to their iPad, iPhone, and desktop. Unfortunately Hulu+ doesn’t work directly on the Apple TV, so Netflix would be a better choice for users of that device. Both products have gift subscriptions that start at $7.99, and both give you a choice of attractive gift certificates to print at home.

There you have it. You didn’t procrastinate, you were simply waiting for the perfect gift, and now you have a great list. Happy holidays and next time, plan ahead!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes
• How consumer media will change in 2013

Online Backup

Online backup refers to copies of files that are directly accessible. Some examples of online backup would be copying files to USB thumbsticks or an external hard drive, and cloning a drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. Online backup is convenient because you don’t need any additional software to get access to the backup files and you save the time that would be spent on restoring files from some other type of backup archive. Cloning is particularly good for system drives because you can boot up your computer and get to work right away instead of waiting to reinstall everything or restore files from a backup archive like you would with Time Machine.

Examples:

• USB thumbdrive
• External hard drive
• SuperDuper! clone

Nearline Backup

Nearline backups are usually saved in an archive format that is saved to storage that is directly attached to the computer, or available on the same local area network. Nearline backups use additional software to manage the copies and provide some additional benefits like compression, incremental updates, versioning of files, and maybe even centralized administration and security. The disadvantage of nearline backups is that you can’t boot from them if your startup disk is down and you can’t directly access the files if you take the backup drive to another machine. Time Machine is the most familiar example for Mac users, but other software like Retrospect can be used this way too.

Examples:

• Time Machine
• Retrospect
• Tape drives

Offsite Backup

Offsite backups are simply copies that are stored in another physical location from the computer. The purpose of offsite backup is to protect you in the case of fire, theft, or some other disastrous event like a lightning strike or flood that would destroy both the computer and the backup storage next to it. Offsite backups, by nature of being physically removed, take time to recover and restore and are really only there for catastrophes. You can rotate physical drives offsite, use cloud backup service like CrashPlan or a filesync service like Dropbox.

Examples:

• Second Time Machine drive
• Cloned drive
• CrashPlan
• Dropbox

These different layers can be combined to provide you with the right amount of protection for your needs. Here are three ways that a casual, moderate and hardcore user might implement online, nearline and offsite backup for their important files.

Casual

Online

• Copy your most critical files to a USB thumb drive. Repeat this process every quarter.

Nearline

• Buy an external hard drive and turn on Time Machine.

Offsite

• Take a second USB thumb drive with critical files to work.
• Get a free Gmail  account and email an encrypted disk image (use Disk Utility) of your files to yourself (don’t forget the password!).
• Get a free Dropbox account and copy up to 2 GB of files.

Moderate

Online

• Clone your system drive to an external hard drive with SuperDuper! Update your clone at the beginning of every month.

Nearline

• Use Time Capsule for automatic network backup. If you have a laptop, don’t underestimate the convenience of having Time Machine just run while your computer is on without having to remember to plug anything in.

Offsite

• Buy more storage from Dropbox or…
• Sign up for CrashPlan, possibly the best cloud backup service for Mac users

Hardcore

Online

• Clone your system drive to two different external hard drives with SuperDuper! Take one clone off site and rotate them every week.

Nearline

• Time Machine with Time Capsule.

Offsite

• CrashPlan
• Dropbox in addition to Crashplan
• Second cloned drive
• If you’re really, really hardcore, set up a second Time Machine drive and rotate that offsite as well. You will have to manually switch drives in Time Machine preferences each time you rotate the drives.

Whatever your level of preparedness (or paranoia), there’s a backup strategy for you. Take a little time this Worldwide Backup Day to choose one and implement it before you have a reason to regret putting it off any longer.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Backup Barrier: Obstacles to Online Storage Strategies
• Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

• 80 percent will work in their home office, while 31 percent will work at the home of an extended family member, and 31 percent will work while on the road. Only 24 percent plan to work at the office over the holidays.
• 83 percent said they plan to access work data using a smartphone, with the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry leading the pack for the most popular devices.
• Nearly eight in 10 (79 percent) will use their device “when they can get away with it” this holiday season; 12 percent will use it during the drive to Grandmother’s house. Thankfully, only four percent will check it at the dinner table.

