If I spend the first several paragraphs apologizing and making excuses for not posting a column since April 2nd (ouch!), I’ll just be adding insult to injury. The Ur-Guru said to blame him, but he’s only been here since April 24th, so that won’t work. I just got caught up in other things—and I only wish all of it had been high-paying client work, which is the kind of excuse I like to be able to make.

Anyway, here at last is the review of Gladinet Cloud Desktop that I promised Jerry Huang ages ago.

The interesting thing about Gladinet is that it lets you back up to multiple cloud storage sites simultaneously. It also maps those sites as “My Gladinet Drive” in Windows Explorer so you can drag and drop from them. Given the awkwardness of reaching some of these services through their own interfaces, that’s a considerable benefit right there.

Once you install the program, there are a couple of screens of settings to configure.

First, enter your license key if you have one. A home-user license for Gladinet Desktop Professional is $39.99 and a commercial license is $59.99. FTC disclosure: Jerry gave me a license key so I could test all the program’s capabilities. Then register with Gladinet. (Give them your name and e-mail address.)

Next, add some storage. I was impressed at the number and variety of possible storage locations, some of which I hadn’t heard of, and some of which I hadn’t known you could use as storage locations. I initially checked Google Docs and Amazon S3, but later signed up for Azure Blob Storage from Microsoft to make it a better test. (And what a nuisance that was—far more trouble than signing up for an Amazon S3 account, let me tell you. And what kind of name is “Blob,” anyway?)

Once you’ve chosen your storage locations, Gladinet will show you your general information and give you the option to change settings such as the drive letter it maps to (I wasn’t using “Y” for anything else, so I left it), whether to encrypt your profile, and so on.

Before you can use the storage options you checked off, you have to provide login credentials. This was not too tricky with Amazon S3, since I’d had to do it with several other programs already and knew where to find the information. It was also fairly simple with Google docs. It was notably confusing with Azure Blob and took several tries before I had the right information in the right place. That’s not Gladinet’s fault, mind you, but a certain lack of clarity on Microsoft’s part. Maybe if you’re a Microsoft developer you understand these things intuitively. If so, I don’t think the Azure Blob service is really meant for anyone else yet. But I digress.

If you use Skype, you might get an error message from Gladinet saying that Port 80 is blocked. Jerry says the easiest way to fix that is to go into your Skype options under “Connection” (in Advanced settings) and uncheck the box that says “Use port 80 and 443 alternatives for incoming connections.”

After setup is complete and you’ve mounted your virtual directories, you have several options. Gladinet installs a fairly sophisticated tool in your system tray/notification area/whatever they call it in Vista and Windows 7, and you can just right-click that to start the Gladinet Cloud Explorer, the Backup Manager, or the Task Manager—or to run backup tasks directly. You can start the Gladinet Management Console from the Start menu, as well, and the Gladinet Quick Launch screen will pop up when you boot your machine unless you do something to make it go away.

There are several options for backup with Gladinet. You can choose to back up all documents, pictures, “musics”, videos, folders, or select specific items. I wanted a relatively quick test, not an exhaustive hours-long marathon with my upstream connection speed as a bottleneck.

As you can see from the screenshot, Gladinet had no trouble seeing my network drives and considered all of them valid sources for backup, though it does warn that backups may not be real-time. Since I wasn’t planning to use it for continuous syncing, I wasn’t worried about that.

If you do choose to back up all your “musics” or videos or document, Gladinet will go through all your drives to index those files. That can be a time-consuming process and slow down your system, so it warns you about that.

In this case, I just opted to back up my FileSlinger™ newsletter directory to all three backup destinations: Amazon S3, Google Docs, and Azure Blob.

I got a prompt from Google Docs asking me whether I wanted to convert my Microsoft Office Word 2007 documents into Google Docs format or leave them as they were, but otherwise the job ran smoothly and quickly.

Once I’d run the backup, it was easy to go into the explorer and confirm that the files had, in fact, been backed up.

Though the interface can be a little tricky (between first testing Gladinet and writing this review I forgot about how a few things worked), the product is versatile and does what it claims to and more than I used it for. (You can schedule backups or use Gladinet for continuous backup.) And, of course, if you don’t want to customize backups, you can use the simpler options and the system tray interface. The hardest thing may well be setting up your cloud storage accounts, as true cloud storage is still much more the province of geeks than online backup is.

