How Much Is Your Data Worth? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-31-07

Last week the VP of Marketing at Data Risk Management contacted me in response to the backup reminder I wrote nearly two years ago about backups and insurance. My conclusion at that time was “It’s possible to get insured against the cost of losing your data, but you’re only going to be insured in the amount it would cost you to restore your data if you had up-to-date backups. If your business is out of operation for weeks or your client data is permanently lost because you have no backups, you’re out of luck.”

What the marketing VP said to me was that his company was “facilitating the data insurance market in a profound way.” I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but I took a look at the website, and what they're offering is interesting.

I was expecting data insurance the way I'd always thought of it: you pay premiums and get money if you suffer from catastrophic data loss. This is something different.

Their website explains it like this:

Insurance companies can't insure the value of your data because data loss is difficult to prove and there would be a high rate of fraudulent claims. Data Storage companies do not have the technology to safely guarantee the value of your data. If they lose your data—they might refund a few months of your storage fees.

So what's their alternative?

We store your data in the safest, most cost effective way possible. If we can't give you your data—you get a check for its full value.

And who determines that value? You do, and that's what your "premiums" are based on.

This is the tricky part. How much is your data worth? If you purchased a mailing list (a practice I advise against, but for the sake of example), then the list might be worth what you paid for it, assuming you could get the same list again from the same source. Alternately, it might be worth what it has brought you in product sales.

As for data you create, the most prudent thing might be to set its value at what it would cost to re-create it. If a client paid you $X to develop a program, write a white paper, or whatever, then you might set its value at that amount. You might need to double that amount, however, or add to it the income you would lose while re-creating it.

There's going to be some data it's not possible to reconstruct, for one reason or another. How do you value that? “Sentimental value” is an expression used to refer to items that most people wouldn't pay money for, but things with sentimental value are often irreplaceable. No amount of money can bring back your late grandparents or return your child to an earlier age to pose for a photograph. Does that mean you insure your personal items for more money, or not at all? Would money compensate you for the loss?

“Many companies value 100 MB of data at over 1 million dollars,” the site claims. All I can say is that either I have the wrong kind of data, or I'm not charging enough, because I can't think of any 100 MB of data I have that cost me and my clients that much to create, or that it would cost me that much in lost income to re-create—though there could certainly be some fairly severe implications for the future of my business if I had to drop everything to re-create something I'd lost.

Let's take, for example, my Outlook .pst file, where I store e-mail, contact information, and appointments. Those are all important things, which is why I back that file up frequently. I'd certainly be in trouble if I lost it all. At a million dollars per 100 MB, it would have a value of almost $6 million. Since Data Risk Management charges 10 cents per thousand dollars of value per month, that would be $600/month. I suppose that if my Outlook data were really worth $6 million, it might be worth it.

Let's look at a more realistic scenario. The minimum value allowed for data is $100 per megabyte, which would put the total value of my Outlook data at about $60,000, which would be sufficient to cover the cost of reconstructing that data from other sources, or at least enough of it to deal with the present and the future. The cost of coverage would then drop to $6/month, which is certainly within range for small and home-based businesses.

The interesting thing about Data Risk management is the way they combine data storage with insurance. By storing your data in multiple secure data centers, they reduce their likelihood of having to pay out on a claim. And by charging $1 per gigabyte for data retrieval, they help to ensure themselves enough funds to pay out if they have to. And you want a company like this to have a sustainable business model, because the biggest risk of putting your data into a startup like this is that they won't be around this time next year.

Technorati Tags: Data Risk Management, data insurance

Zoogmo Follow-Up

Dov Sugarman from Zoogmo answered some of the questions I posed in Friday's writeup in his comment on the post, and also provided me some help with connecting to a backup partner and testing the backup and restore features.

For the beta period, at least, there's a “dummy partner” set up to let people test the system. When I selected “MyZoogmo” as a backup partner, I got a dialog box asking me how much space I'd like to offer and telling me how much space was available for my files.

So I selected some files, and noticed that there isn't a “next” button and that you have to go back to the “partners” window to back up or restore a file, but Dov assures me they're going to fix that.

