A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from my stepmother, who converted to Mac some years ago when she left the corporate world. As I wrote back in November, she brought my father into the Apple fold after his retirement.

For the most part, they are very happy with their Macs, but sometimes trouble rears its ugly head in paradise. Though Macs are well-constructed pieces of hardware, they’re not immune to drive failure—and some of Apple’s products exhibit other flaws. “You might be interested in writing about Time Capsule failures,” Pam wrote.

I was totally unaware of this problem until mine died on Friday as it had been operating flawlessly up to that point. It was not until I did the usual round of troubleshooting per the manual that I Googled time capsule failures, to know that I was not alone. I am off to the store today to get my replacement time capsule, but word on the net is that Apple still has not fixed the underlying flaw so now I am looking at a second backup drive or cloud backup as I can not rely on Time Capsule. If you Google “time capsule power failure”, you will find lots to write about.

Indeed, if you search for “apple time capsule power failure” (without the quotes), you get (at the time of this writing) 114,000 results. A November 2009 article from the Guardian includes a nice graph pegging the average life span of a Time Capsule at 535 days:

The problem is not disk failure, but the power supply. Theoretically, the data on the unusable Time Capsules could be fine, but you can’t get to it.

Frustrated Time Capsule owners have created websites like AppleTimeCapsule.me, which provides warranty-voiding tips on how to prevent your Time Capsule from croaking. (Warning: in addition to voiding your warranty, this solution requires power tools, or sufficient muscle-power to put holes in metal casings without power tools.)

And then there’s the now-famous, only-half-joking Apple Time Capsule Memorial Register.

Once the number of dead time capsules reached 2500, the site stopped accepting new submissions. That doesn’t mean Time Capsules have stopped dying, but Apple has improved its replacement policies.

Pam described her experience this way:

Got my replacement for my Time Capsule—a refurbished Time Capsule. I was told that if it fried again I should bring it back for another replacement. I asked the Genius what Apple was doing to fix the problem and he said that I would need to call Apple. When you take the time capsule back they plug it in with your plug and then their plug and when it does not power up, they just hand you the replacement.

Can anyone spot what Apple left out of this resolution? That’s right: what about your data? Your presumably still intact, possibly entirely confidential data, now in the hands of the “genius” behind the counter at the Apple store. Well, apparently, that’s not Apple’s problem.

Both the websites I mentioned above offer some suggestions, however. The memorial site has a “Now What?” page that breaks down your options into Replace, Repair, and Do nothing. (Hmm. Anyone remember “Abort, Retry, Fail”?) “Replace” is what Apple will help you do. For “Repair,” you either need to be something of a hardware geek, or to hire one. The site points to a list of Time Capsule repairpeople around the globe, but it’s a short list. Any competent computer hardware repair person should be able to get your disk out and put it into another drive case, though.

AppleTimeCapsule.me suggests taking your TimeCapsule disk out before returning the case for replacement, then putting your own disk into the new case instead of using the one provided to you. This is possibly not quite honest, but then again, neither is Apple’s just taking your data.

It would make more sense to me if Apple just provided you with a new empty Time Capsule case and stuck your existing disk into it, especially if it’s clear that the point of failure was the power supply. Admittedly they don’t look all that easy to take apart and reassemble, but it seems as though the company might need to address the design anyway.

Meanwhile, as convenient as a Time Capsule is, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to make it your only backup device. What do other Time Capsule owners out there use to back up their Time Capsules (or their Macs) with? Is there a favored external hard drive maker? A most popular online backup provider? Inquiring minds want to know.

The first time I saw an announcement for the CTERA CloudPlug, I was puzzled. “Cloud-Attached Storage” is a catchy phrase, but what did it mean? Could I just plug the device into a wall socket, connect it to my computer, and send my data into the cloud?

So naturally when CTERA’s PR agency offered me a chance to examine the CloudPlug, and interview a representative of the company, I said yes.

The demo package included the device itself (which looks like nothing so much as the voltage converter on a router, only sleeker), an Ethernet cable, a power cord, and an adorably tiny USB stick loaded with manuals and product info, that the cover letter said I could use as the storage device for testing purposes. Oh, and a FedEx return label to ship it back to them, which I’ll be doing in the next day or so. (FTC, are you listening?)

