Mac Backup Tips from Howard Greenstein: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-10-08

This week’s backup reminder comes to you from Howard Greenstein, one of the many who answered my call on HARO in July. Howard is a Social Media Strategist and President of the Harbrooke Group. He’s been blogging for more than 10 years—which means he used to do it all manually, back before there were blog engines like Blogger and WordPress—and he recently started a blogging column at Inc Magazine’s Startup Blog, where he helps small business understand technologies they can use to better market their businesses. He’s hoping that the advice below will save someone a headache in the future.

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Backing Up your Mac

As a small business owner with a laptop Mac, my business travels with me wherever I go. That is both convenient and dangerous. It is great to have all my mail, presentations and files at whatever client location or conference I happen to be at on any given day, but dicey to realize that I’m one cup of spilled coffee away from losing all my data. So, I’ve set up a few ways of ensuring that even if my MacBook goes south on me, I have a way to recover everything that’s important to me with just a few nail-biting hours of time. As a Mac owner, there are several choices, ranging from “free” to a few dollars a month for a service to a couple of bucks for purchase of backup software. I’ll review a few choices I’ve made, and reference others that are available for readers to pursue.

Back to the Future

Apple’s OS X 10.5 introduced Time Machine, a built-in way to store not only a copy of your hard disk data, but multiple copies, each from a different day or week. While Time Machine is a great utility for keeping a ’running backup’ of your disk, you may need a large amount of storage space. Each time a copy of a changed file is saved, it takes up more disk space. I bought a Western Digital My Book 1 TB drive to use partially as a Time Machine backup disk. My Mac has a 160GB drive, and about 135GB is used. I have Time Machine Backups going back 5 months, and I’m currently using 270GB of the 360GB I allocated in a hard disk partition to back up drive.

Time Machine is easy to use - set it and forget it. You turn it on, tell it which hard disk to use for backups, and every hour the Mac will check for changed files and back them up. Time machine keeps more files from the last few days, and check points for each week going back as far as it can before it runs out of room.

To restore, just go back to the right time in your “history” (see the diagram), click the file to restore, and hit the big “Restore” button. One downside of Time Machine is that it is not a bootable copy of your data. So, if your hard disk breaks, but the rest of your Mac is working, you can’t just boot up and get back to work. But there are several programs that will allow that.

I think I’m a clone now...

I’ve used two different programs over the past few years to create bootable, exact copies of my hard disk. Both effectively “clone” your hard disk to another disk, making the copy almost indistinguishable from your current drive. One is Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich software. CCC version 3.1.1 is Donation-Ware, so it is free for you to try. I used it for several months with good results, but for some reason, about the time that Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) was released, I switched to Super Duper from Shirt-Pocket software. Super Duper also has a free version that will make an exact copy of your disk. For $27.95 you get an upgrade that allows “smart updating”—in other words, the backup program only copies the files that have changed, making your exact backup fast and efficient.

On another partition of that 1TB drive I bought, I created a space slightly larger than the 135GB hard disk, and I run Super Duper weekly to make an exact copy of my hard drive. Once the initial copy was made, each “smart update” takes an hour or so. Every Sunday night, Super Duper turns on and automatically runs that process. In the morning I have an exact copy of my drive. If you want an all-in-one drive plus wireless access point solution, Apple’s Time Capsule is an easy to purchase, set up and forget solution.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an iMac...

Recently, my 1 TB drive had some sort of glitch, and I got worried about its reliability. I couldn’t see the drives on the desktop, but Disk Utility saw the drive as empty—no partitions. Long story short, I bought ProSoft Engineering’s Data Rescue II over the net, downloaded it, and copied a bunch of data from the 3rd partition on my 1TB drive. Somehow all the checking of the disk “brought it back,” but I still wasn’t satisfied.

I took two steps to ensure my data would be safe. The first was getting a second large hard disk, and making another Super Duper backup. (The drive actually came courtesy of Blogger Robert Scoble, who held a contest with Seagate in NY’s Times Square, and I was one of several lucky winners. I consider it fate that I won a drive the same week my other drive went flaky—don’t let this happen to you!) I use this drive once a week in the middle of the week to make a Super Duper copy, so now I’m never more than 3 days away from an exact copy of my data.

Put it in the cloud

The second thing I did was look into online backup solutions. Even though I have 2 exact copies of my hard disk now, they’re both still in my home office. If I had a fire or theft; I’d be very much out of luck for backups or a computer. A friend had recommended Mozy, which is a service from storage vendor EMC. Mozy is a small download that you install, and it searches your drive to show you files you can back up.

You can select your Documents folder, or only Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents, for example. The free backup holds only 2GB, which is fine for many people. If you want to back up more than 2 GB of data, say the 17.3 GB of iTunes I have in the picture, Mozy allows unlimited data storage for $4.95 a month. Yes, UNLIMITED, for HOME users. If you’re a business, you’re supposed to use Mozy Pro, which is $3.95 a month plus $.50 per Gigabyte for a desktop, $6.95 + .50/GB for a server. For those of you playing along, that would be about $55.00 a month for my 135 GB hard disk, assuming I backed up about 100GB (and not system files or programs). So, for Mozy’s purposes, I’m a home user. (Also, there’s no final version of Mozy Pro for Mac yet, only for PC, so I’m not feeling guilty here).