Anyway, it said the backup was running, but that no files were backed up. I'm not at all sure why. But Dov called this morning to walk me through backing up and restoring a single file (except that it became 4 files by the time it was backed up—don't ask me how). And this time it worked.

Zoogmo compares the files in your backup location to the files on your hard drive and offers to restore the ones which are missing. Pretty clever, and also fairly simple.

Dov also assured me that you don't have to set up port forwarding in order to host someone's backup files, even if you have a router. That's definitely a plus.

So we'll see how it evolves.

Technorati Tags: Zoogmo

Connecting Your Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-24-07

Apologies for the late posting of this week's reminder. I had to attend a 4-hour business meeting in the middle of writing it, and I had too many appointments this week to write it in advance. "Those pesky clients," as I sometimes jokingly call them, remain my priority.

I've been popular this week: three different companies have asked me to write about their products and services. Rather than mash them all into one article, though, I'll deal with them separately.

This week's star is Zoogmo, "Your online backup community." If you think that phrase sounds familiar, you're right: I wrote about CrashPlan's similar approach back in February. Whereas CrashPlan works for Mac, PC, and Linux, Zoogmo is Windows-only (XP and Vista).

I confess I rather like the name "Zoogmo," which reminds me of Greek zeugma ("yoke") and refers to a figure of speech most appealing when it connects two unrelated ideas, e.g. "She left in a huff and a carriage."

They also get points for their series of videos about how to use the program. But I do have to add a few caveats to the claim on their home page, however well it ties in with the infinity symbol in their logo:

With Zoogmo you get FREE unlimited backup that automatically runs in the background and lets you protect your data at multiple remote locations that YOU choose.

Free? Well, Zoogmo doesn't charge you. (Their business model? Don't ask me. It's not included in the FAQ.) And presumably your friends and family members won't charge you to use storage space on their computers. But if you use Zoogmo to back up to an external drive, naturally you have to pay for the drive. And your friends paid for their computers, too.

Unlimited? Well, theoretically--if you have an unlimited number of friends with an unlimited number of space on their computers, and don't mind your data scattered to an unlimited number of places. What "unlimited" really means in this context is that Zoogmo doesn't put limits on how much data you can back up. (But maybe I should have the Ur-Guru test it to see how it handles multiple terabytes.)

On the other hand, being able to choose--and know--where your data goes is a good thing.

For some reason, the first time I tried to download the beta, I got the following error message: "Exception in AddUserToXmpp 50 - The operation has timed out." The second time the download started (1.57 MB, which it doesn't say on the download page), but my signup information was not replaced by a "Thanks for downloading, here's what you do next" page.

I was a bit surprised that apparently you can ask any existing participant of Zoogmo whether s/he wants to be a backup partner. Though I'm not sure any of the people on the list right now are real people, or there for the sake of example. I'm not entirely sure I want to find out, either. Asking random people to be your "friend" is bad enough. Asking them to store your data strikes me as nothing short of insanity, even if Zoogmo's claim that your backup partners "won't even be able to tell what kind of files you are storing on your computer." (Seems to me there could be some pretty serious liability issues between partners, even so.) But for the sake of example, since the program wants you to pick a partner, I selected the name of the Zoogmo team member who sent me the info about the product.

Once you have a partner--or several--you can move on to deciding what you want to back up. You can do this by category (My Documents, e-mail and contacts, Firefox bookmarks/IE favorites, etc) or by file. The default seems to be to check everything. For some reason, though, when I started unchecking items, I got a warning saying that I was attempting to back up more data than I had agreed with my partners.

Well, I hadn't agreed anything with my so-called partners, because I was never prompted to enter into an agreement with them. Apparently Zoogmo makes that request to the partner for you, as a closer look at the "partners" window shows a "waiting for approval" note next to the name of the chosen partner. (Guess I should have watched the rest of those videos.)

The interface is straightforward, as the only possible activities beyond choosing partners and files/categories are "backup" and "restore." But as with ION's file transfer function, you have to set up port forwarding on your router in order to offer storage space to your partners. There's a link to information about how to do this under the "advanced" tab. (And for anyone who's curious, their proposed port for access is not the same as ION's, so you could use the two together.)

