Wait a Minute! Back Up! FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-18-08

Our first guest columnist of the summer is Elizabeth Rodgers from Ben’s Ranch. (The original Ben did have a ranch and was really a cowboy, but the Ben’s Ranch that Elizabeth co-founded with Ben’s grandson is a tech support company based in Los Angeles.)

Elizabeth, as you’ll see is a big fan of Mozy’s online backup service. I’ve written about Mozy before, but it’s always nice to get a new perspective on a subject.

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You know you should, and yet, you don't. No, I'm not talking about essential fatty acids, I'm talking about backing up your data.

Imagine this scenario:

Your hard drive fails. You haven’t backed up your data because

1. You were too lazy
2. You were too lazy
3. You have been meaning to do it

All of your financials, all of your emails, all of your contacts, all of your digital music and photos are lost forever. Oh, wait! You could pay a company $750 to get that data back. Oh. They say that it actually can’t be done. It’s gone. Now you have to buy a new hard drive and totally reconfigure your computer and…

It’s a nightmare. And it’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when. You can easily avoid this. There are many ways back up your data:

• You can get an extra hard drive, put it in your computer, and transfer the data.
• You can have the extra hard drive external to your computer, or
• You could backup online.

The simplest solution for the external hard drive is SimpleTech SimpleDrive. The software (StorageSync Backup) leads you through the setup, and once you’ve backed up the first time, the following backups will go much faster as it will be backing up only what is new or changed since the last time you did it. Some people love SimpleTech; some hate it.

Let’s get to the good stuff…

My backup of choice is online backup. No more external hard drives, no more CDs and no more fiddling with backup software. If you have a .mac account, you can get 1 gig of storage for $50 or 3 gigs for $100 for the year.

Another company that backs up online elegantly and less expensively is Mozy. Mozy is an exciting (because it’s) FREE new service that lets you effortlessly, automatically and securely back up your data OFFSITE. The first 2 gigs are free, if you want unlimited gigs (um, that’s a lot of space!), it’s $5/month.

Good story: I told an acquaintance of mine about Mozy and she spent the five bucks a month for the big backup. TWO DAYS later, her hard drive failed! Kaput. Totally dead. No biggie, because she bought a new hard drive (for $80) and downloaded her backed up data from Mozy onto her new drive. This woman LOVES me. And I barely know her.

Here’s how Mozy works:

Go to Mozy.com and click on “Get Mozy free.” You will give them your email and create a password. In moments, you will receive an email from Mozy with a link to click. Once you’ve clicked on the link, you will be walked through a series of easy instructions to get backed up. That's it! If you choose, it can be a continuous backup, so when the software sees that you’re not active on the computer, it will backup your data securely because it’s encrypted. Aaaah, the magic and mystery of online backup!

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One caveat: “unlimited” storage is like “unlimited” bandwidth. There are limits somewhere. One is the amount of time it would take to upload the contents of, say, my 1 TB network drive. Another is that the $5/month unlimited home user account really is supposed to be for personal use. If you have a home office, you’re supposed to get Mozy Pro, which costs $3.95/month plus fifty cents per gigabyte per month. So that 1 TB of data, even if I could upload it, would cost $503.95 per month. Not very practical for a sole proprietor.

But as a painless way to get your most critical documents backed up off site, it’s pretty good.

You’ll be hearing about some other online backup, storage, and archiving solutions as soon as I can finish testing them.

Technorati Tags: Mozy,SimpleTech,StorageSync,SimpleDrive,Ben's Ranch

Hurray for HARO

The Ur-Guru is about to arrive for another visit, and in the interest of spending more time with him, I thought I would try to get some guest columnists for the Backup Reminder.

So I posted a query to Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out list.

I’d signed up for this thrice-daily e-mail full of queries from journalists in order to discover opportunities for me and my clients to get some media coverage. Some of the queries come from major mainstream media publications, but others come from bloggers and podcasters.

When I posted my request for stories of data loss disasters and pitches for SOHO backup products, I had a dozen responses—at least—in the first day. (Note to self: next time you do this, leave yourself more time to respond to the answers you get.) Wow!

Over the next few weeks, you’ll be hearing real-life stories from people who have learned about backup the hard way. (Some of them were so traumatized that they went on to start backup companies.) In fact, there’s so much material that I’ll be posting more often than usual, though the Backup Reminder e-zine will only appear once a week.

What’s more, I already have a new client as a result of this outreach, so thanks to HARO I’m finally going to be making some money from my blog.