I find that Mozy, on my Cable Modem, seems to upload about 1.0 Mbits/second, so the initial upload will take several days. Then, at night or when my computer is idle, Mozy will update any changed files so I always have a good copy of data “in the cloud.”

There are other online backup solutions, including Sugar Sync which promises you not only backup, but access to your files (such as your music) from any computer with a browser or to some files via your iPhone. The 100GB I’d like to back up would cost $14.99/month from Sugar Sync. Since I don’t need that kind of access, I’m not using it, but it has been well reviewed and for those who want any time/any place access to files, Sugar Sync could be well worth it.

Mac and Me

Another choice for online storage is the old .Mac account, now known as Mobile Me, which allows backup and sync between several computers. It also allows access to files via browser wherever you are. It also provides an email account that can be accessed from many devices, or via browser. A 20GB storage plan, enough for most people, is $99/year.

Other tips and tricks

There are other things you can do to keep your data safe and secure, and out of the house or office. You can upload all your contact data to Plaxo, which will sync with your Mac’s address book and provide a convenient online storage for that data. If your contacts are on Plaxo and they change their information, your address book gets the updated information automatically. Gmail from Google lets you store up to 7GB of email on their servers for free. Using the IMAP protocol, you can get that mail on your desktop or in a browser, and the online mail is always up to date. It is an excellent way to keep your mail backed up. Google also allows you to store documents in Google Docs, which can be edited and shared. If you need more room for mail and documents, you can even run a small company on Google Apps for Domains. As a small business, I have 2 accounts for $100 a year, and that gives me 25GB of mail and documents.

To store your photos, Google’s Picasa allows you to upload several GB of photos from iPhoto. Yahoo’s Flickr.com Pro service allows unlimited storage of photos, and sharing with friends, for only $24.95 a year. Your first 100MB of photos are free.

One other sharing solution is DropBox - you can sync files between multiple computers and access the information online. 5GB of file storage is free, so you could consider dropping some critical files and have them stored on your brother’s hard disk, and have his stuff on yours, or save files between your work and home computers. It works on Mac or PC.

There’s no excuse to lose files with all these choices. The only thing keeping you from being fully backed up is a few dollars, and inertia. But nothing’s a harsher lesson than figuring out what is and what isn’t backed up when a hard disk fails.

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Thanks to Howard for that ounce (or two) of prevention for Mac users. Almost any backup solution costs less than losing your data. And I have tons more of them to write about in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Super Duper,Carbon Copy Cloner,Time Machine,Time Capsule,DropBox,SugarSync,Google Apps,Picasa,Flickr,Seagate,Mozy,Mobile Me,Harbrooke Group,howardgr,Howard Greenstein

Backing Up My Mom: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-26-08

My mother came to visit last week and we engaged in Extreme Tourism. (Example: at the time I normally write this reminder, we were catching a helicopter for a tour of the Bay Area.)

The last time my mother had a computer was in 1999. It ran Windows 98. She used it for (CompuServe) e-mail and not much else, and ended up giving it to her uncle—who actually still has it, and still uses it.

Mom got an older Acer laptop a few months ago, and uses it for web browsing and Yahoo! mail. She’s started saving her bookmarks to Yahoo! as well, instead of inside her browser. When you’re essentially operating “in the cloud,” and have no local data to speak of, you don’t really need to back up your C drive.

One thing about Extreme Tourism, though: it tends to result in a lot of photographs. (Not to mention blisters, sunburn, and sore muscles, but those have nothing to do with backups.) I had my Aiptek HD video camera, which is also an 8-megapixel still camera, and Mom had my sister-in-law’s Canon PowerShot, which worked pretty well in spite of her complete unfamiliarity with it. We both had plenty of photos to offload in the course of our travels.

I copied all of them to my computer initially and waited until I’d backed them up to at least one place before deleting them from their respective memory cards. One copy is never enough.

I then put all the photos—about 1.5 GB of them—onto a memory stick and transferred them onto Mom’s computer. This meant she had something to back up.

So I installed a free online backup service for her. If she keeps taking pictures, or starts downloading those dressage videos she watches on YouTube, she’s going to need more than the 2 GB quota pretty soon, but for now, it’s enough.

And it will back up automatically when the computer is idle, which means Mom doesn’t have to remember to do the backups herself, or have the computer on at a particular time of day. My own online backup operates on a schedule basis, but I almost always have my computer on by 8 AM, and the online backup is third or fourth in the sequence of redundancy.

Mozy estimated that the initial backup would take 6 hours. As Mom had a plane to catch much sooner than that, we postponed the initial backup until she got home. And when Mom first turned her machine on, she got an error message about Mozy.