The documentation was extensive (the PDF manual is 200 pages long) but not always helpful, in part because the previous reviewer had forgotten to restore the device to factory settings, so when I followed the directions I didn’t find quite what I was expecting to. I also experienced a little confusion because the Windows Explorer interface for the CloudPlug doesn’t operate the same way as my other NAS drives do.

I don’t think that would be a problem for someone who hadn’t used NAS drives before, though, and the CloudPlug is a device for people who already have a network, but haven’t yet ventured into the realm of networked storage. I will say that despite the apparent simplicity of the device, you really do need to read the manual—once they update it for consistency. (Despite what some parts of the current documentation say, the CloudPlug does work with Macs.) 

Physically connecting the CloudPlug is easy. Stick it into an electrical outlet and then connect the Ethernet cable to your router. Disconnect your hard drive (USB or eSATA) from your computer or hub and hook it up to the CloudPlug. Your computer should take it from there. My laptop, which runs XP Pro, recognized the presence of a new Universal Plug and Play device immediately and proceeded to go through the Windows new hardware installation routine. Thereafter “CTERA CloudPlug” showed up in “My Network Places” with the same kind of icon as my router and my network printer…though it might take a while to appear.

The reviewer’s guide for the CloudPlug is very clear that this device is only one link in the chain between your computer and the cloud. You have to have a modem and a router already. Before you can have Network Attached Storage, there has to be a network to attach it to. Oh, and you have to have some storage. (No one in real life would want to convert a 2 GB memory stick into a NAS drive—or if you would, please leave a comment and let me know why!)

One thing I do not suffer from, however, is a shortage of hard drives. The one I chose to convert into a NAS drive to share among my different machines was Qualora, the Buffalo Quattro, since it has the most storage space and the fancy RAID array.

The next trick was to get to the CloudPlug web interface. As I said, I ran into a few delays there because the device hadn’t been reset, but once I sorted that out I was able to ensure that the CloudPlug used the same network as the rest of the machines and create a couple of network shares for test purposes. Then I went over to the CTERA Portal and set up a trial account for their online backup service.

And that was as far as I’d gotten before my interview with Rani Osnat, VP of Marketing for CTERA, on December 16^th.  Since I was still suffering from pretty severe laryngitis at the time, it was a rather challenging undertaking.

CTERA and the CloudPlug: the 30,000-foot View

The first thing I asked Rani was where the name “CTERA” came from. I’d already had to ask Raegan, the PR representative, how to pronounce it (see-TAIR-a). I can’t help it; I do consulting work for a naming company, and I’m always interested in where names come from. In this case, C is for “cloud” and “tera” is meant to be “terra” as in “earth,” not “tera” as in “terabyte”. Which makes sense, but they should probably have a footnote about it on their website somewhere.

Rani then led me through a presentation explaining, among other things, the convergence of higher broadband speeds, cloud storage speeds, and embedded NAS that make Cloud Attached Storage feasible. The founders of CTERA have a background in network security from their previous venture, SofaWare.

It always makes me laugh, though, the way the online backup companies diss hard drives as a backup medium. The slide Rani showed actually says “External HDD: Unreliable, Manual.” Let’s be very clear here, boys and girls. When you back your data up “in the cloud”, it’s being stored on hard drives. They’re hard drives in mirrored RAID arrays in secure data centers (we hope), but they’re still hard drives. And while all hard drives do eventually fail, the failure rate of the hard drives in data centers is actually much higher than that of XHDs in offices, unless you knock the thing on the floor.

Besides, almost all XHDs now come bundled with some kind of backup software, and almost all backup software now has scheduling built in, so it’s a stretch to assume everyone who buys an XHD is backing up by manually dragging and dropping files. More and more backup software includes versioning, too.

The real down side to using an external hard drive for your backup is that it’s almost certainly right there in your office with your computer, so it’s just as vulnerable to theft or natural disaster as the drive you’re backing up.

But I digress.

The CloudPlug is aimed at the “prosumer” market, and those seem to be the people who are buying it. These are the traditionally underserved small and home businesses for whom consumer products don’t quite cut it, but who don’t have nearly the infrastructure—never mind the budget—to support enterprise hardware and software. It is, in fact, a perfect device for someone like me, running a home business, sharing a network with someone else. There are normally four computers and two NAS drives on our network here, in addition to the network printer. (For an office with more than 20 users, the C200 is a better device.)

It’s also aimed at the ISP market, as something the likes of Comcast could re-sell to their customers, with a white-label version of CTERA’s storage portal service.