Contest

For those who have hung in there in my absence, I have two free licenses of Gladinet Desktop Pro to give away. The two best (meaning most creative and entertaining) answers to the question “Why did Microsoft call its cloud storage Blob?” will win. (The judges are the Ur-Guru and me. Criteria entirely subjective.) Post your answers to the comments. You have as long as I was late to enter.

A couple of weeks ago a representative of Dmailer contacted me with information about their forthcoming, still-under-embargo release of a free version of their software that would also include 2 GB of free online storage. Because I have a bit of editorial backlog on this blog, it was not difficult to keep this news under wraps until after the official March 23rd announcement.

Dmailer is a French company (though the name is pronounced “Dee-mailer,” at least by English-speaking users), and the only person I know who uses their software is my colleague Lee Hopkins in Australia. When I posted a request for someone to write about it, quite some time back, no one responded, and by this time I’d stopped ever expecting to hear anything from Dmailer themselves. But with this push into the crowded online backup market, they clearly want as much coverage as they can get, in as many markets as possible.

Like Mozy, Dmailer gives you 2 GB free online backup. Unlike Mozy, Dmailer also gives you a full-featured offline backup product, Dmailer Backup v3.

There are definitely advantages to being able to use the same software for your online and offline backups. Fewer programs to install and manage. Less space taken up on your hard drive by those programs. Just one interface to get to know. Less likelihood that the two will interfere with one another. And, perhaps the most important for the “set it and forget it” generation (which is most of us, given the option)—no extra steps to take to make sure you have both local and online backups covered, at least not once you’ve signed up for your online backup account.

In theory, anyway.

Installing Dmailer Backup v3 was easy. The user interface is attractive and easy to understand, and leads you through each of the steps, giving you several options along the way.

First, you choose your installation location: “Dmailer Backup must be installed on an external storage drive.” The program recognizes both USB and network storage as well as secondary internal disks. I chose the USB drive with the most available space on it for the test.

Next, Dmailer asks whether you want automatic, continuous backup of certain folders, or to choose what to back up. I chose to customize, but novice users will find that automatic option extremely comforting and convenient.

If you’re customizing your backups, you can do so both by file location and by file type. Personally, I don’t need my desktop backed up (nothing there but a very few shortcuts; I don’t know why people clutter their desktops with folders), but I do want my Outlook data copied. (Note that “e-mail messages” is not an option under “file types”—if you want your e-mail backed up, you have to back up the folder where it gets stored.)

Then there are the Backup Settings. The one to watch out for here is “Live Backup” That means Dmailer runs in the background and backs files up continuously as you change them. For some types of files and some people, this is great. It’s the essence of continuous data protection.

For me, on the other hand, it’s trouble. There are some kinds of files you can’t back up while they’re open, notably Quicken data files and Outlook data files. And then there’s what happens if you’re running a continuous backup program while you’re recording audio or video. The computer overloads and freezes, or at least that’s what happened to me with Memeo Instant Backup. So I turn that feature off, because I can’t count on remembering to turn the backup program off when I need to record something, and I can put a shortcut to the program in the Startup folder so I get a backup whenever I boot my system, which is often enough for me.

Once I’d been through all these options, I saved the backup job and started backing up.

The program works pretty quickly; it copied my 12.7 GB of files over in an hour.

Despite offering versioning and password protection, Dmailer doesn’t use any kind of proprietary format to store your backups, so you can just drag a file back from the backup folder to restore it. Or you can use the restore wizard to restore as many or as few of those files as you want.

The next step after local backup is online backup, but for some reason I ran into trouble here. Even though I filled in all the fields, read the EULA and clicked the button to say I had, I kept getting an error when I tried to create an account.

I tried with a different e-mail account; same result. Tried logging in on the website in case the error message was a mistake; no luck. I figured it would take forever to hear back from support, because it’s Easter Weekend.

When I re-started Dmailer a bit later and filled in the product registration information, however, I was suddenly able to create an online account. Maybe that was the missing link, or maybe whatever was glitching got fixed.