She called me immediately, of course, which is what she usually does when she’s having problems with her computer. Because Mom hasn’t use a computer since the days of Windows 98, and didn’t use it much then, she isn’t familiar with terminology like “taskbar” and “system tray” and “desktop.” That makes it hard for her to explain, and for me to understand, what exactly is wrong.

Grammar Girl will be delighted to know that even before installing the backup program, I set up GoToMyPC on my mother’s computer. In fact, I did it while in a hotel room in Monterey. GoToMyPC is basically an easy-to-use version of UltraVNC, which I used to use sometimes in order to see what was on a client’s screen, back when I was foolish enough to do computer consulting for a living. So now—or at least for the duration of the free trial, after which I have to decide whether it’s worth $20/month, I can see what Mom is talking about, and even fix it. (Hmm. I suppose I could use GoToMyPC to install and configure UltraVNC on Mom’s machine…)

So I logged in to Mom’s computer and took a look. By the time I got around to doing this (a good two or three hours after Mom’s phone call), this is what I saw:

Whatever that error message meant, clearly it wasn’t preventing the backup from functioning, and Mom just e-mailed me to say the backup was complete.

I confess I’m more excited about the ability to access my mother’s computer than about the online backup. I suppose you could consider GoToMyPC a backup tool, in that it provides you with a whole backup computer at need—and lets you get copies of files you forgot or deleted or that have become corrupted.

It’s probably more accurate to say that my mother and I are acting as backups for each other, since each of us now has a copy of both sets of photos. (Well, I have several copies, but her copy definitely counts as offsite backup.) Which makes me think, as did my headline, of CrashPlan, the social backup tool. In fact, if I’d thought of it sooner, I might have installed that instead of Mozy.

But then Mom’s backups would rely on access to my computer, and since my C drive is fairly full, she’d actually need access to one of my external or network drives. And while I am at home, online, and connected to those drives fairly often, I do take this monster heavyweight Pavilion dv8040 out with me sometimes, and I do turn it off at night, and Mom is three time zones away. Better she should have an always-on backup location.

The question to get you thinking until next week is: what kind of backup plan does your mother have? And when did she last back up her photos of her grandchildren?

Technorati Tags: Mozy Home,CrashPlan,GoToMyPC

Cheers for Carbonite (and Some Vacation Musings): FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-08-08

This week’s guest contributor is Confident Marketer Sue Painter, but first a brief update from Yours Truly.

The Ur-Guru and I have been traveling a lot over the past few weeks. As an incurable geek, I haul my laptop with me on all these trips, and I’ve been bringing Vesta (the Buffalo MiniStation DataVault) with me to make backups on. In fact, Vesta lives in my laptop case, since I don’t really use her when I’m at home.

While we were driving back from the Russian River Valley, the Ur-Guru noticed that his MP3 player was acting up. It insisted that every song was a bad track and wouldn’t play anything. (I considered connecting mine and forcing him to listen to podcasts, but I restrained myself.)

“You could try reformatting it,” I suggested, “but you’d lose all the music.”

He gave me his best “Do I look like an idiot?” stare and said “Who is it I’m marrying again? Did you think I wouldn’t have backups?”

So when we got home, he reformatted the player, copied the music back onto it, and all was well.

Now, on to Sue’s story about Carbonite.

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I use and LOVE Carbonite for backup. No horror stories here, just really hated constantly backing up to CD’s which got disorganized and half the time didn’t work. Plus, I never got around to it in any scheduled fashion. Somehow I ran across an e-ad for Carbonite, checked it out, did a 30 day trial, then bought it. It’s a big, whopping $45 per YEAR and you can back up a second computer for $20 (or at least, that was the deal I was offered). It constantly runs in the background of your computer and gives you 24/7 backup.

Slight downside: it makes my computer run a bit slower, but I solve this by a quick click to put Carbonite on 24 hour pause, do my work, then “unpause” it before I go off to bed. Overnight, it backs anything up I’ve changed that day.

I have had to use it—my Palm Pilot died a horrible death, with all my appointments for the rest of the year, and the backup file on my computer got corrupted, too. Total panic (I am booked nearly a year out with client appointments so my Palm is my lifeblood) but I just clicked on the little icon and got everything restored to my new Palm, no problem.

I clicked on my Carbonite icon and it brought up my entire Palm calendar on the computer screen, same as I would do from my computer files. What I like is that Carbonite is for total non-techies like me—it brings up a screen that looks EXACTLY like your desktop, you click on what you want to restore, and boom, it’s done. Could not be simpler.

Once my calendar was there on my screen (stop, my heart!) I simply hot synced it back to my Palm. I could scarcely believe it was so easy! And yes, give me back floppies—I really hate CDs and can never make them work. (ARG...)

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There you have it—another satisfied Carbonite customer. (David Jackson wrote about Carbonite in February 2008.) A backup is useless if you can’t restore your data, so it’s good to hear that it’s easy to get things back, and few professionals can afford to lose their business appointments.