I asked about the people who have already purchased some kind of NAS device, and want to be able to back it up online?  After all, people who are geeky enough to make good use of the CloudPlug (which is definitely not a device for my mom) might already own a network drive. Or two, in my case. Rani said to watch this space.

So How Does It Work, Already?

The CloudPlug is designed to sync the computers onto the drive it’s connected to, then back the contents of that drive up to the CTERA’s online backup service. The sync feature is pretty basic, even in the advanced version. But once you’ve configured the drive for Windows sharing, you can use any backup software you want to copy data onto the drive that’s hooked up to the CloudPlug.

Of course, part of the point of the CloudPlug, and one of its advantages over traditional online backup, is that you don’t have to install any software on your computer. Any file copying from your working drive takes place over the local network, at fairly high speeds. (Very high speeds if you have a gigabit network, but I don’t.) The actual uploading of files from the backup drive to the cloud doesn’t slow down your machine. You don’t even have to have it turned on. And if you need to back up several machines, you don’t have to install software multiple times—and pay for multiple licenses.

Absolutely brilliant, in theory. Slightly rockier in practice. Easy Sync chooses entire drive partitions to synchronize. I was not that surprised when it ran into errors trying to synchronize my C drive. I was rather puzzled when all it could copy of my D drive, which contains only data, was the file structure. On the other hand, it did a spiffing job of copying data over from my Buffalo MiniStation.

I imagine that if I’d settled in for a session with tech support, we could have worked our way through that problem, but I was already way overdue with this post as it was. (It’s possible that part of the problem is the fact that there’s a password on my laptop.)

I really like the idea of the CloudPlug. I think it may need a little fine-tuning in the usability department. For one thing, if you look at the web interface, the tools are in the wrong order relative to what you need to do to get the CloudPlug set up.

I’d be the first to agree that “backup” is high in importance, but before you can back up with the CloudPlug, you have to run the setup wizard, then share folders, then synchronize. (The setup wizard should take care of the network connection.)  Then you can create some backup jobs.

Compared to the rest of it, the backup and restore process are quite simple and straightforward, and fairly speedy. (Though I’m not sure my files actually did get restored, since I’d ticked the box that said to append something to the file name, and never saw any files with names like that.) And I’m not sure why the restore process needs to analyze files outside the folder that the backups came from, either.

Conclusion

I’m not sure the CloudPlug is 100% ready for Prime Time yet, but it’s a very intriguing device with a lot of potential. It looks like it should be easier to use than it is. Admittedly, it performs a pretty complex array of tasks, but configuration was certainly not simpler than, say, my network printer, my Maxtor Shared Storage II, or my Buffalo LinkStation Mini. The main difference is that there’s no software to install. That difference might be worth it to you, and it might not. There aren’t many solutions for backing network drives up online right now, and some of the ones that exist contain slightly bizarre restrictions based on file type.

If you’re doing it just to create a NAS drive for local use, it probably isn’t worth it, since you’d be adding the $199 ($299 when their special introductory period ends) for the CloudPlug to the cost of a comparable drive, which means a USB RAID drive like my Quattro (about $400 for the 2 TB model). The 2 TB LinkStation Quad, the networked equivalent of the Quattro, costs about the same as the Quattro. Yes, you can connect the CloudPlug to an ordinary, inexpensive USB drive. But that wouldn’t be a drive comparable to the NAS drives on the market today, all of which offer some level of RAID protection against drive failure, in addition to the kind of storage capacity you want when using a single drive to back up multiple computers.

Part of the CloudPlug’s cost is the first year’s 10 GB online backup subscription, and it’s really only the “cloud” part of the CloudPlug that makes it stand out. As I said before, backup is the function that works best, with sync still seeming a bit rough around the edges. Automatically uploading backups at times when no one is actually using the Internet, in a way that doesn’t tie up any system resources, seems like technology worth investing in.

But I might wait for the second generation.

So right after he finished explaining to me that he really couldn’t take the time to evaluate StarWind’s products, the Ur-Guru went ahead and did it anyway. And here’s what he had to say about them. There are a lot of technical terms in this post, partly because it’s about enterprise software, and partly because enterprise software products are more complex and partly because the author is (though he won’t admit it) a geek.

As I said in the call for reviewers, StarWind’s products are suitable for businesses with multiple PCs and a network who want to store (and back up) their data in a central location. ISCSI is just a technology that lets your computer talk to disks over the network the way it would if they were installed in your system, but if you want more details, follow the links to the Wikipedia definitions.