Success bred its own problems, however. Dmailer suddenly sucked up all my CPU cycles as it began running the online backup—before I had even configured it. Which was a big oops, since I needed to specify a much smaller subset of folders to back up online in order to stay within that 2 GB limit. But unless you click “Advanced Settings,” Dmailer will use the same backup definitions for your online backup as for your offline backup.

I eventually managed to fight my way through to the settings I wanted, apply them, turn off the “start online backups automatically” option, stop the backup that was in process, and start over again. I then clicked the “Go Online” button to see whether I could remove anything that I hadn’t wanted backed up.

This, fortunately, is perfectly possible. Just click those little blue drop-down arrows and select “Delete” if you want to get rid of something. (You also have the option to download it, so you can restore the file to a computer without the Dmailer software installed, or to share it.)

Upload speeds are not what I’d call record-setting, but they’re certainly no slower than Mozy. It wouldn’t hurt Dmailer to add in an option that let you determine how much of the computer’s resources to dedicate to the backup, however. I know Enna is getting on in years and her RAM and processor aren’t impressive by 2010 standards, but given the length of time any online backup usually takes, it’s a good idea to be able to relegate it to the background and get on with other things, unless you plan to run it overnight.

Minor issues aside, however, Dmailer Online Backup looks like a viable alternative to Mozy Home Free, combined with a solid offline backup tool. Whether it will scale as well as the EMC-owned Mozy remains to be seen, but if you don’t have an online backup solution yet, this is a good place to start.

Don’t worry, Paragon Backup & Recovery 10.1 Free Edition really is free. And it is a backup and recovery tool. But I’m not sure I would call it a paragon among programs of its kind, even though Paragon Software Group has been developing it for 15 years now.

Unlike many backup products, which are designed to back up your files, Paragon concentrates on creating images of your hard drive. If your drive crashes and you have to replace it, you can insert the recovery CD (or memory stick), follow the directions, and restore the image. Presto! You have everything back: operating system, software, and data.

I mostly find that while it’s nice to have an image of a recently-installed machine with all the software, and while I’m going to want a drive image before attempting anything really strange and tricky, and certainly before reinstalling the computer, you may not want to use drive imaging for your regular daily or weekly backup routine. Image files tend to be large and to take a long time to make, and if there’s anything wrong with your system (e.g. virus infections), the problem will return along with the image when you restore it.

So you want to have an imaging program available for those times when you need it, but even with differential imaging, you may find it’s too time-consuming for backups and too tedious for restoring individual files. Plus they use proprietary archive formats, so you can’t open your backups without a copy of the program that created them.

That’s true of all imaging programs, not just Paragon Backup and Recovery. (More about drive imaging software on the blog.) Different types of backups work better in different situations. You balance the drawbacks against the advantages and decide what fits your needs.

Installation

When you start Paragon Backup & Recovery Free 10.1 for the first time, it prompts you to get a free serial number. Click the button and it takes you to a website where you fill in some basic information, and shortly thereafter you’ll get an e-mail with your product key and your serial number. Fill those in and you can get started.

One of the first things you’ll see is a visual representation of your disk, color-coded for the format (that blue means NTFS), and showing the number of partitions (this drive only has one).

You won’t have much time to admire it, though, because you’ll be prompted to create your recovery media. This is what you’ll need to be able to do a “bare-metal restore” from your backup, in the event that Windows isn’t working or you’re dealing with a replacement disk. Despite the illustration showing what looks like a ZIP disk, your options are CD/DVD and Flash Memory.

I started by creating a USB stick with the recovery software on it, but it turns out that neither Enna nor Mena is set to boot from a flash drive. I remember the contortions the Ur-Guru went through trying to get the netbook to boot from a memory stick, without success. This is a bit peculiar for a computer without an optical drive, if you ask me.

Enna is old enough that I’m not sure whether booting from USB is even an option, and I didn’t take time to go into the BIOS settings to find out. I just made a CD instead.

Backing Up (Creating Images)

If you click “Back up Disk or Partition” from the menu of options in the sidebar, the Paragon Backup Wizard starts you on your path to creating a drive image. You can choose any of your connected hard drives to back up.