Next week we’ll hear from the Data Doctors.

Technorati Tags: Carbonite,Sue Painter,David Jackson,Data Doctors,online backup,DataVault

Backup with Room to Spare: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-25-08

When I put out my request for backup stories on HARO, two of the first respondents were eager to tell me about Spare Backup. Maria-Christina Zajac of Avalanche Strategic Communications offered to set up an interview with Spare Backup CEO Cery Perle, and Heather Schroeder at Corporate Advocates wrote to me about the new Spare Mobile service.

Spare just announced last week its Spare Mobile service that may be of particular interest to your readers. The new service provides users with the benefits of real-time mobile access to their content without the risk of lost data due to a malfunctioning device. In addition, Spare users can remotely access photos, music and podcasts from their home computers anytime, anywhere from their mobile device.

Just in case I wasn’t sufficiently convinced of Spare Backup’s wonderfulness, she added:

Spare Backup doesn’t just back up your data, it can actually help you transfer all of your data from your old computer to your new one in 3 easy steps. I switched from a desktop to a notebook about a year ago and I still have things on CD because I didn’t know how else to transfer my files! It’s so easy my mom can do it. :-)

“Easy,” as I discovered when I interviewed Cery Perle on July 15th, has always been a priority for Spare Backup. Cery was motivated to get into the backup business after experiencing a data loss catastrophe. The company he worked for at the time did have a backup system, but someone had forgotten to insert the backup tape for the day he needed. (Shades of the Institute for Backup Trauma’s 2005 video with John Cleese, except that Spare Backup has actually went public in 2003.) Cery wanted a product easy enough for him to use, and the options available at the time didn’t fit that description.

The product I downloaded definitely does. Spare Backup has an attractive interface, dominated by a big green “Click here to Backup” button. (Pedant’s point of contention: “back up” as a verb should be two words.) A sidebar on the right offers tips for changing what to back up and where to store your backup. The default location is online, where you get 50 GB of storage space, but Spare Backup will also work with CDs and DVDs, external drives, and network drives.

The user interface is fairly self-explanatory, but there are detailed user guides with screenshots available, too. I did notice a few slightly odd things. Under “Settings,” you have the following options:

• Select files for online backup
• Online backup schedule
• Select Files for local backup
• Manually include/exclude files
• Account Information
• Advanced

Having the “manually include/exclude” separate from both the offline and online backup options seemed strange to me. Isn’t that part of selecting files for backup?

The default option for either online or offline backup is to back up everything. Since I didn’t want to wait all day for files to transfer, I instead opted to back up just my Microsoft Publisher files online. I then discovered that unlike many backup programs, which back up only your C drive unless you tell them otherwise (and are sometimes configured only to back up one internal drive no matter how many you have), Spare Backup automatically backs up all your internal and external drives, though not your network drives. So it went searching through my C drive, then the D drive where I keep fairly-recent data that isn’t part of current projects, then the F drive (my Free Agent Go). It didn’t copy anything from the M or P drive, but then again, the P drive wasn’t connected properly and the M drive only has a Safety Drill image on it right now, and no individual Publisher files.

Because I back up data from the C drive to both the D drive and the F drive automatically, there are now several duplicates in my Spare Backup storage area. (I’m not too worried: I’ve only used 1.26% of my online storage capacity.) If I adjusted this backup job to exclude the D and F drives (or at least one of them), then I could solve the duplication problem.

Spare Backup automatically pauses when it detects mouse or keyboard activity. The idea is to keep from slowing down your computer, but that can slow down your backup job instead. If your priority is finishing the backup job, you can adjust this under the advanced settings.

One feature Cery mentioned to me, which I haven’t tested, is the ability to restore individual e-mail messages to Outlook, and not just the whole PST file. I meant to test it, but since all my PST files are large, and you can’t back up individual e-mail messages (at least, I didn’t see that option), I decided to do the Outlook backup onto one of my external hard drives.

And so I discovered that while recovering files from online backups is fairly intuitive and done right through the regular Spare Backup interface, recovering from offline backups requires you to run a program called Local Launcher that gets put into the same location as your offline backup.

On the one hand, this makes sense. It means you can restore the data from the external drive even if all you have is the drive, and not the computer you installed Spare Backup on. But it’s a pretty crude interface by comparison with the main program, and it doesn’t let you restore individual messages.

Spare Backup’s best features are clearly reserved for the online backup service. And speaking of online backup, Cery told me that the Spare Key you get when you download the program (and which you need in order to recover your data; I had to enter it in Local Launcher) Is housed at a third company. That means none of Spare Backup’s employees can get to your data, and neither can anyone at the company holding the keys, because the only person with all the pieces is you.