And if you have no interest at all in enterprise products—even for smaller enterprises—skip this and wait until next week, when I’ll be talking about something friendlier to ordinary humans.

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StarWind Software approached Sallie about writing a review about their products and guess who got to play around with it instead? Yep, me, the guy known as Ur-Guru. Why? Oh, because I happen to have some servers sitting around that would make a good SAN.

Before I continue I have to say that even though my home office comes close to what you might find in a small enterprise or rack server I have very little need for a SAN (Storage Area Network), because every single system is already loaded up with many terabytes of fast RAID storage. A SAN, regardless of the size, speed, and cost, would always be slower than the local storage of each system.

However, if I wanted to centralize the storage for the systems in the network, whereby the systems themselves were smaller, less top-heavy computers, I would certainly be looking at something like StarWind Server or StarWind Enterprise Server (probably the latter because I like the replication features).

Also, if I were to overhaul the way my virtual machines are managed and stored throughout my network, and if I wanted to create a single cluster of systems to run that, StarWind would certainly get an even closer look.

So what is StarWind Server, you might ask. If you’ve familiarized yourself with the concept of a SAN, the short version of the story is that StarWind Server is a software product that turns a Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 server into a fully capable iSCSI SAN system.

Think of it as having storage space on your system that isn’t local but remote and runs over a network. I could get into how to build a complete SAN network and recommend fiber-channel switches and how to hook it all up for the best performance and manageability but I’m going to restrain myself and focus on how a more modest SAN setup could be of use for the “power user” or small business.

What I tested was a combination of StarWind Server combined with the Starport iSCSI Initiator and AoE Initiator. Lots of terms you may have never heard, but in essence, Starport contains the drivers required for a system to use iSCSI over the network in order to use storage space on the StarWind Server SAN by connecting to it and making it appear as if the storage is a device or disk connected to your computer. In technical terms it is connected, except it’s connected over the network.

Installation

Installing the StarWind Server was a breeze, especially since it’s a very small installation with a very modest memory footprint. After installation I connected to the local system via the StarWind Management Console (the application that allows you to configure your SAN) and created an Image File Device of 800GB on one of the arrays on the system I installed it on. If you must know, the system I used for testing is a Dual Xeon E5472 with 32GB of RAM and 6.4 Terabyte of RAID-5 storage split over eight 300GB Seagate Cheetah HDDs and four 1000GB Samsung Spinpoint HDDs, running 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 (that’s SP2, not R2). StarWind Server (and the Starport) support both 64-bit and 32-bit systems, of course.

When specifying an Image File device it complained that I didn’t give it the right file extension (*.img). I think the developers at StarWind might have to look at this and add a few lines of code that will automatically add the extension if the user forgets to add it. It’s the small things that matter when it comes to having a smooth end-user experience. The Image File Device created on the StarWind server is really just a large file that has the size you specified when creating it. So what StarWind Server does is, while running on top of Windows Server and its regular file system, create large files to actually store the data.

Because I never install anything relating to drivers for testing purposes on systems I use for my daily work I decided to give the Starport software a try by installing it on a virtual machine (VM, for short) that ran on one of my workstations. Again the installation was a breeze and the memory footprint of the StarPort iSCSI initiator is very small. I’m glad to see some companies still care about writing efficient software that isn’t bloated to the point where you wonder what’s bigger, the OS or the application running on it. The VM I used had a local pre-allocated disk of 80GB and was assigned 4GB of memory, running Windows 7 64-bit. (I’m not even sure if StarWind supports Windows 7 at this stage but I didn’t run into any major problems seeing as how most Vista x64 drivers will run fine in Windows 7 x64 anyway).

After specifying the license to use for Starport I added a Remote iSCSI Device to is via its management console, gave it the name (or IP address) of the server that was running the StarWind Server and it immediately connected me to the Image File Device I created there. Next up, I opened up the Computer Management on the VM, headed for Disk Management, and saw “Disk 1” in there which was in fact the Image File Device on the remote server. From there on it’s a piece of cake, you partition and format the volume the way you need to and voila, you’ve got yourself a bunch of storage that looks like it’s local to the system but is really running elsewhere over the network. Smooth! I now had an F:\ drive on the VM.

Performance

Of course the real test for a SAN would be to see how it performs when you start throwing things at it. In this case, a lot of files of varying sizes.