Technorati Tags: HARO,Peter Shankman

Back Up Your Passport with Gmail

In response to last week’s Backup Reminder, Loyal Reader MKR wrote:

I use a very simple approach to backup my files, unless they are very large. I have a Gmail account and I e-mail a message to myself with an attachment. The message and attachment are stored on the servers of Gmail.

Recently, when one of my friends was planning to travel abroad, I told him to scan the important pages of the passport and tickets and email them to himself. If ever they lose the passport and tickets anywhere in the world, they can retrieve a copy from anywhere so long there is access to Internet.

This is important since one of my friends lost the passport and other papers in Frankfurt on the way to India. On reaching India, the airport authorities needed some evidence before admitting her. Her husband faxed a copy of the passport to the airport in India and then only she was allowed to enter. The above simple solution would have easily solved the problem.

Back in the olden days, we used to make photocopies of our passports and carry them separately from the passports themselves. That still works, but I still like this solution as a supplement, if not necessarily a replacement, to the old-fashioned method of passport backup.

It’s not likely to be very helpful if you’re in the middle of the desert with no Internet access (and no printer), but then again, most people who check your passport probably won’t be in the wilderness.

If you’re not confident the documents will be private enough stored in your Gmail account, you can always put them on your own FTP server, but that requires a higher geek-score than just sending yourself an e-mail does.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-11-08

I have a friend(?) whose chosen backup strategy is to e-mail me copies of her important files and BCC me on her important e-mail messages. I did not volunteer for this service, and I’m not recommending it to anyone as a particularly good approach to backing up your data. It beats having no backups at all, and it’s one of the few options available to my friend(?), whose own computer isn’t connected to the Internet and who does almost everything on a U3 data stick at public library computers (which tend to be designed not to let U3 data sticks work properly, or run any programs).

So she e-mails me files and I save them into a folder for her, where they get backed up with the rest of my documents. I then usually delete the attachments from Outlook, because my main PST file is big enough as it is.

And I don’t usually pay any more attention to the files themselves than any backup program would. They get scanned for viruses on the way into Outlook, and I don’t have the time or inclination to check the content or format of these files (usually Word documents).

But the other day I happened to notice something. My friend(?) was sending documents to some prospects, and one of the Microsoft Word files was only 150 bytes. When was the last time you saw a Microsoft Word doc that was less than 1K in size? Even a flat text file is longer than that if it has any content.

So I tried opening the file, and sure enough, there was nothing in it. I have no idea how this happened; some error in saving the file, perhaps. My friend(?) is kind of jinxed when it comes to computers, as if they weren’t capable of creating problems all by themselves.

I told her about the problem. Naturally, she freaked out. Then she asked me whether I had an earlier, uncorrupted version of that file. Fortunately for her, I did. (More fortunately, she had given it a different file name, so it didn’t get overwritten by the 1K file.) So I e-mailed that back to her.

But it got me to thinking about the first thing I ever learned about computers—from reading science fiction, before I’d ever touched a computer myself.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

If you make multiple backups of a corrupted file, then all you have is several useless files instead of one. Even backup software that verifies your data is only making sure that the copy is the same as the original. You’re the one who has to make sure the original is worth copying.

Now, most of us have no reason to think our files might be corrupt. If the file was fine the last time you used it, then there’s not likely to be anything to worry about. But if the document is critically important, you should check it before you either back it up or submit it to a client.

This is especially true if you’ve been having any kinds of problems with your computer, your software, or your storage. My friend(?) has been having lots of trouble with corrupted files lately. Whatever the cause (and I’m not really in a position to guess), that’s a sign that she needs to check her files before she sends them to me or anyone else—but especially before she sends them to me, if she’s counting on me to be able to provide her with intact files when she needs them.

Checking all your files before every backup job isn’t practical. But some files are more important to save than others. Before you take your jewelry over to the safe deposit box, you might want to be sure it’s not counterfeit.

And don’t even think about e-mailing me your documents for safekeeping.

The Drawbacks of Dell DataSafe: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-04-08

Yep, this is late again. Sorry. I had a completely insane week last week. Part of the insanity gave me the topic for this week’s Backup Reminder, but I had to sleep for two days before I could write it.

I hardly do any computer consulting work anymore, but I have a few legacy clients (not to mention the occasional friend or family member) who can persuade me to wade into the trenches now and again. In this case, the client had temporary custody of my Maxtor OneTouch Plus drive (otherwise known as Mama Bear, but designated “P” for “Plus” in my drive lettering system), so I had an added motive.