Spare Backup does a private label business for bigger brands. For instance, if you buy a new Sony Vaio, the backup program you’ll find pre-installed on the machine is really Spare Backup. Offering online backup services helps hardware companies retain customers. If you have the customer’s data, you keep the customer. (Spare Backup has a 93% retention rate.) This is why the big enterprise backup companies like EMC and Symantec are buying small online backup companies like Mozy right and left.

Spare Backup is also working on an enterprise product for up to 500 users. (Disclosure: I may be writing a white paper about this for them, which would make them a client, which would at least potentially bias my opinion.)

Next week we’ll have another guest columnist for you.

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

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.

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

I’m Crushed: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 05-02-08

I thought I knew what I was going to write about for this week's reminder. A few days ago, someone contacted me (through the Podcast Asylum, natch—perhaps I need to make my FileSlinger™ e-mail address easier to find on the Backup Blog) to ask about online backup, which has been the theme of the past couple of weeks.

The specific problem, however, involved an intersection of factors I don't know enough about to explain: Vista x64, Office 2007's .docx format, and Mozy, or rather why Mozy didn't seem to want to back up .docx files from a Vista x64 PC.

I don't use Vista, and don't plan to, at least not for as long as I have this particular machine. The Ur-Guru says that the x64 version isn't bad now that Service Pack 1 is available, but the overall Vista adoption rate is so low that the only pressure to “upgrade” comes from Microsoft. (Even the Ur-Guru only has it installed on one system, and that's only because the software he develops has to work on it.)

As for Office 2007, while the Ur-Guru has been using it happily for some time, none of my clients use it, and I would be creating more problems than I was solving if I switched now. So I don't know much about the new .docx format for Word files which Office 2007 for Windows shares with Office 2008 for Mac, except that it's based on XML. And while I found a number of articles and blog posts talking about the difficulty people with older versions of Office have opening .docx files, I didn't find anything that would explain why uploading them through an online backup service should be a problem.

Likewise, I found some “don't use Mozy” stories from a few dissatisfied customers who had experienced file corruption or other problems, I didn't notice anything specific to Vista. So that was the end of that idea.

This morning, however, while catching up on my C|Net newsletters, I saw an item in Gearlog that I couldn't pass up mentioning: EDR's Hard Drive Crusher, billed as “a new spin on destruction.”

Though this is by no means a data security blog/e-zine (blogzine?), I have mentioned before that if you are giving away a computer or a hard drive, you want it thoroughly erased. There have been special shredders for CDs and DVDs at least since I wrote about destroying outdated backups in 2003. And computer recycling facilities have powerful electromagnets designed for completely wiping the data off any magnetic drive.

The Hard Drive Crusher is not a home-office solution. For one thing, it weighs 85 lbs. For another, it costs $11,500. Even the Ur-Guru doesn't go through enough disks in a year to make it a sensible purchase. But it's the kind of thing your local electronics recycling center or data protection service might want to invest in, and let you use for a small fee if you don't think a magnetic wipe or repeated overwriting of the drive is sufficient.

And it has to be a pile of fun to operate if you're suffering from computer-induced frustration.

Technorati Tags: Hard Drive Crusher,Mozy,Gearlog,Aleratec,Vista x64,docx

Jumping on the Online Backup Bandwagon: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-25-08

Everyone seems to be jumping on the online backup bandwagon these days. Enterprise software giant EMC bought SOHO online backup provider Mozy a while back. Now EMC is flogging Mozy Enterprise for all it's worth. I've received links to no fewer than four white papers about Mozy Enterprise, the first of which boasts a provocative title: “You're Not as Backed Up as You Think.”

EMC is coming late to the online backup game, and has the likes of LiveVault (bought by Iron Mountain in 2005) to contend with for the enterprise market. (Though there's a difference between LiveVault's Continuous Data Protection, which updates files as they change, and Mozy's scheduled backups.)

Most of the new online backup providers seem to be targeting the consumer and home-office market, however. I've written before about Mozy Home, Carbonite, and other online backup providers. Do a search for “free online storage” in Google and you'll be overwhelmed with possibilities. (Tip: read the reviews, and the fine print of the license agreement, before signing up with any of these services.)

The amount of storage space you get for free is usually modest even for a home or home office user, and certainly not suitable for the enterprise. But there are more and more home users producing data that needs backing up, and more of them have high-speed connections, so everyone wants to be in on it.

There's Dell's DataSafe™, now offered free with the purchase of a new Inspiron or XPS notebook. The first two types of files they recommend backing up are photos and music, followed by Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slide shows. 100 GB of storage costs $119.00 per year, which doesn't dent the small-business budget too much. It isn't clear whether it's possible to back up more than one computer to a single DataSafe™ account, but I suspect it's not. (This is also true for Mozy Home.)

If you want to back up your network drive online, you probably need either an enterprise product or a geeky homemade hack to upload the files to a server. My own network drive, to which all three of the computers in my household (my two laptops and my housemate's desktop) back up automatically, backs up to a USB drive. I shudder to think how clogged our cable connection would get if I tried to send 617GB up that 6Mbps connection every week.