I’m pleased to see the performance was quite spectacular. The network in my home office is all 1Gbit running through a solid HP Procurve 24 port switch using jumbo frames. Copying data to the new F:\ drive was fast. On average I got around 65MB/s with peaks on the larger files of 90MB/s. To compare, these are very acceptable given that SMB2 copies (when you copy files from one system to another over the network via Windows Server 2008 and Vista/W7 systems) usually runs around the same for files of varying sizes with peaks of over 100MB/s for larger files.

Clearly, there is not much of a bottleneck with StarWind Server and I’ve seen SAN setups that perform so poorly that you’d wonder why so much money was thrown at it when it performs that badly. Having said that, there was a noticeable hit on the performance I normally have between the systems but for one, I was running tests through a VM and secondly the data is being written to an Image File Device which, of course, comes with a bit of overhead.

By now some of you might be thinking “OK, I understood half of what you’re on about so what would I want all this for?” Well, that depends whether you may have a need for SAN or whether sharing files between systems via a NAS is sufficient for your needs. SAN and NAS are often confused, even though both serve more specific purposes that the other doesn’t. I’m more a NAS guy than a SAN guy depending on the situation and the setup.

I would really prefer a SAN configuration (over NAS) if I were building a set of servers that are virtualized and centralized in a rack. Either to have the SAN provide storage to the VM’s or act as the storage for the VMs.

StarWind also offers a free version of their software, which comes with limitations (like a max. 2TB storage size) but should give you something to look at and give a try without having to overhaul your entire network and jump in off the deep end into the world of SAN. However, the Server and Enterprise Server versions offer more than just basic Image File storage and include support for a RAM Drive Device. If you have a really large server with a good deal of RAM you could designate some of that RAM as storage space.

The performance of that is hundreds, if not thousands of times faster than disk based storage. But RAM comes at a higher cost and I wouldn’t recommend using RAM disks for actual storage unless you have redundancy in the system and can deal with situations where a server might blow up, break down, or simply stops working for any of a million temporary or catastrophic reasons. In addition other device types are also supported like Virtual DVD devices, Disk Bridges (where your storage/partitions on the server are actual volumes/drives), SPTI devices (which allow any physical storage device, including DVD, tape, etc. to be used as iSCSI targets that your client machines can connect to), Virtual Tape device (which emulates a tape drive while using disk based storage via StarWind VTL). There’s quite a few options there that make StarWind Server a very interesting choice when creating a SAN on your network.

But as always, just like RAID IS NOT BACKUP (it is redundancy) don’t mistake SAN for a way to back up important files if all you rely on is the continuous operation and solidity of the SAN. As always, you have to ensure you have backups and that’s where my favorite feature of StarWind Enterprise Server comes into the mix; it allows two SAN servers to replicate data, much the same as a RAID1 mirror. Except, of course, the mirroring happens between two physical SAN servers instead of all on the same single hardware box. This is most definitely something that shouldn’t be overlooked when building a SAN.

Another good-to-have feature in StarWind Enterprise Server is the Snapshot and CDP (Continuous Data Protection) Device which allows you to create virtual drives that support backing up and snapshots (taking a backup of a certain state at a certain point in time).

The good…

To conclude, my experience installing and using the StarWind Server and Starport has been a good one. These aren’t the kind of scary server applications that come with a ton of overhead and require a study of many days to get a grip on the configuration. The management console windows to configure both the server and client side are well laid out, simple to understand, and offer exactly what you need without a huge amount of complicating factors. If you’re looking for a SAN without the headache, I think Starwind certainly has what you need.

The bad…

The only bad thing is that I didn’t get to use StarWind Server in daily production use, mostly because it would be a step backward for me in terms of storage and performance and what I really would have liked to test this on would have been a system with 50+ client systems with two mirrored SANs using CDP over a 10Gbit fiber-channel network. Alas, I don’t have any of that sitting around here to toy with. If I had, however, I’d probably go back to StarWind and see if I could get a good deal on promoting their software by showing how it operates in my home office. :-)

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And now it’s back to my adventures in WordPress, with a reminder to everyone to upgrade in a timely fashion: there’s a nasty worm going around that attacks popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla.

Backups—and the consequences of not backing up—have appeared twice in as many weeks on my favorite podcast, For Immediate Release. First my Podcast Asylum colleague and fellow FIR correspondent Lee Hopkins reported on a hard drive meltdown, and then frequent commenter Ricardo from Amigo Audio in Costa Rica called in with a request for tips on developing a backup plan.

