There are advantages to being a blogger. The main one is that people give you Free Stuff because you’re part of the media—and when you’re not actually a journalist, you don’t need to have any qualms about keeping said Free Stuff.

Last night I got to meet my BFF Jay Pechek (the man who sent me the free hard drives in ’06 and ’07) in person, along with his new boss at Buffalo Technologies. When your favorite tech PR guy changes jobs, it means new toys to play with.

Enter the charmingly petite LinkStation Mini. It’s a fraction of the size of my Maxtor Shared Storage II, and does the same thing. Admittedly, the one I got is only a 500 GB model, but there is a 1 TB model with just as much storage capacity as the MSS-II, which is approximately the size and weight of a cinderblock. You can see the two side by side for comparison here:

That’s the difference between starting with two 3.5” drives and starting with two 2.5” drives. And then there’s the fan, or rather the lack of one. Notebook drives rarely get as hot as desktop drives, because they don’t spin as fast. (These are 5400 RPM drives.) Instead of putting a fan into the LinkStation Mini’s case, Buffalo’s engineers designed the housing with a heat sink between the drives and plenty of ventilation on the sides and back.

Not having a fan means the LS Mini is quiet, and also that there’s nothing drawing dust and cat hair through those nice big ventilation grilles. (Theoretically. In actuality, nothing is proof against cat hair unless it’s airtight, and possibly not even then.)

The normal reason for using 2.5” hard drives is to allow for portability. It’s unlikely, however, that even I would pack a NAS drive along on my trips. However, I could fit six of the LS Mini into the space occupied by the MSS-II. That means people who don’t have room for a cinderblock on their desks can still use network storage.

I have seen Apple’s Time Capsule. (My stepmother has one.) It’s got that sleek white Apple look to it, and it doubles as a wireless router, which is a neat trick. But while more elegant than the MSS-II, it’s still substantially larger than the LinkStation Mini.

Buffalo hasn’t quite mastered idiot-proof simplicity the way Apple does. Basic setup of the LinkStation Mini is easy enough—plug it in, connect it to the router, turn the power switch to “on,” and insert the setup CD. But despite the fact that it told me it had installed the Memeo backup software, it didn’t; I had to go into the CD and manually install that. And I’m still working out the Web Access setup. (Heck, I’m still recovering from going out with the Buffalo PR team—and I don’t even drink.)

This was my first encounter with Memeo’s backup software. One thing I noticed right away was wide array of specific backup destinations, including iPods, USB keys, and Memeo’s own online backup service. In this case, I wanted my new network drive, L, and had no trouble choosing it as a destination.

Having a new NAS drive gives me the opportunity to back up my D drive: the second internal hard drive on my laptop, the one which contains recent backups of business files and a number of other things as well, like fonts, icons, and sound effects. While drives other than “C” are normally excluded from backups, it was easy enough to remove the exclusion and set up a backup from D to L. Backing that drive up is something I’ve done manually when I’ve done it at all, so this will be a good thing to have.

The initial backup of this nearly-full 80 GB drive is taking a long time, in part because it’s running in the background and in part because there are a lot of small files in there, and nothing slows down a network like hundreds of small files. (Except thousands of small files, I guess.) Plus, while the LinkStation Mini is equipped for gigabit network connections, I don’t have a gigabit network card in my laptop, so I’m restricted to ordinary 10/100 transfer speeds (slower than USB hi-speed).

And speaking of things that run in the background, my system tray is getting ridiculously crowded with all these assorted backup drives and utilities: NASNavigator, Memeo, Mozy, FreeAgent Launcher, and Maxtor Status Icon. It’s got to be safe to shut some of these down when backups aren’t actually running, though the biggest drain on functionality seems to come from AVG Free version 8, which puts tentacles into places previous versions kept themselves out of, like Firefox.

Stay tuned for future explorations of some of the more advanced features of the LinkStation Mini.

Here it is the end of another year of backups—almost time to make those special year-end copies of your important data to store with your tax records. I thought I’d do something a bit different for today’s column, so I put a question out to my LinkedIn network asking the people I know what they do for backups. (And no, this is not what “networked backups” means.)

Most of the answers came as private messages, so I won’t quote them in their entirety here, but I’ll list the different tools people are using and write a bit about each, so you can decide which ones might be good for you.