I don’t know why you would choose not to back up the first hard disk track or the Master Boot Record, but you have the option to refuse—or, I presume, to back up that and only that. I selected my C drive (listed here as “Basic Hard Disk 0”), which is what I would normally make an image of. I haven’t yet come across a situation in which I needed an image of a non-system disk, though it’s possible that using one would be faster than copying the files through Windows Explorer.

There’s a little box at the bottom of this screen labeled “Change Backup Settings” that takes you to the advanced settings. I wish I’d noticed this before, because I would have un-checked the “enable image splitting” box. If you aren’t backing up to DVDs, there’s no reason to divide your backup file into DVD-sized chunks.

Next you choose the destination for your backup (local/network drive or CD/DVD) and whether to back up now or schedule the backup. Then you see an overview of your options, and then, on the final screen, a warning: “The wizard did not commit the changes. Backup & Recovery™ works in virtual mode now. To commit your changes use Apply command.”

This is geek-talk for the more familiar “Are you sure you want to…?” dialog boxes that you often see in Windows. If you click “Finish” to exit the wizard and then “Apply” from the top menu, your backup program will start.

It took a long time to make an image of my 80 GB hard drive. I’m not sure quite how long. I started at 6:44 PM, and it was still running when I went to bed at 9:00. I woke up briefly at 1:30 AM and noticed it was finished, but I don’t know how long before that it finished. The estimated time to completion had been 6 hours, which seemed excessive.

Once the archive is complete, you’ll see it in the Archives tab in Paragon Backup & Recovery.

Your primary options are to restore the archive, check its integrity, or make a differential backup—one that backs up the changes since you created that archive. Even though I haven’t accumulated that much new data on my machine since last night, I hesitate to commit the time it might take after the experience with the first image, so I haven’t tested the differential backup.

File Backup

You can do file-level backups with Paragon, via their File Transfer Wizard. The name of this component is a bit confusing, because it doesn’t say anything about backup. But if you want to copy files from one drive to another with Paragon, this is what you use.

You can copy files from any drive to any other drive by putting them on the file transfer clipboard and telling it where to send them. You use the same tool for backup and restore. It seems like a remarkable number of steps to go through for what amounts to drag-and-drop file copying, but it does work. You can see the transferred files in the navigation pane of the Archives window by browsing to the destination, and restore them by right-clicking and choosing “Export.”

Note that the File Transfer Wizard does not act as a browser to let you view individual files within your drive image. For that, you need the Restore Wizard.

Restoring Your Data

The Restore Wizard gives you the option of restoring your entire image or just selected files, and you can restore them to their original location or to a different location. I wasn’t about to test the full-image restore on a working system that I didn’t have another, known-to-be-trustworthy image of as a backup, so I tried a file-level restore and asked the Restore Wizard to export the !WordPress Asylum folder into the C:\Temp folder.

Once again, I had to click the “Apply” button before Paragon would carry out my commands. In the case of restoring a disk image and overwriting an entire drive, I can certainly see why you’d want an extra “Are you sure?” step. And, actually, if your backup is going to take 6 hours, you might want that warning then, as well.

The progress gears ground for a little while, and then Paragon informed me that the restore procedure was finished. But when I went to look in my Temp folder, I saw a very odd thing:

For some reason, Paragon restored substantial chunks of two folders that I didn’t ask for—but not everything from the folder I did want. Unless, of course, it never backed up everything from that folder. I have to say this was not a reassuring result. Is something wrong with my image, or with the Restore Wizard? Neither is especially good.

Conclusion

Paragon Backup & Recovery 10.1 is attractively designed but not aimed at the beginning user. One could argue that creating and restoring drive images is not a task for the technophobe, but there’s nothing inherently more complicated about using the product than there is about many consumer-oriented file backup programs. In part it’s just the language: “virtual mode” and “commit changes” are expressions for software developers, not ordinary users.

The range of image-creation options open to more advanced users is good. The option to use a USB stick instead of a CD for your recovery medium is a good one. Unlike some programs I’ve tested, backing up to network drives is no problem. Differential image backups can save time and storage space.

But the results of my file restoration worry me. At no time did Paragon tell me there was an error, which you would expect if something had gone wrong during either the creation of the image or the export of the files back onto the C drive. But something went wrong. So how can I entrust my entire system to this program?