While I’m a little dismayed that this blog didn’t turn up in Ricardo’s searches, I’m happy to provide some guidance, particularly as it may be of use to other readers.

According to the comment in FIR 410, the Amigo Audio offices have 3-6 staff members and 5 computers. He didn’t mention a network, but it seems reasonable to assume one exists. (And if it doesn’t—Ricardo, get a router.) The computers are not the kind of mega-workstations used by the Ur-Guru, but ordinary desktop PCs with modest-sized hard drives (120 GB). Up to this point, Ricardo has been using primarily DVDs and USB sticks for backup, but without any regular schedule.

Here’s what I recommend for this situation.

Part I: NAS Drive with RAID

That stands for Network Attached Storage, which means that instead of connecting the backup drive to one computer via a USB or FireWire cable, you connect it to all your PCs through the network by plugging it in to your router (see above). This is an efficient way to handle backups for multiple computers, and you can very often access that data through a Web interface when you’re away from the office. (You do have to set that part up and put the passwords in and so on.) Each computer connected to a NAS drive has its own “share,” a private area for backing up that computer’s data. They also often have a “public” directory as well, which any of the computers can access. I keep software on the public share of my Maxtor Shared Storage II, Teratides.

If you are really geeky, you can build your own NAS drive out of an old computer using FreeNAS—my brother did that. For the rest of us, there are several different models of SOHO NAS drive. If space is at a premium, you might want to look into the LinkStation Mini from Buffalo, which I wrote about in June 2008. Physically, it’s very small, but it packs in quite a bit of storage.

Those two drives contain only two disks, and can be formatted for RAID 0 (spanning, to make a single large drive) or RAID 1 (mirroring, to duplicate everything on the first drive to the second drive). If you want a higher level of RAID protection (see my December 23rd post for more about RAID), you need something like HP’s MediaSmart with Windows Home Server, which has 4 drive bays with removable drives, or Buffalo’s TeraStation, which actually does RAID 10. Netgear, LaCie, D-Link, and Iomega all produce NAS drives, as well.

Part II: Automatic Backup Software

Most of these drives come bundled with some form of backup software. Almost all backup software these days offers the option of scheduled backups: you just tell it when you want to back up, and it will back up at that time. Your most critical files should be backed up at least once a day.

Many software programs also offer the option of continuous backup or sync. That means that whenever you change a file, the new version gets backed up. Running a continuous backup program can slow down your computer’s performance, but it does mean that you never have to worry about when the last backup was made.

The software bundled with your NAS drive is probably good enough; unless you know you need to do something you can’t do with what you have, there’s not likely to be a need to go out and buy additional backup software. You should check, however, to make sure there’s a way to recover your data if you can’t run the software you’ve installed on your PC. Some programs instruct you to create a rescue CD. Others copy your files just as they are, rather than creating a proprietary backup file format. That often requires more space on your backup drive, but does make it easier to recover files.

Part III: What to Back Up

If you have a relatively small amount of data and have just bought a massive NAS drive, you might just decide to back up everything. This saves the effort of prioritizing your files and ensures that you don’t  forget anything.

However, very often what you really want to back up are the files you’ve created, rather than, say, your software. It’s more efficient to save one copy of the install package of the software on the public section of your NAS drive and then just back up your own files: documents, e-mail, financial records, photos, audio, video, etc. Many backup programs offer suggestions as to which files to back up.

The prioritizing exercise is also important to prepare you for Step IV. It’s good to make a written list of these files.

Step IV: Off-site Backup

A NAS drive in the office is handy for retrieving data when something goes wrong with your PC, but if your whole office building burns down, your backups will go up in smoke. That means you need to get your most critical, irreplaceable data off-site.

The easiest way to do this is generally to use an online backup service. If your office has multiple computers, look for a service that charges by total data stored, not by the number of “seats.”

For most of us, uploading data to an online backup service is a slow process. That’s why it’s important to be selective about what you back up. (Well, it’s part of why: if you’re paying per megabyte for online storage, you want to keep your costs down.) This is where that priority list from Part III comes in.

There are other ways to get your data off-site. You can burn DVDs with that critical data and store them at home or in a safe-deposit box (if your home and your office are in the same building). You can make backups onto an external hard drive and then keep the hard drive in your car, at home, in the safe-deposit box, etc. If the storage location isn’t secure, make sure you password-protect the drive or disc.