• Amazon S3. The person who mentioned this isn’t using it yet; he’s got a couple of 250 GB external drives. S3 stands for “Simple Storage Service.” It’s fairly inexpensive: $0.15 per GB per month for storage, plus similar rates for data transfer in and out. Jeremy Zawdny has made a list of S3-compatible backup software, since otherwise S3 isn’t really a backup solution, just a storage solution.

• Buffalo TeraStation. This is network storage for people who have serious data to back up. It supports full RAID 5 configuration, which offers protection from disk failure (unless something kills off all the disks at once), and comes in capacities up to 4 TB. It’s big, solid, and expensive: about $700 for the 1 TB version. The TeraStation comes with automated backup software called Memeo AutoBackup, about which I know nothing, but will try to find out more. If you’re a photographer, musician, or videographer, or just run an office that generates masses of data, this could be the product for you.
• Carbonite got two recommendations—or was it three? It’s been around longer than Mozy, and costs $50/year for unlimited online backup. They’re working on a Mac version, but it’s not available yet. Instead of backing up on a schedule, it backs up files as they change. That’s known as “continuous data protection” and has advantages and disadvantages. One potential disadvantage is slowing down your computer; another is backing up changes that you didn’t want to make. The advantage is that you’ll never lose a whole day’s data. Also, unless you’re working on several large files simultaneously, you won’t have to wait through endless uploads after the first backup is finished.
• Cobian Backup. This was a new one on me, but it turns out it’s been around for a long time. Cobian is free open-source backup software for Windows. It allows scheduling, encryption, and backup online via FTP. The user interface looks fairly similar to that for SyncBack SE and for Backup4All. I guess there are only so many ways to configure setting up a backup program. There’s a tutorial for version 7 online. (You need Internet Explorer to view it, though.)
• EMC Retrospect for tape backup. Retrospect comes in a lot of flavors and is compatible with both Vista and Leopard—or so their website claims. The Express version that used to come bundled with external drives is easy enough to use, but stores your data in a proprietary format and doesn’t let you browse through the backed up files. (Norton Ghost stores files in a proprietary format, but at least there’s the Ghost Explorer to let you retrieve individual files.) The Professional version supports tape drives, which most consumer backup products don’t. I’m not a huge fan of tape, but it does provide a way to get your data off-site, and it’s still common in enterprises.
• Genie Backup Manager comes with two recommendations, one from the owner of the TeraStation and one from a respected IT colleague. It comes in Home and Pro versions. Both of them seem to be pretty comprehensive tools for backing up everything on your computer to just about any medium you could imagine. The site also features a backup encyclopedia. The Home version is $50; the Pro version is $70, and the server version is $400—which is probably a good deal if you have 50 computers to back up. Windows only.
• Karen’s Replicator. Yes, there is someone besides me in the world who’s a big fan of this free program for Windows file backup and synchronization. I suppose I might be slightly biased in its favor because it was created by a woman, but it’s been doing a great job of backing up my files for years now, and it’s easy to use. Very handy for copying files onto one of those USB external drives mentioned above. It’s less sophisticated than Cobian, so which you use depends on your needs.
• Mozy. I’ve written about this online backup service before, and it seems it, too, has other fans out there. The free version gives you 2 GB of storage and is available for Vista, XP, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X. The Pro version is available for all flavors of Windows (including servers), but not for Mac. Pro licenses are $3.95/month plus a $0.50/GB/month charge.
• USB External Drive. Given all I’ve written about such drives already, I don’t think that needs a lot of explaining. But if you have an older machine with USB 1.1, consider getting an XHD with a FireWire connection instead. (Assuming you have a FireWire port, that is. You can use an external drive for manual drag-and-drop backups or with automated backup software.
• Windows Home Server. This is network storage and then some. I have read good things about WHS, and the person who uses it says it rocks. In addition to doing automatic backups of multiple computers, it acts as a media server. (Sort of like my Maxtor Shared Storage II, but more so; the interface on the MSS-II is designed for simplicity rather than flexibility.) You can install it on a not-too-old computer yourself, if you’re on the geeky side, or you can buy it pre-installed on something like the HP MediaSmart Server. The software costs about $189; the full rig about $600. There’s a good description with screenshots over at Tiger Direct. Best for those with multiple computers and lots of audio and video files.

If you use a backup service or program not listed here, feel free to post it in the comments to the blog or e-mail it to me. I’ll be happy to produce a second list. Indeed, I might try to twist the arms of my Mac-using friends to get a list of different Mac-compatible backup products that people actually use.