But I digress. (Gosh, how unusual.)

Not to be outdone by its rival, HP has also launched an online backup service, HP Upline, complete with glossy website. It even offers multi-user options. Unfortunately for HP, Upline suffered a week of downtime, with security issues for good measure. TechCrunch and its readers had some fairly pungent things to say about that, and one wonders whether the service will survive the bad publicity long enough to establish credibility. I can't see myself signing up for the one-year limited-storage free trial.

Computer Technology Review provides a good overview of what an organization should look for in an online backup service. While not all the same considerations apply to home and home office users, it's still worth reading the article before signing up with a service provider.

Online backup is a good supplement to your other backup methods. Unless you can guarantee that you'll always be able to connect to the Internet in the middle of a data loss crisis, however, I wouldn't rely on it exclusively. Especially if it's free.

Technorati Tags: DataSafe,HP Upline,Mozy Enterprise,LiveVault. Carbonite

More about the Cloud

The Ur-Guru has kindly pitched in with some sources for the use of “the cloud” to mean the Internet. (He had the sense to look in more places than Wikipedia, which has a pretty confusing entry.)

PC Magazine has a dictionary entry defining cloud as a network infrastructure and showing a diagram using a cloud symbol, while Infovark describes the Internet as a cloud of clouds, with a pretty CGI rendering that looks like nothing so much as a star cluster. Certainly it's not a nice, neat, geometric shape.

Just as you always suspected, the Internet is unruly, chaotic, and not particularly linear.

Is Your Data Safer in the Cloud? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-18-08

The other day I attended a presentation by someone who works for Google Sites, the new incarnation of JotSpot. He told a story about how he'd dropped his laptop and had to replace it, but it didn't matter, because the presentation was “in the cloud” and he could get to it from any computer that had an Internet connection.

In this case, “in the cloud” means that it's on servers at Google. More generally, the phrase refers to data stored on hosted applications. I'm not sure where clouds come into it; somehow I think of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and probability clouds, but that's probably me mis-remembering high school math and science. Naturally, if you're sitting at a computer in your home or office and your data lives on a server at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wordpress.com, Typepad, or somewhere like that, then there's a lot of information moving back and forth whenever you edit those documents, and some of it gets transmitted by satellite through literal clouds.

Anyway, the etymology doesn't matter for the purposes of this backup reminder. What matters is that even the storage and processing capacity of personal computers increases, hosted services proliferate, meaning that more and more people keep quite a bit of data “in the cloud.”

We talked a few Reminders ago about how hard it can be to back up your data if some of it is in Facebook and some on TypePad and some in your Google Reader account and some in your Yahoo! Mail account and so on. But there's also a positive side to not storing data on your own computer. The server rooms at Google, Yahoo!, and your own web hosting company are almost always better designed to resist theft, fire, and hardware failure than what you have at home. Data centers have security guards, sprinkler systems, and Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks locked into air-conditioned cages—much tougher for someone to walk off with than your laptop.

On the other hand, if you get cut off from your Internet connection for some reason, you can't get to any of your data. Back when I was in college, I used the university mainframe for word-processing, e-mail, and chat. (Swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, anyone?) The computer center was full of “dumb terminals:” screens and keyboards designed to let you log into the mainframe, wherever it was, and use the programs it ran. If you wanted your own copy of anything from the mainframe, you had to ask for a tape of it. (I never did, which I sometimes regret, except that I doubt I could ever have gotten the data off it.) If you wanted to print something, you sent a command to the laser printer and then went to the print window to pick it up in an hour or so.

And if the mainframe went down, there would be a few dozen students sitting around in the computer center, and more scattered across the campus, who were unable to do any work at all. (The first thing to do when walking into the computer center was to look at the handwritten status board to see whether it said "Up and Running.")

Some of today's hosted services do let you work offline, and then sync up as soon as they have a connection. But before you decide to keep all your data online, you need to be sure you can get to it when you need to. That almost certainly means having more than one way to get online.

And, of course, you have to be willing to expose that data to the people who work for Google, Yahoo!, and the like. Google probably knows more about us than we know about ourselves already, but that doesn't mean we want to turn everything over to them. (Are they reading your mail? Probably not, but they're sharing a lot of information about your online behavior.)

It can be a sensible precaution to keep very little data on any device that's at frequent risk of being lost, stolen, dropped, or having coffee spilled on it, but that's not the same as putting all of your data online and using your $3000 Vaio as a dumb terminal. If you're going to do that, you might as well get a $300 ASUS Eee instead.

Technorati Tags: Google Sites,cloud computing,Asus Eee,hosted applications

Backing Up Social Networks, Part 2: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-28-08

Last week I talked about backups for two different Web 2.0 services: del.icio.us and LinkedIn. I chose those two because they're the ones I use the most often.

This week I'm going to start by talking about Flickr, a popular photo-sharing service that doubles as a social network. I don't post photos to Flickr myself, but the Ur-Guru does. (Yes, lots of them are pictures of me. What did you expect?)