Step V: Annual Archives

As this is the first of the year, it’s appropriate to talk about annual archives. That’s where you take all the data from the past year and put it onto a DVD (or several) and store it with your paper files from the same year. (You know, the ones you have to keep in case the IRS audits you.) Eve Abbott recommends making copies of appropriate software (e.g. Quicken or TurboTax) and storing them with the data, so that you’ll be able to open the files if necessary.

If you’ve never made annual archives before, do it for every prior year whose data is sitting on your hard drive. Then delete any of the data that isn’t current. That makes room for the data you’re going to create in the coming year, and makes it easier to find things.

Of course, if we ever replace optical storage (CDs and DVDs) with a new technology, you’ll need to copy those archives onto the new medium. That’s assuming you still need to keep the stuff, which you might well not. Follow the guidelines for retention if you’re subject to regulations about what to keep and for how long. The rest of us can get rid of a lot of material once we’re past the risk of a tax audit. I don’t know how long that is in Costa Rica, but in the US it’s generally 7 years. (Which must mean it’s time for me to purge some more files from the archive boxes in my garage.)

There you have it—a backup plan for a small office, circa 2009.

This week’s Backup Reminder comes to us from Tracey Franks of Words and Money. Like me, Tracey is a professional writer. Unlike me, she’s an expert on finance. She’s also a Mac user—a recent convert. Since I know that some of my most loyal readers have Macs, I like to include Mac-backup stories whenever I can.

And since I have about a zillion things to do before my mother arrives tomorrow, I’m grateful to have a guest post to offer you.

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For some reason I’ve always considered myself to have good computer Karma. Everyone else seemed to have a nightmare come true about losing data or experiencing “the black screen of death.” Even though I had heard plenty of these stories from friends, I never experienced anything like that. Sure, I’d had some freeze ups or forgotten to save a document properly, but I never really lost control of my technology life.

Backing up work is important for everyone, but particularly when you write and edit for a living. The problem is that when I’m deep in concentration on a project, I forget to back up or don’t do it nearly as often as I should. Ideally, I need a backup secretary to just do it for me so I don’t have to think about it. The Tech Guy who comes to my house, and saves me from entering technology hell, always preaches the importance of a backup system. Yeah, I know, but that stuff happens to other people because it’s never happened to me. And off I go back to my corner of denial.

A corporate client had given me a large project that I was working on one morning when my computer Karma ran out. My trusted Sony Vaio had been trying to give me signals for weeks that its hard drive wasn’t feeling well. Like a bad parent, I ignored the signs of impending illness thinking “this too shall pass.” Besides, we’d had a good six year run together without a single problem.

Finishing a piece of the project, I reached for my thumb drive to back it up and then it happened to me…the black screen of death. I’m fairly certain my neighbors could hear the guttural scream that came from somewhere within my body. I reached for the phone and called Tech Guy, begging him to drop everything and recover my work from the bowels of the Sony Vaio. My deadline with the client was hours away.

“Did you back it up?” he asked.

“Um, sort of. Well, some of it,” I replied.

I felt like a little kid who just did something I wasn’t supposed to do, and so I braced myself for the lecture. Tech Guy didn’t give me a lecture, but he did come over and retrieve what I needed to make my deadline. Then we talked about how to get my computer Karma back.

A visit to the Apple Store not only sold me on the iMac with the 20-inch screen for my 45-year-old eyes, but also on their version of a backup secretary, the Time Capsule/Time Machine. It works with both Macs and PCs, so there’s no reason why everyone can’t use one of these wonders. This little white box backs up everything on the hard drives of my iMac and my Powerbook G4 every hour, which is probably an hour more often than I was backing up my work. It also serves as a wireless router so I can work anywhere in my house, and even outside in the backyard if I choose to.

When I hear the quiet hum of the Time Capsule entering its backup mode, I feel a sense of relief that Big Brother is watching over me. It’s so quiet that one day I shut down my iMac right in the middle of a backup. When I realized what I had done, I grabbed the manual and saw that those Apple guys had thought of everything. Once I powered my iMac back up, the backup continued where it had left off. Nice! I can also tell the Time Machine to only back up certain folders or files on the hard drive. With 500GB of storage, I’m not too worried about running out of space.

Tech Guy still tells me to back up more often than every hour, and I will admit he is right. At least my corner of denial is smaller and I feel like I’ve got my computer Karma back…for now anyway.

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