Meanwhile, try not to spill champagne on your hard drive when celebrating the New Year, and I’ll see you again in 2008.

When I told the Ur-Guru what I was planning to write about today, his response was: “Seagate sure is getting a lot of exposure through you. :-) Hate to think what you’d write and how much if they sent you a full 100TB RAID rack.”

I’d hate to think where I’d put a 100 TB RAID rack, myself. Never mind what I’d do with it. I’m already running out of room for external drives, and I had to buy a new USB hub to keep them all connected and powered. I’m the wrong blogger for enterprise-level hardware and software, and most of my readers—the ones who send feedback, anyway—wouldn’t know what to do with it, either.

But a Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive was something I did know what to do with, so when Jay Pechek (that’s pronounced like “paycheck,” for those who care) of Seagate offered me one back in 2006, I jumped at it. And it worked perfectly for a year, whereupon it died rather dramatically. (You can read all about it in my “Sounds You Never Want to Hear” post from 9/21/07.)

Jay sent me a new Maxtor Shared Storage II drive (and a couple of OneTouch 4 drives for good measure) and I sent the dead one back to him so he could have the engineers see whether they could get my data back.

The inside of the MSS-II is actually two 500GB drives, and you have two options for formatting them: “spanning,” which gives you a 1 TB drive, and “mirroring,” which gives you a 500 GB drive in duplicate. I had set the old MSS-II to mirror, because I thought the extra protection against drive failure was more important than the extra storage space, and while you can back the MSS-II up onto a USB drive, I didn’t have a USB drive big enough to back it up.

It turned out I’d made a good decision, since one of those drives did die, and the purpose of using RAID (which is what “spanning” and “mirroring” really are) is to protect against physical failure of the disk.

Except there was a little problem, notably the complete impossibility of opening up the MSS-II in order to switch the drives around. What’s supposed to happen when the first drive fails is an automatic fail-over to the second drive and a few warning lights to let you know that one of your drives isn’t working. But before that can happen, the software that controls the boot sequence of the drives has to get a signal that the drive is dead, and it couldn’t get any signal at all from the drive. (That’s why it was making those nasty clicking noises.) So it didn’t work.

Because of that, and because I now had a 500 GB OneTouch 4 drive I could use to back up the new MSS-II, I have set the new MSS-II to span. And this was a good thing, too, because the Seagate lab was able to retrieve my data from one of the drives. Jay shipped it back to me as a shared folders backup file on a 750 GB OneTouch 4 Basic, which is black plastic all over instead of black plastic with brushed aluminum.

My first attempt at restoring the data didn’t get anywhere, because the MSS-II wouldn’t recognize the drive, even though it was properly formatted. A second attempt, made with some coaching from Jay, worked perfectly. It seems that even though the administration interface for the MSS-II has an equivalent to the Windows “Safely remove hardware” button, you have to power it down and restart it before it will recognize a new USB drive.

Anyway, once we’d done that, I clicked the “Shared Folder Backup” button, selected “restore,” and then chose the backup set I wanted. (In this case there was only one, which Jay had called “BackupBlog.”) I then had the choice to restore the items to their original locations or to a temporary folder in the “public” share on the drive. (Each computer connected to the MSS-II has its own “share,” which is accessible only to that computer, but all of them can use the “public” share.) I chose the temporary folder, and away we went.

Jay advised me to close the web-admin interface for the MSS-II and just wait until the light on the OneTouch Basic stopped blinking, because copying almost 350 GB of data takes a long time, even over a high-speed USB connection, because shared folder backups are compressed and each file has to be, as it were, re-inflated, before it’s copied.

It was finished by the next day, though, so I was able to start consolidating the data. The fastest part was moving things that belonged in the “Public” folder into their proper places. As it happened, I’d had many of those things backed up elsewhere, but there were a few I was missing. I filled in the blanks and deleted the duplicates.

Restoring data to the different private shares is more time-consuming, because that data has to be copied over the network even though it’s all staying on the same physical drive. (Jay may be able to explain why this is; I can’t.) In addition to that, I have to go to my housemate’s computer to copy data back into her share, and start up Star, my more-portable laptop, to copy data back into her share. And while the MSS-II is capable of transferring data at 1000 kbps, my router can only do 100 kbps—and Star’s wireless card can only manage 11kbps. That’s considerably slower than USB 2.0 hi-speed, which does about 360 kbps.