Your mileage may vary. It’s possible that you could download Paragon Backup & Recovery 10.1 Free Edition, create an image, restore from the image, and have it all work flawlessly. The company would never have stayed in business if problems like this were the norm rather than the exception. So I’d say you should go ahead and try it if you’re looking for something like this—but test it in a safe environment. If it works for you, great. Come back and tell me about it.

Review of the 3X Remote Backup Appliance

The headline of the pitch I received back in November read “3X Systems Launches Private Backup Cloud Appliance for SMBs”. The notion of a “private cloud” intrigued me, so I decided to follow up. (Besides, no one quoted in the press release used the word “excited,” so they get extra points.)

We all talk about “the cloud” as if it’s some amorphous collective up in the sky somewhere, but none of these “cloud computing” services actually operates among the cumulus and cumulonimbus. Your data is not floating around among the raindrops or waiting to crystallize as snowflakes. All it means to use cloud services is that instead of installing the software on servers in your office building, it’s on servers in someone else’s data center, and you access it through the Internet. Cloud storage puts your data onto disks in a similar data center (or more than one, for redundancy), instead of on a backup drive in your office.

With most cloud services, you rent rather than owning—though with companies like Google making so much available for free, consumers may forget that there are costs involved, the same way they seem to forget that there’s actual hardware involved.

With the 3X Remote Backup Appliance, you become your own online backup service.

Now, if you were geeky enough, you could find a way to do this without a special device. Personally, I’m not geeky enough. And I’m pretty geeky, relative to most people I know. So I think the 3X RBA is a great idea for three reasons.

1. The biggest disadvantage of online backup is the slow speed of data transfer over the Internet. Because the 3X makes its initial full (or “seed”) backup over the local network, it’s much faster than typical online backup services. (How long did it take me to upload my 2 GB backup to MozyHome Free the first time? 12 hours? And that over a cable connection.)
2. Many businesses—and even individuals—want to be sure of just who has access to their proprietary or confidential data. Running your own online backup service, with only your own company’s data on it, gives you complete control.
3. If you have half a dozen or more computers to back up, the monthly or yearly cost of most online backup services is going to start to add up pretty quickly. Many of them charge per computer rather than by the amount of data backed up.

So I arranged to get a product demo and an interview with 3X CEO Alan Arman and some of the team, and also to get an evaluation unit to check out. The demo was very straightforward: it certainly looked easy enough to use. But things are often a bit different in real-life situations. I wanted to see whether the 3X would really be as easy to set up and operate as it seemed to be. (After all, the CloudPlug was harder than it appeared.)

The evaluation unit arrived on January 20^th—the same day as my mother’s SaveMe drive. I was surprised at the size of the box. Based on the photos I’d seen, I was expecting something more the size of my Buffalo Quattro. This box was square and flat.

When I got home, I found out why. The 3X comes in two form factors: the cube, for desktop use, and the 1U rackmount model. Guess which was in that box.

“They sent you a what?” the Ur-Guru said. “Didn’t you go batty from the 40x40mm fans in a rack model!?”

To be fair, Richard Keggans at 3X offered to ship me a cube version instead when I told him about the mistake, but once he assured me that I could still use the rackmount model without a rack, it didn’t seem worth replacing it when I was only going to be using it for a few hours anyway. (The PR spokesperson, who has perhaps never been in a server room, said “We didn’t think it would make a difference to you.” Ha. I think he just wanted to be sure they’d get their $2500 device back.)

Anyway, for anyone else who’s never been in a server room—it’s not so much that the fan noise is loud. It’s not actually louder than, say, my space heater, which is also an electric fan. I did not really need to warn the neighbors to run for their earplugs before powering the thing up.

It’s just that there’s something about the quality of the noise that causes instant brain death. You can tell immediately why people lock these things in cages behind heavy doors inside secure buildings miles away from where they do their actual work. Even the Ur-Guru doesn’t work with rack-mounted systems, because the noise would be too much even for him if he had them in his home office.

So if I were a real customer, I would have bought the cube model, which Richard says is “almost silent.” And it probably is, too, because it isn’t being stored less than an inch from some equally hot device above and below it. The Buffalo Quattro, which has more hardware (though less software) in it, makes very little noise. (Interestingly, the two draw the same amount of power.)

