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Monday
Jun072010

Never Say You’re Sorry

You have all probably been in the situation where you have lost a file on your computer, either because you accidentally deleted it, had a system crash, virus attack or the super imagecatastrophe, a drive failure. Recently, on my blog site, I had written about a virus that goes in and encrypts all your music, picture and document files so they disappear and if you try to run a virus removal program to fix the problem, it actually causes irreversible damage to those files so that they cannot be recovered.

So if you are like me, and your work and family memories have all become digital… You need to start considering how you’re going to protect your digital treasures from permanent loss.

Local Backup

Let’s begin by discussing the cheapest ways to get a backup. I don’t like archiving things onto CD’S or DVD’S but this is the simplest and least costly method. CD’s in bulk now cost less than quarter and a rewritable CD is not that much more. DVD’s have also become inexpensive and purchasing a couple of rewritable DVD’s will cost you less than $7 for a 5 pack. Why don’t I like this method? I find that this type of media is easily damaged. It will fail if the surface of the disk is scratched and the media is involved. So I tend to move towards more expensive media as my choice for protecting data.

Flash Drives are much less expensive and are small and a bit more resistant to damage than optical media. There is a limit to the number of times you can write to them though, and if you are not careful with how you insert them into a USB connection then you could damage the drive clip_image002[1]and lose all of your data. So even though this is a better option it is still not the best.

We find that the most frequently used excuses for not doing a backup is that you forget or that you don’t have time to do one, so how do we eliminate these two hurdles? You can do so by using a hard drive backup system that comes with software that can be used to schedule the backup.

Hard Drive Storage has become so inexpensive that there isn’t any excuse not to use this method.

image If you copy something to a backup device and then erase the original to make room for more data, you have only moved that original file and it is still in a state of single point of failure. So, when you design your backup strategy, think about the need to have multiple copies and possibly having multiple copies in multiple locations.

Why do I like these external hard drive backups? It takes the “I forgot” and “I don’t have time” excuse and throws it out the window. Most hard drives you purchase today come with automated scheduling software as part of their package. So once you have set it up, you can almost forget it. You should periodically check that the areas you want backed up are being backed up and that the scheduled backup did run.

There are two primary types of hard drive interfaces to pick from and the one that is best for you will be determined primarily by your computer environment. If you have multiple computers in your home then you may want to consider a network drive, or what is called Network Attached Storage (NAS). This interface type allows the drive to be available independently from any computer on your network. If you were to attach a drive directly to a computer using a USB connection, you would have to share the drive with the other computers on your network to make it available to them. If this computer is not turned on then the attached drive is not available. If you leave your systems on all of the time this is not an issue, if you don’t then it is.

clip_image004If you have a single computer that you are backing up, a USB drive is a good fit. An interesting side note is that many new routers available today have a USB connector on them that will allow you to attach a printer or hard drive to the router to make them a network accessible device.

Buffalo Networking now has a great home drive that has both a network interface and a USB interface on it so you have the best of both worlds. A typical 500GB drive can be found for as low as $79 on special and the Buffalo drive with the network interface as low as $149.

Offsite Backup

I had mentioned earlier that you should consider having your backups at multiple locations. You can do this by sneaker net, by taking a copy of your data to another physical location (a family member, a friend or to your office). You can also use one of the many on-line services that are available as well. Some of these on-line services are free (MS Live Mesh, MS SkyDrive, Google Docs and Dropbox to name a few). They usually have storage limits. If you need more storage you can use one of the pay services for home users that vary from a fixed fee per year for unlimited storage to a model where you pay per gigabyte for the storage you use. If you decide you are going to use a paid service you should take a hard look at your environment and what you want to backup. If you have opted for backing up locally and you want to backup that drive’s data, then you should probably consider Jungle Disk, Carbonite or Mozy services. Carbonite gets a lot of press and is offered by many computer manufacturers as one of their installed product offerings when you buy their machines.

clip_image006Carbonite is a great product if you are only going to backup the files located physically on your machine. If you want to backup attached or network storage you have to subscribe to their Pro Version.

I use Mozy for myself at home but I also have used Jungle Disk. I had initially gone with Jungle Disk because it would allow me to backup any of my PC’s to one account and it didn’t matter whether the source was an internal drive, attached storage or a NAS device. But for personal use it became expensive when your total storage size gets large. I am currently at over 380GB’s stored offsite and with Jungle Disk’s consumer pricing this would cost me $59/month. There are some benefits to this I will talk about in a moment. Staring at this price made me reconsider how much I was willing to pay and I decided that I really only wanted my critical data backed up so I went back to looking at Mozy and Carbonite.

clip_image008I chose Mozy primarily because it would allow me to back up an attached (USB) drive as well as internal drives. So I attached a 1TB drive to my primary system and I am now able to backup all my critical data for a cost of $54.45/year instead of $59/month. This is over $600 in savings each year. I have both NAS and USB drives on my network though and if you are in this situation as well, then you may want to view a video that I created that shows how I am getting around this Mozy limitation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxYvHtLeBAk

Why did I include Jungle Disk if it is so expensive? Well if you have multiple machines at multiple locations that you want to backup, you can do this with one account. Why? They charge by the amount of storage you use. If you are in this situation, then you may want to pay the few extra bucks because it is more flexible. It also has a network drive feature that allows you to designate a drive letter for storage in the cloud (a service that is accessed through the Internet) that can be accessed by all of your computers and your iPhone as well. I still have my Jungle Disk account but it is primarily used for its offsite storage access now, not as a backup system.

So the bottom line is if you are a home user, I would look at either Mozy or Carbonite for your offsite storage. If you are a business owner, then consider Jungle Disk because it can become more cost effective in a business use case. If you need a combination onsite and offsite solution come to us for some products that we have that support more mission critical network systems.

I hope that this information has given you some ideas and that I won’t be seeing you any time soon with lost data and tears in your eyes because you haven’t backed up.

If you have more questions about designing a total backup solution for your home or business be sure to contact us.

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