In any case, most of the job was more than usually straightforward, and I was starting to feel pretty good about everything. The new machine is a perfectly decent piece of hardware, running XP with 2 GB RAM, which meant it was a lot speedier and easier to work with than the old one. (We will pass over all the problems the client had setting it up; I was spared involvement at that point.) Copying data from Mama Bear onto the new machine and the laptop—no problem. (It just needed a new USB cable, as someone had stepped on the connector for the old one and bent it into an interesting but non-useful shape.) Consolidating Outlook data into one file—easy. Replacing the expired trial anti-virus—made easier by recommendations from the LinkedIn community. Etc.

Then we came to setting up the Dell DataSafe™ online backup account that my client had purchased with her computer back in March. Supposedly, a free year’s subscription had been included in the package, but either she never received the username and password necessary to access the account, or it had gotten lost in the course of previous disputes with Dell Tech Support. The invoice listed the account as a line item, but provided no useful information.

My client ended up spending 90 minutes on the phone with Dell, bouncing back and forth between Customer Care and Tech Support, who insisted that she was supposed to activate her account within 30 days of purchase. That was after I’d led the Tech Support guy through all the appropriate screens and files to show him that no, really, we hadn’t been given any information and there wasn’t an option for “I already got a subscription with my computer” in the sign-up section.

Now, given that a one-year’s subscription for 3 GB storage costs all of $9, trying to get credit for what my client had already paid for was almost certainly not worth the cost of either my time or hers. But I wasn’t about to hand Dell her money without her permission, either.

I went through the process of setting up the free 30-day trial account, and that was easy enough to do. You enter your e-mail address and create a password, and then download some software. (You don’t have to provide credit card information at that time.) It’s no harder than setting up, say, Mozy.

But I ran into a problem fairly early on. Among the various files I’d copied onto the 500 GB hard drive of the new PC were several backups of Outlook data files, with varying dates on them. Even though none of the individual .pst files was unusually large (for a .pst file), the combination of those files with the ones already in the folder with the current file meant that there were more than 3 GB of .pst files alone.

I’ve run into the “over quota” problem with Mozy a few times—and I don’t even back up my .pst files online. It’s not that hard, in this day and age, to accumulate more than 2 (for Mozy’s free service) or 3 (for DataSafe’s free trial) gigabytes of data. Online backup always requires prioritizing your data.

With Mozy, I usually collect large files that push me over quota and don’t really need to be backed up offsite into a sub-folder and then exclude that sub-folder from the backup configuration.

I could not find a way to do this with Dell DataSafe. There are two options for selecting the files to be backed up: by overall type of file (documents, e-mail, financial, photos, music, video), or by file extension. So I could either tell it to back up all the Outlook data files, or none of them. “All” wouldn’t fit, and “none” isn’t such a good choice for someone who doesn’t have another backup system in place.

In the short term, my client’s options are either to increase the size of her account (10 GB is only $19/year) or to copy the older Outlook files onto a DVD and then delete them from her hard drive to keep her within her 3 GB.

In the longer term, however, the inability to tell DataSafe which specific documents are critical and need backing up is going to be a problem. Even with duplicates and archives cleared out, data will start to accumulate. Everything takes up more storage space these days, and with families owning multiple digital cameras and videocams, it starts to fill up. And those photos and videos are just the kind of thing people don’t want to lose, whether or not they have any intrinsic or business value.

Because online transfer speeds—particularly for uploading data—are inconveniently slow, backing up an entire 500 GB drive online isn’t likely to become feasible any time soon. So it would probably be a good idea for my client to get an external hard drive or a NAS drive as an offline backup method.

But as long as DataSafe doesn’t let you decide exactly which files and folders to back up, she’s also going to need a different online backup service.

I’ve already put Mozy onto her laptop.

Technorati Tags: Dell DataSafe,Mozy,Maxtor OneTouch Plus

My Wordle! A Tag Cloud for the Backup Blog

There’s a new Web 2.0 tool out there called Wordle that creates pretty tag clouds from text or RSS feeds. Here’s the one I made for the Backup Blog. The most common words are largest.

There aren’t any real surprises in here “backup” and “drive” are the terms that appear most frequently.

Click on the thumbnail image to see a larger version.