Installation

Even given the awkwardness of having the wrong version of the device, it was easy to set up the 3X. (The printout of the Quick Start Guide was helpful, too.) Plug in the power cable, connect the Ethernet cable to your router, and turn the monster on. Then insert the memory stick with the 3X admin software into your computer and let it run. Then reboot your computer, and start up the 3X Systems Admin tool again. Your device should automatically appear; just select it and choose “Launch Manager.”

That takes you to the web interface, where you do all the sophisticated stuff, including downloading the client software so you can back up individual computers to the device.

The critical thing at this juncture is to set up port forwarding—something I don’t think I’ve talked about since I reviewed ION Backup. I obviously hadn’t done anything with it since then, because I still had that port set up to forward. (Oops.) It took me a while to find the right screen in my router admin, but eventually I found what I needed, and it only took a minute to set it up after that.

There’s a connectivity check feature in the web manager tool for the 3X, so you can check to make sure that it’s possible to reach your device from outside your local network. This is important if you’re going to actually use it for its intended purpose as an online backup device. (And if you aren’t, why are you paying so much money?)

I then downloaded the client and set it up on my netbook. This worked pretty much the same as installing any other backup software. Once it’s installed, however, you have to get a key from the administrator (provided in the backup manager, above) and then the administrator has to approve you. The administrator can also create backup sets and set quotas for client computers.

I’d read some of the instructions for creating backup sets while waiting for Enna to reboot after the initial 3X admin tools install, so I figured I was all set to define my backup set and go. I did run into one small issue, however: when I clicked “Edit” under the “Backup Sets” tab, the top of the window ran off my 1024 x 600 netbook screen.

I was still able to create a backup set that would copy everything on the C:\ drive except for the Recycler, System Volume Information, Windows folder, and Program Files. When I eliminated those, I was left with 9 GB of data, and the 3X copied them quickly (if loudly) while I had lunch.

I’m not really in a position to test the deduplication and some of the other features of the 3X, but deduplication is the reason you can back up several computers to a 100 GB drive. All enterprise systems rely on it these days, but almost no SOHO systems offer this level of dedupe. (And if you have people sending e-mail attachments to others in your company, you’re racking up duplicate files fast, never mind duplicate software installations.)

So I’ll leave those to another reviewer and just say that my “seed” backup went smoothly. It was time to test the remote backup.

Remote Backup and Restore

The normal way to use a 3X is to disconnect it from the local network when the seed backups are complete and move it to another location—the business owner’s home, a different office, or even a cage rented in a data center. Then you plug it in and hook it up to the Internet, and the client computers will back up incrementally according to their schedules. Because only the changes are backed up, this doesn’t take much bandwidth or time.

I don’t have an alternate office location, much less a pocket data center, so I took my computer elsewhere instead. I headed over to the local public library to see whether I could back up and restore data using their free wi-fi connection.

I didn’t have so much luck backing up. I’m not sure why, but the program just seemed to sit around endlessly calculating the size of the backup. (Not very large: I had downloaded a whole two image files so there would actually be some changes to back up.) This might have had something to do with the very slow wi-fi connection, or it might just be that the backup client has to scan the entire machine before running. My battery and patience were running low, so I aborted the backup and tried a restore, instead. The main thing, in my mind, was to confirm that I could connect to the 3X from outside my network.

Clicking the “Restore” button gave me the option to restore one file or several. I then had the chance to browse to my chosen file and to select which backup I wanted to restore from. (I’d only made one, but had earlier opted to save 10 backups.) In order to be sure the restoration had worked, I restored it to a different directory.

And work it did. It took a little longer than I might have expected for a file of modest size, but I don’t think that was the fault of the 3X. That wi-fi connection was really slow. Not quite shades-of-dial-up slow, but I am reminded of the early days of the Web and the expression “Graybar land.”

So the verdict is: it works. You really can become your own online backup service provider. To make it work, of course, you need a place to set the 3X up. If you’re like me and work out of your home, you might need to make an arrangement with a colleague to each keep the other’s remote backup appliance. But the ideal customer is not the home office user, but the person who runs a small office with multiple computers—enough of them that paying for Mozy Pro for a year would more than cover the cost of buying one of these.

And now that that’s done, I can shut it off and hear myself think again.