To make the job more finicky yet, unless I want to keep everything in a lump called “restored,” I have to copy files into their appropriate locations and decide whether I want to use the restored version (dating back to August of this year) or the current version. I’m discovering that as time goes on, my enthusiasm for tidily consolidating all of this data decreases, and I can see why automatic “de-duplication” is such a selling point in enterprise backup solutions.

On the positive side, doing the consolidating frees up space and means that I only have to look in one place if I need to restore a file. On the negative side, it takes a lot of time, and because there’s still a ton of room left on the MSS-II, I don’t have to do it. I probably will, though, even if I don’t do it right now, because I tend to be compulsively tidy about my data and file folder structures.

Besides, I now have a spare OneTouch drive, but I can’t convert the original OneTouch Plus (Mama Bear) for use as a Windows drive until I’ve restored all the data that was backed up there and go through this consolidation process again. Not that I’m really sure what I’m going to use Mama Bear for, but it makes sense to use the Basic drive to back up the MSS-II, because of its larger capacity.

So I’d probably better stop writing and get back to consolidating my data.

I want to start this week’s Backup Reminder with a story about how spam blockers can sometimes backfire. It turns out that Jay Pechek at Seagate actually responded to the first message I sent him about the unexpected and untimely demise of Teras, the Maxtor Shared Storage II drive he had sent me last August.

The problem was, I had recently turned on a challenge/response system for my sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com e-mail account. (That funny way of writing my e-mail address is to foil the harvester bots.) Unless you’re already on my “whitelist” of e-mail addresses to accept, the first time you send a message to that address, you get a “challenge” message generated by my mail server, which asks you to reply in order to confirm that you’re a real person and not a spam-bot. (You’ve probably seen the more sophisticated versions of this system used by Earthlink and Spam Arrest.) All you need to do is hit “reply,” and then “send,” and your original message will reach me.

Unless my “challenge” message gets caught in your spam filter, that is. Then you never realize that there’s something else you have to do in order to get your message through, and I never know you tried to contact me.

Which is exactly what happened with Jay’s response to my “Help!” e-mail. The spam filters at Seagate sucked in my “challenge” message, so I never got his response.

Last week, puzzled by the silence and frustrated by my interactions with the baffled tech support team, I manually added Jay Pecheck’s e-mail address to my whitelist. No sooner had the Backup Reminder gone out than I had a message saying “Didn’t you get my earlier mail?”

So I owe Jay, and Seagate, a public apology, because they weren’t ignoring me.

Not only that, but these people know how to make good when there’s a problem. First, Jay sent me a replacement Maxtor Shared Storage II drive by next-day courier and gave me the UPS account number in order to send back the dead drive so he could see whether the data might be intact in one of the drives in the RAID setup. Then he decided to throw in two more drives: a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus (500 GB) and a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini (160 GB). Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and Baby Bear, as you can see from the photo.

The first priority was setting up the new Shared Storage II, which I named “Teratides” (4 syllables) because that’s the Homeric Greek for “Son of Teras.” (You already knew I was a geek, but what you might not have realized is that I’m a classics geek.)

As I said last year, basic setup of this drive is quite simple, though there are a few tricks to remember. When you first connect the drive, you’re prompted to ceate a password for the advanced web administration access, but not told that the login is “admin.” And when you first create a “share” from one of the machines on the network, Maxtor Easy Manage suggests your Windows login as the name for the share. The problem with this is that my Windows login is my full name, with a space in it, and login names with spaces don’t work for Easy Manage. I’d remembered that from last time and used my computer name instead.

There were a few other quirks we ran into during the course of setting up Teratides and then connecting Mama Bear to the USB port to act as a backup for the network drive, but we got them sorted out with Jay’s help. For those of you who might be considering getting one of these drives, I’ll sum the fixes up by saying that 1) it’s a good idea to download and install the firmware upgrade, and 2) when you connect a printer to the MSS-II, don’t use the printer software that came with the printer, or it will get confused. I was getting “Communication error” messages from Epson even when documents printed properly, until Jay pointed me at the knowledge base pages that explained how to do the printer setup. (This required uninstalling all the Epson printer software, which in turn required several passes through add/remove programs, both before and after disconnecting the printer.)

Communication with the printer is still a bit slow–there’s a perceptible pause between the time I send the “print” command and the time the printer actually starts working. But the documents all print just fine, and now my housemate can use my printer even when I’m not home and have taken my laptop elsewhere. (Yes, she has her own printer, but mine does 13″-wide documents.)