A word on the subject of port forwarding and routers. If you have broadband Internet access (cable or DSL) and don't have a router, get one. It will save you from thousands of automated attacks against your system, because every router builds in firewall protection. Most SOHO users don't need separate (expensive) hardware firewalls, but there's no point volunteering to join a botnet. And having a router is way less intrusive than using one of those irritating so-called Internet security packages. But I digress.

It's not clear what happens if you have several backup partners. Does all your data get copied to each of them, or does Zoogmo just move on to the next after the first one is full?

So I can't provide a live field test today, but Zoogmo certainly looks as though it would work for the right people under the right circumstances. The right people being folks who trust each other and all have high-speed connections and plenty of hard drive space. Oh, and whose computers are running most of the time, or at least likely to be running at the time any given partner needs to restore something from a backup. It might be especially worthwhile for those who don't trust online backup services (or don't trust the governments who can demand access to their data) but who still want some offsite backup.

If anyone starts using Zoogmo, let me know how it works for you--or doesn't. You can comment here in the blog, or e-mail me: sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.

And as a bonus for waiting so long to get this, you get an extra link, this time to the CNET community newsletter, for members' suggestions about the best way to back up and restore your computer to the same condition it was in before the crash.

Slightly Famous Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-17-07

Yesterday I received a copy of the 2nd edition of Steven Van Yoder’s book, Get Slightly Famous: Become a Celebrity in Your Field and Attract More Business with Less Effort.

So why am I telling you this? Van Yoder interviewed me about the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog back in October of 2005, and there’s a very short section about it in the book (pages 186-7). I don’t have to go back and listen to the recording to know that the quote attributed to me is a fairly drastic paraphrase, but that’s okay.

At the time of that interview, the Backup Blog was only 10 months old, though I’d been writing the reminder newsletter for a couple of years already. It had gotten a mention in the May 2005 San Francisco Chronicle, in an article about local business blogs.

Two years down the line, I’d say that “slightly” is definitely the word to append in front of “famous” where the Backup Blog is concerned. Having it certainly gets me more readers than are subscribed to the e-zine, and it has attracted the attention of software manufacturers (who offer me products to review), hardware manufacturers (who occasionally give me spiffy hard drives), and content aggregators like the newly formed TechDispenser and its sponsoring partner Adify. I will not be retiring on those ad buys, nor on AdSense. (I have yet to make enough money from that to collect a single payment.)

While many tech bloggers write about backups periodically, I’m the only person I know who actually writes an “all backups, all the time” blog/e-zine. That makes it fairly easy to stand out.

On the other hand, I’m never going to get more than “slightly” famous even in the small and specialized realm of data backups. That’s partly because I’m not a real expert in the field, but mostly because I’m not passionate enough about the subject to put in the effort required to build the list, increase the number of comments, get more links from other bloggers, and so on and so forth.

Of course I care about my data, and my clients’ data. I don’t want anyone to lose anything they could have saved with a decent backup system. And I like computers and don’t mind checking out new hardware and software. But I’m not a hard-core backup geek, really. If I didn’t have to crank this reminder out every week, I probably wouldn’t stay current on the latest developments in SOHO and consumer backup and storage options.

On the other hand, if I didn’t have this reminder to write every week, I might be less scrupulous about doing my own backups. (Though now that I have 5 different automated file backup programs, that’s not such a worry.) And I might not hear about products and services that would work better for me than something I used in the past.

But sometimes I wish someone else would decide s/he really, passionately wanted to write about backups, because whenever I’ve thought of discontinuing the Backup Blog in favor of writing on other subjects closer to where my real business is, I get stopped by the thought “If I don’t do it, who will?”

Eventually I will resolve this dilemma one way or another. Either something will happen to ensure that it’s worth it to me to keep writing, or something will happen to prove to me that I need to put my time and energy into something else.

But whether or not I continue with my “slightly famous” blog, it’s important for all of us to be more than slightly backed up. Maybe five different file backup systems is overkill—and maybe it isn’t. None of the backup software I use (Mozy, Karen’s Replicator, SyncBack Free, FreeAgent Sync, and the Maxtor Shared Storage backup) cost me any money, but data recovery costs a fortune.