PS In the week between the time I wrote this and the time I published it, 3X was named one of the 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors by Computer Reseller News.

When I posted on LinkedIn that I was looking for subjects for this week’s Backup Reminder, David Battino pointed me to a blog post over on O’Reilly Digital Media. The post dates back to January of this year and recounts the hard drive failure the author, Darwin Grosse, suffered at Christmas—whereupon he discovered his most recent backup was four months old.

Ouch.

Since that time, Darwin decided to save himself from himself by using Dropbox. I’d used Dropbox only once before, in the course of co-hosting the For Immediate Release podcast back in May, so I thought of it mostly as a file-sharing tool, a way to synchronize documents across computers. This is certainly handy, but synchronization is not, by itself, backup.

But it turns out that Dropbox does backup, too. “It stores two months of revisions online,” David said, “So when a file went corrupt, I could backtrack. And backing up takes zero effort. You save your current projects in your Dropbox folder on your PC and they get uploaded automatically.”

In order to see how this worked, I downloaded Dropbox for myself and installed it both on Enna (my main laptop) and Mena (my netbook). Once you install it, Dropbox creates a “My Dropbox” folder that automatically copies any files you put in it first onto your Dropbox account (free for up to 2 GB storage, with plans starting at $4.99 month thereafter) and then onto any other computer you install the program on.

I can see how this will save me from crushed-USB-stick syndrome as long as I create and store any notes I take on Mena in the My Dropbox folder, and that’s great.

I’m learning, however, that instantaneous/continuous/copy-even-as-you-create-the-file backup is not a particularly good idea for all kinds of files. For instance, don’t try to make a backup of a Skype recording while you’re recording it. Bad things will happen. (In my case, it froze up my entire machine after about 15 minutes. If you have more RAM than I do, it might take longer for that to happen. Or not.) Create the recording first, save it, and then put it into the Dropbox. If you’re using something like Memeo Instant Backup that doesn’t restrict itself to one folder, turn it off or pause it until you’re making the recording.

But back to Dropbox and its backup-specific tools. Once you’ve installed Dropbox and put some files into your My Dropbox folder, you’ll notice their icons are overlaid with little green checkmarks. This appears to mean they have been successfully uploaded and synced. When you right-click on an item in the Dropbox, you see a new option, “Dropbox,” which gives you the option to see previous versions of the file. If you click on the link, it takes you to the web interface, where you can choose to either preview or restore earlier versions of the file.

On the plus side, Dropbox is easy to use and has multiple applications. It’s instantaneous as long as you’re connected to the Internet; if you aren’t, it will sync as soon as you have a connection again. And it really does provide for backup as well as synchronization, because, although it replicates changes across all the computers you have connected to it, it saves those previous versions.

On the minus side, only files in the “My Dropbox” folder get backed up. I suppose you could tell Outlook to store your .pst file in there…but I’m not sure you’d like the results, given what I said earlier about the potential negative effects of attempting to back things up while they’re in the process of changing. Outlook’s .pst file is one of those that doesn’t take well to being copied while it’s open. So if you want to use Dropbox for e-mail backups, you probably have to do it manually, and it’s not going to provide true e-mail synchronization anyway. Likewise, you’re going to need to remember to put certain other kinds of files into the Dropbox in order to get them backed up.  You’re probably safe enough letting things like Office docs just live there.

I don’t know that I would recommend Dropbox as a replacement for a dedicated online backup solution. I think too much is likely to get left out, and at least some of the online backup providers can handle backing up your e-mail. But I definitely recommend Dropbox for people who want to share and sync files and provide themselves with some extra backup redundancy in the process.

Finally, Dropbox hired CommonCraft to make their “tour” video, and I can’t resist including it here even though it doesn’t really address the backup features of the product.

P.S. If you use this link to sign up for Dropbox, you and I both get an extra 250 MB free storage space. It’s part of their campaign to get more users. I don’t know whether that quite counts as an affiliate link, but I’m pretty sure the arrangement is something the FTC would want me to disclose under their new rules.

I can’t see that anyone loses by it, though. I genuinely like Dropbox and think it’s going to be helpful for me. If you need to keep documents synchronized between computers or in a workgroup, you’ll probably find it useful, too.