Motivation to Back Up: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-27-08

Hi, my name is Gavin Impett and I’m here to provide you with your weekly motivation to backup. I met Sallie just over a month ago at a Podcast Meetup. I’m starting a video kitty-match-making, used cat service, www.kittysingle.com for the San Francisco Animal Care and Control, Toni’s Kitty Rescue ,and anyone else who’s willing to show me their, ahem…adoptable—meaning ready for love—cat.

This had the immediate effect of bringing my current web host to its knees, and I decided to find a new host, which meant I needed to not only find the “back up site” button on my cpanel, but also learn how to use it, since I’m packing up and moving on.

So I sent Sallie and email to Sallie, saying more or less, “Here I am, dutifully backing up my site. Golly, I wonder what this ‘destroy all data button’ does. I wonder if anyone I know knows anything about backing-up and stuff. You wouldn’t have any thoughts on that backing-up subject, would you Sallie? Help me, for the love of god, I’m on my knees here.” To which Sallie replied, “Hey, I have an idea: you could write this week’s reminder.” Maybe I was too subtle.

Fair enough and as it turns out, I am uniquely qualified on the subject of backing up. Some years ago, I attended a Wilderness Medicine with my Physician girlfriend in the mountains above Aspen. (There’s nothing like listening at 9,000 feet to a lecture on the symptoms of altitude sickness, checking off the symptoms, and saying, “Yep that’s me, I got that. I can die up here! Rockin’!”)

An Army doctor gave us his lecture to the troops, on the subject of the differences between frostbite and trench-foot. He made a joke about his medical title and what the Army really thinks of its soldiers. My sweetie leaned over and explained, “He’s a veterinarian.”

“You don’t see trench-foot too much these days,” he said, “that’s why the war in the Falklands was so great. This guy was in a water-filled fox hole for a week. When we took his shoe off, his whole foot came off. Next slide please. Now if that doesn’t make you change your socks, nothing will.”

Let's just say, the photo left an impression. The reason I mention this seeming digression is it comes to the subject of backing up, I am uniquely qualified on this subject, not unlike the Army doc dealing with something now rare, but once common and responsible for the loss of millions.

I was one of the first human beings to own a computer. No, not the Atari, but the now long-forgotten Apple IIc. When the San Francisco Museum of Modern art had a display on ancient computers, my IIc was older than anything on display. I remember laughing at people who wanted common monitors for their computers and attended the very first computer art class offered at San Francisco State University. While every other student was figuring out how to make squiggly lines move in random patterns in the class, I attempted to see if it was possible to write a short story on one of these computer things. With AppleWorks, you could write about 400 words before the Apple IIe ran out of ram.

In those days, you had to save the file to a floppy—a real floppy, mind you—and if you were smart, you backed up to a second floppy that you stored next to the original so it wouldn’t get lost (not so smart). Then someone pointed me to AppleWriter, which allowed me to have a forty-page file, and life was good. So I wrote, backed-up, tried to remember which was the original, which was the back-up, and so on. One great happy adventure, except when the power went out, or I hit the magic delete-the-only-record-of-these-forty-pages button, which happened on more than one occasion.

Since those happy, innocent days of floppies, I have learned the obsessive joy of backing-up to 5.25 disks, CDs, DVDs, MyBook. My current jones is for a Blu-Ray (50 gig a disk!) burner.

My obsession for back-up stems from the two simple facts. First, I can no longer have printed copies of everything. Video, photos, blogs, websites, are not printable in any functional way. Many of my files can now only exist on hard drives and servers.

The second reason dates back to when it was time to move on from my trusty IIc, which if you held the conversion box just right, could still print to the old dot-matrix. I needed a better quality printer and it was time. So I printed everything I had written on the IIc, walked into the Apple Store, money in hand, and asked a fateful question. “Mac supports IIc files, right? I will be able to convert these files over, right? Apple makes both products, right?”

So I walked out of the store, bought a PC and haven’t looked back. In fairness to Apple, many of their support people and Mac aficionados everywhere have assured me over the years that it is possible to convert IIc files to the Mac format. In my defense, I will say, no one I have ever spoken to or contacted on this subject has actually attempted or managed to accomplish this task. Apparently, the necessary hardware is stored in a secret mountain village in the Himalayas that appears only every eighty years or so, because next to Apple’s file conversion secret is the secret to eternal life and world peace and 90 per cent of the world’s computer users just aren’t worthy.

Now if the next slide doesn’t make you back up your files to a usable format, nothing will.

Technorati Tags: KittySingle,Apple IIc,file conversion