Oh, and for anyone who’s wondering, I like the FreeAgent Go drive much better now that I’ve turned off that annoying light, and it seems to be functioning perfectly. I reformatted the old X drive to remove the data so that I could recycle it. Wouldn’t you know, it behaved perfectly throughout the entire reformatting process. This makes me more suspicious than ever that the problem is really with the connections in the case and not with the drive itself, but it’s a chance I can’t afford to take, so I’ll hand it over to the Alameda County Computer Resource Center to reuse or recycle as they see fit.

Unless, of course, one of you wants it, risks notwithstanding.

Keep an Eye on Your Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-10-07

I’ve been beta-testing Universe Point’s ION Backup this week, and after sending so much feedback to the development team, I feel almost as though I’d already written the review. Because the program is still in beta, some of the things I mention may have changed by the time the release candidate (that’s the official version) comes out.

The installation package for ION is a modest 23 MB. If that doesn’t seem modest to you, DriveClone Pro is 96 MB and TrueImage Workstation is 155 MB. On the other hand, my standby Karen’s Replicator is less than 2 MB, so perhaps “mid-size” is the best description for ION.

In order to install the program, you need a customer ID, which the company supplies when you sign up for the trial or buy a copy. This registers your “station” (the computer you are backing up) with Universe Point. That’s important both for monitoring and for site-to-site file transfers.

I have to say that both the development and support teams at Universe Point are really on the ball. The support forum has extremely detailed instructions, with lots of screen shots, on how to do things like set up port forwarding so you can receive file transfers. There are links to the support forum from within the program, particularly in the beginner’s interface, and also links within the different windows to answer questions like “What should I name my backup?” and “What should I back up?” (Note to Universe Point: “Back up” as a verb is two words.)

Because I have my screen set to display items at 120 DPI, some of the text in ION runs off the screen or otherwise displays a bit oddly. I’m assured that the development team is working on ways to deal with this. The high resolution of modern computer screens means that fonts at the usual 96 DPI setting are hard to read, and I don’t like squinting. The down side to this eyesight-saver is that not everything displays properly, particularly in fixed-size windows. (If you want to increase readability in Windows XP without decreasing screen resolution, go to Control Panel | Display | Settings | Advanced and select 120 DPI from the drop-down menu.)

When you start ION, you get a welcome page which offers you a choice of “simple view” and “detailed view.” I chose the detailed view and set up a backup job by clicking the “backup” button.

You can choose between full, incremental, and differential backups, select which items you want to back up (including the System State), and then choose the local or LAN location for your backup. ION replicates your file and folder structure exactly, which is not ideal for me, but does make it easier to find the backup copy of a file, because it will be in the same place in the backup location that it is on the original computer (e.g. C:\!FileSlinger\!Clients). That file structure is packed into a folder with the backup name and the date on it. ION saves several days’ worth of backups in case you need to go back to a much earlier version; there’s an option to keep only a certain number of backups or delete old backups after X days.

Instead of creating a proprietary backup file format, ION either copies your files exactly as they are or compresses them into a ZIP file. To restore a single file, you just drag it back onto your hard drive.

You can opt to verify your backup once the copying is done. If you’re a sufficiently advanced user (the kind accustomed to command lines), you can include “pre and post commands.” That means you can tell ION shut Outlook down before trying to back up your PST file, or to shut down the computer after the backup finishes. (It would be great if these could be more user-friendly, with a checklist for the more popular commands.)

I set up a test backup of my client files (3 GB as of this morning) to my F drive. The first time I ran it, I turned on verification, and it took 49 minutes. The most recent full backup took 14 minutes, which is comparable to the time needed to copy those files with Karen’s Replicator or a straight drag-and-drop.

There are several scheduling options for backups and transfers on ION: hourly, daily, and monthly. The “daily” option gives you a choice of days, so if you only want it to run once a week, you just check one day.

Monitored Backups

ION’s real claim to fame is their backup monitoring service. Most people who use automated backups don’t check to see whether their data is really being backed up. As Universe Point’s marketing guy explained: “Any errors on your system automatically ping our server and we, in turn, give you a call. This came out of the developers’ tech days when they went to office after office and discovered corrupt, damaged or completely blank backup media.”