I first noticed the existence of Flickr backup tools a couple of years ago. I had a bit of trouble understanding why you would need them. After all, the photos can't get to Flickr unless you first have them on your computer (or a camera connected to the Internet). Surely if they're worth sharing with the world, you're going to save them on your hard drive or a CD, and they'll get backed up with the rest of your data.

On the other hand, if something happened and you needed to re-upload your photos, remembering which ones you'd had there and which tags you'd used to identify each image could get to be a real challenge. That's why there are programs like Flickredit, a Java-based program for editing, tagging, uploading, and backing up your photos and their associated metadata (copyright info, title, description, tags). If you've put hours into creating this metadata for your Flickr photos, I'd recommend checking it out.

Photobucket, another popular photo-sharing site, lets its pro users back up via FTP download. Regular users can order backup CDs or DVDs from the Photobucket Store.

Enough people who belong to multiple social networking sites have expressed a desire to import their profiles without typing everything over again that there's now a Data Portability Project. There's a long list of the benefits of data portability over on the Use Cases page. They look particularly useful for people who use a lot of job-search or social networking sites.

Interestingly, however, while the list mentions transferring, aggregating, and exporting contacts and other data, it doesn't specifically address backup. If your data is that portable, however, it should be possible to port it onto your hard drive and back it up. And, of course, having the same information duplicated across several sites can also act as a backup, though if you delete something by accident, the deletion might propagate across all the sites. Which leads me to wonder whether there's an “Undo Portability Project” in the making. (Repeat after me: synchronization is not backup.)

It will take a while before the Data Portability Project produces useful results, so remember to check out the possibilities for backing up your profile information and other data before you sign up. If you need to keep your profile info in a Word doc in order to keep from having to re-type it, then that's probably what you should do. And if you can get new messages, photos, and the like from your friends as an RSS feed, remember to subscribe to your own feed in order to keep a copy.

In most cases, anything you post on these sites goes up there at your own risk, and it may well become the property of the social networking site once you put it there.

If you're an avid user of MySpace, Facebook, or other social networks, why not share your method for backing up your profile and other data—or your reason for not bothering.

Technorati Tags: social networks,MySpace,Facebook,Flickr,Photobucket,data portability

New Backup Resources from Tech Target

How could anyone fail to read an article entitled “Five Signs that You Are Headed for a Backup Disaster”? Like most of TechTarget's material, this piece focuses on enterprise backup, but it's still worth reading—in particular, I'd say, the point about keeping your offsite backups up to date.

And speaking of getting your backups offsite, there's also a special report about online backup. This comes in three parts: “Online Backup is a Matter of Trust”, an “Online Backup Product Roundup”, and a podcast featuring a Forrester researcher entitled “Online Backup Addresses Specific SMB, Enterprise Needs.”

Happy reading.

A Real Live Backup Scam: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-14-08

It was only a few days after publishing last week's “Are You Paranoid Enough?” Backup Reminder that I heard the sorry tale of G-Archiver, a program designed to back up your Gmail account. Or allegedly designed to back up your Gmail account, anyway. A programmer named Dustin Brooks discovered that G-Archiver did something else: it sent the Gmail IDs and passwords of everyone who had downloaded it to the Gmail account of one John Terry.

The G-Archiver website claims that this was a “coding mishap” and urges users to remove the old version and replace it with a new one. This strikes me as lame both as an apology and as an explanation (I have trouble imagining how such a “feature” could find its way into a program by mistake), but at least it's better than pretending the problem never existed.

Still, I suspect that very few people who have read about said “mishap” are going to take a chance on G-Archiver again. They're probably too busy changing the passwords for their Google accounts.

Neither flaws nor deliberate scams are necessarily obvious. If Dustin Brooks hadn't decided to examine the source code using Reflector, we might all still be ignorant of the problem with G-Archiver. It takes a programmer to discover a problem at that level.

But it doesn't take a programmer to run a product name through Google and Technorati and see whether someone else has found problems. And it doesn't take a programmer to look for (or ask about) alternative ways to back up the specific data you're looking to copy.

One commenter on the original post in Coding Horror made the following sensible point:

Why would anyone pay $30 to get a backup copy of their Gmail account when Thunderbird is free? Just connect to Gmail's IMAP server, set TB to save all downloaded messages, and do a complete sync. Not only would you then have a complete backup, but you would also be able to read and send email from TB while having it synced with Gmail.

Just about any other mail client with IMAP support should also work.

Since I don't use my Gmail account for mail, I've never bothered downloading the tiny handful of messages there into Outlook, but that's probably what I'd do, since my Outlook .PST file already gets backed up at least once a day.

It seems obvious to me that an offline mail client would be the obvious way to backup an online e-mail account, but that might not occur to everyone. But if you type “backup Gmail” into Google's search box, you'll find lots of possibilities, including instructions from Google about backing up your mail with POP. (You'll also find instructions for using your Gmail storage space to back up data from your hard drive, which brings it all full circle.)