For those who are working from their smartphones, Egnyte is now offering an Android app, which joins the existing iPhone and iPad apps, to enable users to access and share files while on the road (or during the holidays).

The Android app has some nice features, shared with Egnyte’s web app, such as being able to:

• Create notes
• Manage different versions of the same document
• Email documents as attachments or links — links can be set to expire after an interval of your choosing.

Of course, in order to edit documents, you’ll need an appropriate editor app.

Egnyte’s Android app is now available in the Android Market at no charge. The Egnyte service is available at several price levels, beginning at 20 GB of online storage for $14.99 per month, through 1 TB of storage for $49.99 per month. A 15-day free trial is available.

Egnyte will also be one of our Net:Work Future Ideas Launchpad finalists. You can see the company’s CEO Vineet Jain presenting on stage at Net:Work in San Francisco on December 9 — register here.

Will you be working during the holidays?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

These new features are added to the existing Egnyte service, which provides one interface for managing an internal file server available to employees, file sharing with partners, large file transfers, and computer backup. Egnyte is a hybrid system, meaning that files are always accessible, even without Internet access. The interface puts a friendly front end on standard FTP, HTTPS and WebDAV protocols. By using these well-proven protocols, and by synchronizing invisibly with local files, Egnyte has enough speed to allow file editing directly in Microsoft Office.

Files can be managed via a web interface that can be branded to suit your organization. Egnyte also offers an optional desktop app (for PCs, Macs and Linux) that simplifies setting up connections to your local file system via WebDAV over HTTPS; mapping local drives; and specifying backup intervals. More sophisticated users can set up these connections manually, if desired.

Files are also accessible via mobile browser. In response to many customer requests, Egnyte is currently developing mobile apps for Android and iOS that will allow full file access and editing on such devices as the iPad.

Egnyte offers a long list of security, access, administration, privacy, search and storage features that are similar to what you’d expect from a local file server.

The service is available at several price levels, beginning at 20 GB of online storage for $9.99 per month, through 1 TB of storage for $44.99 per month. Additional storage is available, and a 15-day free trial is available.

Let us know what you think of Egnyte below.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

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.

Back Up and Synchronize in the Same Place

Having a backup of the documents you work with on a regular basis is crucial — but why does it always have to be a separate application from whatever process you use to access your files when you’re on the go? Nomadesk makes sure that you can safeguard files and make them accessible at the same time. The service offers unlimited backups and guarantees that every time you add a new file or make a change, your file is backed up on redundant servers in the cloud.

In part, I think Nomadesk’s approach comes from the fact that it considers digital nomads the company’s target market. For individuals traveling only with a laptop, this service is ideal, no matter where you go. Even if something happens to your laptop when you’re on the far side of the globe, you can quickly recover your files — you just need to find another computer with an Internet connection. Of course, Nomadesk offers tools for synchronizing files across multiple computers, as well.

File Sharing Made Simple

Many of the other tools currently available for sharing documents and other files often require the people that you share files with to also register as users. With Nomadesk, however, a new feature allows you to share an entire folder — no matter the size — with anyone who has an Internet connection. As long as you’re logged into the tool’s desktop client, you can create a link to share any folder. From there, it’s just a matter of sending that link to whoever you want to have access to it.

To have access to the folder sharing feature, you do have to be signed up for the team version of Nomadesk ($15 per month), rather than the personal version ($50 per year).

Unlimited Usage, With Restrictions

Nomadesk does offer unlimited backups and doesn’t limit the size of files you share, but the service does have a “Fair Usage Policy:”

Although we do not set fixed limits on storage or bandwidth, we might intervene in the spirit of “fair usage” if we see a customer dramatically exceed the storage amounts of an average Nomadesk customer.

The phrasing of the policy is fairly vague — there’s no definition of what might be considered excessive or average. If you think that you might fall into the category of a heavy user, not having a clear definition of the upper limits of Nomadesk’s service could be a problem in the long run. It seems like a problem like that would be caught during the 30-day free trial, but there’s no guarantee.

Are you a digital nomad? Does Nomadesk meet your backup/syncing needs?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• The Backup Barrier: Obstacles to Online Storage Strategies