There’s a certain irony to this, because I’m a laptop-only person, so I’m not going to be building my own computer anytime soon, but last week Dave Wiebe of the Build My Home Computer site asked if he could interview me about backups. I agreed, and the resulting interview is now posted on his site. Dave also has his own page about backup.

I didn’t reveal any deep, dark, never-before-mentioned secrets in the interview, but if you’re new to this blog, you might find it useful.

And if you’ve come here because of reading that interview, welcome! Hope you stick around for a while.

Acronis kindly notified me that they’re having a back-to-school sale on Acronis True Image Home 2010. Act now and you can get it for $29.99 instead of $49.99.

I haven’t tried the home version of True Image—or not for some years—but the Ur-Guru swears by the Workstation version, which he installed on my new laptop. I haven’t had to restore from it yet, which is the real acid test, but it creates backups speedily and effectively.

PS. Nope, I have no financial relationship with Acronis, though if they were to offer me one, I might accept it.

Just announced today: Dmailer and Verbatim have joined forces to launch “A Backup Saved My Life,” a contest that invites you to submit your videos, photos, and stories in order to win a Verbatim 250GB Pocket Drive (see photo above) and a one-year subscription to Dmailer Online’s unlimited storage plan.

For complete details, read the press release and watch the video below. Submissions are due by May 22^nd.

• Larry H., who will be using it to back up his business data.
• Ty Taylor, who has some higher education and training presentations and video files to back up and synchronize.
• Tim Larson, who needs to back up all the photos and videos of his kids on his Windows Home Server.

Thanks for participating, guys, and good luck with your backups. Keep an eye out for future contests here on the Backup Blog.

You’ll be prompted for your serial number as part of the installation process. Just click on “Get free serial” when you see this screen.

You’ll be taken to the registration page to fill in your name and e-mail address, after which Paragon will send you the product key and serial number.

The product itself seems fairly comprehensive, all things considered. I just did a very quick test yesterday; a full review will have to wait. According to the product comparison page, the compact version lacks several features offered in the full suite. It still seems like a real bargain at $0.00. Go grab a copy while you have a chance.

FTC disclosure: I have no relation to Paragon, to V3.co.uk, or to anyone else involved with this promotion. No one either paid or asked me to write this.

I wondered then about their business model. It now seems possible they didn’t have one, because I just received the following e-mail:

Valued Zoogmo Customer,

We would like to thank you for your loyal support.

Since we launched our backup service in August 2006 we have enjoyed serving you but the time has come for us to close our doors.

We plan to shut down our servers on 31st December 2009 at which point your backed-up data will no longer be available. We suggest that you check out www.mozy.com for unlimited online backup for just US$5/month. If you have any queries about our shutdown, please email us at info@zoogmo.com.

Thank you once again for using Zoogmo,

The Zoogmo Management

The online backup industry has become overpopulated and highly competitive. Some of the players are bound to have to drop out. Re-reading my posts about Zoogmo, I wonder whether Online Backup Vault, whose representatives posted comments to both of my Zoogmo entries, will fare better. One can’t tell from their blandly glossy stock-photo website. On the other hand, their comment-spam-marketing processes certainly wouldn’t encourage me to entrust my data to them.

Does the failure of Zoogmo suggest a problem for social backup in general? Will we see similar notices from companies like Cucku and CrashPlan soon? Or will we see more social backup because we’re having more social everything?

These days, people don’t share photos or other files by sending them directly to their friends. Instead, “sharing” means uploading the file to a server somewhere “in the cloud” and then letting everyone know where they can see/hear/download it. This is a generation accustomed to entrusting everything to someone else’s servers. Only the geeks, the old-fashioned, and the slightly paranoid are likely to prefer a system where they know exactly where their files are and who has access. And only the geeks are likely to have friends with computers that are secure enough to compete with the data centers where online backup providers rent server space.

And the geeks already have the means to send the files to each other. I didn’t use Zoogmo myself, beyond the initial trial so I could write the review. And I’m a slightly paranoid, old-fashioned geek. My own experience suggests that a social backup system has to offer significant benefits over and above what the technically savvy can do for themselves.

Or else it has to re-frame itself altogether, and become something like Dropbox. Backup is a valuable part of what Dropbox provides, yet it’s almost incidental to the real function of the service, which is to make it easier to share and synchronize files. That’s a much easier sell, with a much bigger market.

Zoogmo had an interesting concept, but despite a 2008 mention in Lifehacker, it never caught fire. It just may be that most people feel safer entrusting their data to strangers than to friends.

The only problem is, the small businesses StarWind serves are just a bit larger than mine, because they use servers, and I don’t. I thought immediately of the Ur-Guru, but while he’s very interested in the free V2V Converter for converting one kind of virtual machine image to another, he’s in the middle of all kinds of installation and upgrade nightmares and doesn’t want to reconfigure a server to test out the SAN products.

So I’m putting it out to you, my Loyal Readers. If you’ve been thinking that a storage server or Storage Area Network (SAN) might be the right backup and disaster recovery solution for your Windows-based office, hop on over to StarWind and download StarWind Free iSCSI Target, download it, and check it out. You can even sign up for a live demo of the software, though the emphasis there will be on the features in the paid versions of the product (prices ranging from $595 to $2995).

Or, I should say—have your IT person check it out. These are tools for geeks. But they look like pretty good tools for geeks, so it would be nice to know more about how they work in an actual office environment.

It is kind of exciting to see the blog up there on Amazon, though. Check out the subscription page: FileSlinger(TM) Backup Blog.

If you run a small business, you can expect a clean-cut, highly-motivated young salesperson to come knocking on your door quite soon bearing one of the Spare Backup Enterprise brochures explaining why online backup is so important to business continuity. (And yes, I can give you sources for all those statistics; there just wasn’t room to put them on the brochure.)

If you don’t run a business, you can probably expect one of the salesperson’s colleagues to ring your doorbell with a Family Pack Brochure in hand.

Both packages are aimed at protecting groups of computers (up to 5 for the Family Pack and up to 100 for the Enterprise) and can be ordered from My Spare Backup. (Which I did not write, but may, at some point, rewrite, or add onto.)

I labored hard to get the copy for these two documents done in time to have the designer format them and get them to the printer and into the hands of the salespeople. I am, naturally, seized with the desire to show them off. In retrospect, and with input from some people who were not involved in the project, I can see possible improvements, but I still think they’re worth posting here.

Now then—while I have not actually signed a contract to that effect, I think it would be in poor taste for me to do paid work for any of Spare’s direct competitors, to wit, other online backup companies. But the blog itself is meant to be independent and neutral, so I’m absolutely going to continue to cover anything that readers are interested in and that I can manage to fit in.

(Just as an aside, though—there’s this huge discussion in my blog comments about Dell Datasafe, and really, folks, it’s probably better if you talk to Dell about it, because I have no influence with them.)