The concept of monitoring made me a little nervous, however, because I wasn’t sure how it worked and whether it meant the Universe Point team had access to my data. So I asked about that and got a detailed answer:

We don’t check your data because we never have access to your data. We simply get detailed error messages from the software if it encounters problems. For instance, I got a message on a job I set up the other day that told me my differential backup couldn’t run because a full backup was already running at the same scheduled time. After being told this error, I was able to fix the schedule and prevent further errors that might have resulted from this setup mistake.

Essentially, we are doing, via our monitoring center, what everyone should be doing on a daily basis by checking their backup log files. After every scheduled job runs, the log should be checked for errors. This ends up at maybe 10 or 15 minutes a day dedicated to properly monitoring your own backup. Most of our clients bill their time at well over $100 dollars, so our $30 a month monitoring fee is a decent deal. Even if you just bring a tech out once a month to check the backup logs, it’s going to cost considerably more than that.

We really see this as a key feature. It is like a home security system for your data backup. Everyone is willing to invest in protecting their hard assets with office or home security systems, but very few people are dedicated to protecting their data. That data is often more difficult to replace than anything a thief might physically walk off with, so doesn’t it deserve at least as much attention?

That made much more sense. I’ve known people who have lost data because they didn’t know their backups weren’t working, and not all software programs let you know if there’s a problem with the backup. And not everyone knows what the error messages mean if they get them. If you want the monitored service, you have to provide a phone number so that Universe Point can call and let you know when there’s a problem.

Site-to-Site Transfer

The other feature I tested was the site-to-site transfer. This is designed to move data on one network (say, your computer at work) to another (say, your computer at home). ION uses uses 128 bit, private key encryption to protect your files while in transit. Transferring requires a bit more geekiness than backing up, because you have to set up the router for the receiving computer’s network for port forwarding.

I chose to test the transfer feature by sending files from my housemate’s computer to mine, which meant I had to take the additional step of adding an alternate IP address for the receiving “station,” because we’re on the same network. But once I got that worked out (with help from the tech support guys), the transfer went smoothly and fairly swiftly: 305 MB in 7.5 minutes, with an average transfer rate of 750 kB/s. (That’s faster than my usual download of a program from a website via a browser by a factor of two.)

If you want to move large files from one machine to another and don’t want to have to use an FTP server as a way station, ION transfer is a good option as long as all the computers involved have ION installed and running when the transfer is made.

Net/Net

The monitoring and the friendly, readable help and support files are ION Backup’s real strengths. It’s a good product of its kind, with the potential to be a very good product of its kind. Given that I’m already running 5 different file backup systems, I don’t really need another one, myself, but if you’re looking for something with better help and support options than the free programs, go on over to Universe Point and download a free trial version. The home edition is only $29.95.

Did I mention it’s leopard-proof?

Technorati Tags: ION backup, Universe Point

Grading the F Drive: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-03-07

I haven't had a chance to check out ION Backup yet, but I did manage to investigate my new FreeAgent Go drive further, and to copy the data from the dying X drive onto the new F drive. (Designating it F, for "FreeAgent," seemed obvious, particularly since that was the default letter Windows assigned to it.)

One thing I discovered in the course of checking out Seagate's drive management interface was that it's possible to turn off that annoying yellow light. Click the FreeAgent Launcher icon in the system tray, select "Utilities" from the pop-up menu, and then choose "Adjust Drive Lights." Whereas the X drive's green light indicated drive activity, and flickered more or less in time with the drive's spin rate, the three-inch-wide, half-inch-high light on the FreeAgent Go doesn't seem to indicate anything except that the drive is getting power. That much light for that little information is overkill.

The case I had for the X drive was also equipped with a bright blue "cooling light," the purpose of which was to help dissipate excess heat. I rarely saw that light, because the drive didn't get particularly hot. The new drive is also reassuringly cool to the touch, and you can adjust the sleep interval from 3 minutes all the way to "never."