So once again, the moral of the story is, don't hand out your passwords to anyone you don't have some reason to trust, and do your homework on new products before trying them. Backups are supposed to make your data safer, not more vulnerable.

Technorati Tags: G-Archiver,Coding Horror,Gmail

Are You Paranoid Enough? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-07-08

Now and again I talk about aspects of data security that aren't directly related to backups. I don't do it often, because I'm not a security expert, but there's more than one way to lose your data, and stories about backup tapes stolen from financial institutions and missing laptops with confidential information on them show up in the news pretty often.

The security of your backups can be an issue for everyone. If someone broke in and stole your external hard drive, would they get everything? Most small and home office users have at least some information that shouldn't be available to anyone who finds a USB key lying on a taxi seat. So we should all take basic precautions and not make it easy for those with harmful intent.

I saw an announcement about a new service called BlogBackupr the other day and flagged it as something to investigate. As a backup blogger, I'm certainly in favor of backing up your blog. (I'm not at all in favor of that awkward name; even "Blog Backer-Upper" would be more euphonious.) Before I could check the service out, however, I saw a post from Ike Pigott warning readers about a the way any provider of such a service could abuse the login and password information for your blog.

And just in case I wasn't feeling paranoid enough after reading Ike's post, I got a link to a new white paper from Bitpipe this morning: “How to Fully Protect Your Storage Environment.” (You'll have to register to download it, if you're interested.) The section that caught my eye was “Why and How Your Storage Environment Will Be Attacked,” by Kevin Beaver.

While the guide addresses enterprise storage, a few points apply to smaller businesses and home users as well:

1. Storage security does not equal redundant systems and good backups. These two elements are only part of what’s going to keep your data safe and sound, so it’s important not to solely rely on them as has been done in the past.
2. Storage encryption is not the silver bullet. Not for data at rest and not for data in transit.

The truth is, we all have to trust someone with our data sometime. Even if you run your own web and mail servers, even if you avoid online backup services, the only way to protect your data against fire, flood, and theft onsite is to move copies of the data offsite—which means it's vulnerable in transit and at its destination. And most companies providing backup and storage solutions limit their liability pretty severely.

The malicious hackers are way ahead of most of us, too. They know more ways to attack than we're aware we should defend.

So what's a sensible person to do?

If you work with really sensitive data, it's probably worth hiring a security expert. Otherwise, take the obvious precautions. If it's small and portable (and even my twelve-ton, 17-inch laptop qualifies for that category), put a password on it. And store your passwords in a password-protected program. Don't leave your data unattended. Do provide someone in your company or family with your master password in the event you are injured or killed and they need access to your data, but make sure that person knows how important it is not to hand out that information.

Check out any storage services you're thinking of using before you sign up: search on Technorati and in places like Yelp to find out what people are saying about them. One or two negative reviews is normal, but if you find pages and pages of complaints, stay away. If a storage company is making headlines because of lost or stolen data, choose someone else.

At least most of us SOHO users can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we are just too insignificant for serious hackers to bother with. The payoff for stealing your PIN number is fairly small. The payoff for stealing millions of credit card numbers from a bank is a lot higher.

But don't let that make you careless.

Technorati Tags: BlogBackupr,Ike Pigott,data loss,security

The Hard Drive in the Sky: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 02-29-08

Seems like everyone's talking about backup these days. Last week it was Marketing Over Coffee; this week it's Morning Announcements from Dave Jackson's School of Podcasting.

Dave had a sudden realization: if he didn't save the uncompressed (WAV) version of his audio files, he would never be able to re-edit the episodes into an audio book and sell it the way Grammar Girl is. The problem with uncompressed audio—or uncompressed anything else, for that matter—is that it takes up a lot of space.

Now Dave has seen the light when it comes to online backup:

“So I found this tool. It's called Carbonite. I've talked about it on all my podcasts because I think it's so cool. I have backed up 52,609 files on my computer—13 Gigs—for fifty bucks a year.

Here's how this works. What I'm gonna do is save this as a WAV file. Carbonite will back it up and move it offline to this great hard drive in the sky. So if not only does my computer burn down, but my CD backups and my office burn down, my podcast files are off in this hard drive in the sky. If a publisher says ‘Hey, can we take some of this and turn it into a book’ all I have to do is use their Easy Restore function and download it to my hard drive.

All you have to do is save it as a WAV file. Probably overnight, Carbonite will upload that WAV file to the hard drive in the sky, and then you can delete it off your hard drive. You've already got it saved out there in Carbonite-land.

I've never been totally sucked into a product like this one, just because it's so easy. And in my opinion, five bucks—less than five bucks—a month is affordable, because I do website design, I help people with their podcasts, I have all my customer files, and I don't have to worry about if my hard drive crashes.

My girlfriend's computer crashed about a week ago, and it just wouldn't boot up. She had all these family photos, she had the wireless router settings on there, things like that. We even