A few of the issues I ran into almost certainly stemmed from the fact that I hadn’t removed the old Maxtor Easy Manage software before adding the new drive. Easy Manage has been somewhat updated since then, in order to make it play better with the Maxtor Manager software that comes with the OneTouch drives. That’s all been straightened out, and the scheduled backups to Teratides are running properly, as are the backups from Teratides onto Mama Bear.

Those are a little trickier to track, as the interface is a bit lacking, but it’s possible to see that drive by going to “My Network Places,” where it shows up with a long Unix tag: “MaxBackup_Maxt_1_2HAA0GP3.” The backups themselves are .tar.gz files (that’s a compressed Unix format), unlike the files on the Shared Storage drive, which are direct copies mapped into the same folder tree as on my C drive. If this sounds a bit obscure and confusing, it’s deliberate. You’re not supposed to mess with those backup files, because they won’t do you any good if you accidentally delete them.

When we went to bed on Saturday night after setting up the new drives, we noticed that the (very bright) white LED on the front of Mama Bear was gently pulsing in a sleep rhythm. The Ur-Guru loves LEDs (they remind him of home), but I may turn it off after he goes home. To do that, I have to disconnect the OneTouch Plus from Teratides, connect it to my laptop, use the Seagate software to turn off the lights, and then reconnect it to Teratides, so I might just decide not to bother. I’m starting to get used to it, and at least it’s not yellow.

So that’s the news for this week. Seagate is in fact both paying attention and concerned about its reputation—and my data, too, for that matter. I’ll be back next week with a discussion of the new Safety Drill software that comes with the OneTouch drives, and I’ll keep you posted on whether Jay manages to recover the data from the late Teras.

Okay, be honest: who forgot to back up last week? Anyone?

That’s the “Does anyone actually need me?” question. Because if you’ve all got your backups automated by now, does it matter whether I actually write this reminder? Do people even notice if I don’t produce one?

Not that I’m trying to let myself off the hook for not producing a post last week, mind you, but no one on my less-than-enormous mailing list (backups are never going to win the e-zine popularity contest) wrote to ask where I was last week. (I was at the Podcast Expo in Ontario, California, having a great time but with scarcely time to check my e-mail, never mind compose a Backup Reminder.)

Just because I was on the road doesn’t mean I didn’t back up. I took my new FreeAgent Go drive with me in a pocket of my laptop case, and it worked just fine. The Ur-Guru took all six of his Western Digital XHDs–and a lot of pictures, which you can see on Flickr if you search under the tag “newmediaexpo2007.” We heard more than a few people mention what they did to back up their photos and their audio and video files, but mostly it came down to DVDs (which they were trying to get away from) and external hard drives. Nothing really new there.

Nothing new from Seagate about my dead Shared Storage II, either. Oh, I had a bit of back and forth with the tech support team, who were baffled by the serial number I gave them and asked for a photo of the label and a proof of purchase. Um, guys? My point was that I didn’t purchase it at all. After I explained that and sent them everything they asked for, they decided to pass the buck to another division and told me they’d get back to me, which they haven’t.

Suggestions for more reliable NAS drives to replace the late Teras are welcome.

I also did a comparison test of Norton Ghost 8 versus TrueImage 9. The Ur-Guru has been using TrueImage on all his systems (actual and virtual) for some time now, and he suggested I try it. First I did a Ghost backup of my hard drive. It worked the way it always does, and took a good while but performed as expected. The TrueImage backup projected that it would take somewhat less time, but I got a strange error message in the middle, even though everything thereafter appeared to work normally and TrueImage told me it had completed the backup successfully.

“I wouldn’t trust that backup,” the Ur-Guru said. Well, no, not if I had to try to restore my whole system from it. So I’ll stick to using Ghost 8 until I find something that works better.

But why TrueImage should work for him–and many others–and not for me, I haven’t a clue.

I’ll conclude on a humorous note. The Ur-Guru and I attended the Halo 3 launch party in Silicon Valley on September 23rd. The only game I play on my computer is Solitaire, but I knew the guy organizing the party from the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology.

In addition to the gaming competitions, Microsoft was showing off some of its other projects, including the new improved Hotmail and the Silverlight/Popfly combination. We were talking to the Hotmail guy and I asked him what they did about backups.

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. “I know the answer to that question,” he said, “but I’m not sure I’m allowed to tell you.”