As I mentioned before, the new drive has twice the capacity of the drive it's replacing. Even after I painstakingly dragged all the files over from the X drive (which took several tries, as the connection kept dropping, and a couple of hours, because the 80 GB drive was almost full), I'd only filled in 46% of the space.

Checking Out Ceedo

Since nature and I abhor a vacuum, I thought I'd fill a few of those empty megabytes by checking out Ceedo, the software which is designed to make the FreeAgent(TM) Go mimic your computer. As I had suspected from reading about it, Ceedo is the hard-drive equivalent of U3 for memory sticks. Not only does it work almost exactly the same, displaying a list of programs and options in an approximation of the Windows Start Menu, most of the programs available for installation are the same.

Where a U3 memory stick shows up as two drives, however, the FreeAgent(TM) Go only occupies one drive letter, with the Ceedo program files in a subfolder. Like the U3 launchpad, the Ceedo easy access menu displays your remaining drive space along with the list of programs. Ceedo also makes it clear which programs are being run from Ceedo rather than Windows, by framing the windows with an orange outline. (You can change the color, but orange is good for warnings and stands out against the blue theme I use on Enna.)

You can also buy something called Argo, which lets you install any Windows program on your Ceedo drive. The idea is to install it on the portable drive rather than on any one computer. The up side is not worrying about single-user licenses. The down side is the lag time created by the USB 2.0 connection. Although I have found copying data to and from the FreeAgent(TM) Go drive satisfyingly fast (faster, certainly, than the 10/100 network connection to my Z drive), and although the drive spins at 5400 RPM instead of the more standard 4200 RPM of my two internal drives, it always takes longer to access external drives. That could lead to a noticeable and irritating lag time when using some of these programs, particularly if they require a lot of read-write functions.

And while there's a long list of Argo-compatible products, including Dreamweaver, Quicken, and Nero Burning ROM, not a single Microsoft Office program is to be found on the list.

FreeAgent™ Tools

For me, Ceedo and the programs it lets you run are mostly a distraction, because I already have the U3 memory stick and I'm much more likely to carry that around than the FreeAgent(TM) Go. My primary interest was in storage space, though I wanted a drive portable enough to take on a vacation or business trip. I think Ceedo would be quite useful for those without laptops, or who regularly shuttle between a computer at work and a computer at home.

For the backup-obsessed, Seagate's own FreeAgent(TM) Tools are more interesting. (Unlike U3, which has Disk Hero, Ceedo doesn't offer a backup program.) Folder Sync is designed to update the files on your FreeAgent(TM) Go whenever you change them. If you take the drive from one computer to another, it will update the second computer with the files from the FreeAgent drive.

Presumably because of the automatic-sync function, you can't back up your Outlook .pst file using Folder Sync. That restriction means I can't use Folder Sync as my sole backup tool for this drive, so I went back to Karen's Replicator and updated all the jobs to copy files to the F drive instead of the Z drive.

The only problem with this is that synchronized files don't get stored in the same folders as other documents, so I now have two copies of some of my files. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, because I can revert to the previous day's file if I really mess something up, and only the files I'm currently working on are in the Folder Sync directory. It's pretty much impossible to have too many copies of important client files, at least until the project is over.

Rather like the backup program that came with the Maxtor Shared Storage II, Folder Sync has a fairly limited set of features. It's not even as configurable as Replicator, which is freeware. But it's easy to set up and it does what it claims to do. I'm not about to object to having one more backup tool at my disposal.

There's one other function of FreeAgent(TM) Tools that I first noticed while exploring my C drive: you can encrypt files by right-clicking on them. This works on files stored on any drive, at least once you've installed FreeAgent(TM) Tools. But there's no blanket password-protection option for the drive itself, the way there is with U3. You can, however, password-protect Ceedo. That works much the same way a Windows logon does: it can keep you from using the programs, but doesn't prevent access to the contents of the drive.

Best Features

So far, the things I like best about the FreeAgent(TM) Go drive are:

1. 160 GB (twice the size of the X drive)
2. 5400 RPM (faster than the X drive)
3. Only one cable (even though it uses 2 USB ports)
4. Real-time Folder Sync
5. 5-year warranty

And the only thing I really don't like about the drive is that yellow light. So I'm giving the F drive an A-.