This week we have a guest post from Sally Davison from Fire Science Degree. And a good thing, too, because I’ve been so swamped that I still haven’t had time to test the StarTech SATA drive USB dock.

Online data storage is all the rage now; what with cloud service providers vying with one another to provide free storage for all your documents and other data, most people have moved all their stuff online. At the other end of the spectrum however are the naysayers and predictors of doom – they feel that the cloud is tenuous and unsafe and that your data could be seen by prying eyes, stolen by greedy opportunists, or lost due to ineffective backup and security measures. In spite of these varying opinions, the cloud is doing quite well and it seems like it’s here to stay. So the question that you need to ask yourself is, would you move your data to the cloud?

The answer is actually pretty simple – if your needs demand it, then by all means patronize the cloud; in my opinion, it’s the best thing that’s happened to data storage and file management. Online data storage offers a host of advantages:

• You don’t have to carry your data around with you – it’s easily accessible if you have a computer and an Internet connection.
• Most online file management systems sync the data on your system to the files online and vice versa – so when you update the files on your side, the master copy online is also updated when you save them. Similarly, when you download the stored data to your computer, the same file management system is maintained.

There are two kinds of online file management systems, and both have their benefits and drawbacks. One demands that you download software onto your system; however, you don’t have to explicitly upload your files every time you need to move them online – all you need to do is save them in a particular folder and if you’re connected to the net, the job is taken care of behind the scenes. The other does not ask you to download any kind of application, but you do have to upload your files every time you want them saved – it’s like storing attachments on your email, only a lot simpler and more convenient. You log in with your username and password and upload or download files as and when you need to.

If you do decide to store your data online with a random service provider, you must remember that there is a tiny possibility that it could fall into the wrong hands or be deleted for good. Using a second provider as backup is not a bad idea, but there’s still the chance that someone could get at your data if they had the means to. So if your data is very sensitive in nature and cannot fall into the wrong hands, it’s best to trust no one but yourself to safeguard it.

This guest post is contributed by Sally Davison, who writes on the topic of fire science degrees . She welcomes your comments at sally [dot] davison091 [at] gmail [dot] com.

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

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

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

If you go to the old Data Deposit Box website, you’ll be redirected to KineticD.com, where you’ll be presented with a nice AJAX pop-up window announcing the following:

Data Deposit Box is now KineticD^TM

While we’re still the same company that over 40,000 business customers around the world trust every day with their data, we thought we’d make some exciting changes to our brand. Our customers are part of a growing movement of successful businesses who need to be active with their data.

Our new name, KineticD reflects significant enhancements to our product we’ve developed over the past year and the momentum we’ve achieved. As an industry leader, we are committed to setting the standard for data protection, mobility and business productivity that our business customers and valued channel partners deserve.

In case you haven’t clued in (it took me a while) the “D” in “KineticD” stands for “Data,” and the idea behind the change is that data is no longer something that sits passively in storage. Where SOHO computer users once wanted “set it and forget it” backups that really were the equivalent of putting their data in a safe deposit box, out of the way, times have changed.

In November 2009, the company surveyed more than 1000 of its customers in North America, Asia, and Europe, and discovered that 57% of them had used the product’s “restore” function. This puzzled them at first—were their customers peculiarly loss-prone? (Earlier statistics I’d read put losses in the 40-50% range.)

Then they realized they’d asked the question the wrong way. What they asked was “Have you used the restore feature?” not “Have you lost data?” It turned out that customers were using the restore function in order to access files from their work computers when they were at home.

At that point, Data Deposit Box started to think it needed to redefine itself and redesign its services to better serve the needs of its customers. Hence the new name and new features for remote access using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop technology.

Given the fact that the Remote Access for Windows tool doesn’t run on home versions, and I have Windows 7 Home Premium on Auset here, I can’t install it. And I still haven’t gotten around to reinstalling Enna (who has XP Pro) and making her into a usable test machine. So for now I’m just going to have to report on the old-fashioned backup features of KineticD.

One of KineticD’s main claims to fame is that it has open file support for Outlook and Quicken/Quickbooks, two programs that have been the bane of backups pretty much since the dawn of software. If I happened to have Quicken on when the backup on my Maxtor Shared Storage II ran, for instance, the entire backup would fail, even though all the other files were okay to copy. I run Karen’s Replicator when my machine boots up because after that, I’m likely to have Outlook on all day, so it’s my only chance until shut-down to back up my PST file, where I store e-mail, appointments, contacts, and now a lot of WordPress database backup file attachments.

And the darn thing really does work. It slows down the function of Outlook a little, but not enormously. And the upload speed for those honking PST files is pretty good: I’m getting almost 800 kbps, which is better than my FTP transfers to my web server last night.

Not, I admit, that I intend to keep my PST files stored online. Or my Quicken files, for that matter. While KineticD emphasizes security and I have no reason to distrust them specifically, it’s just not a thing I feel comfortable with. (No, I don’t use Gmail, except sometimes to forward things.)

There are a few clever options in KineticD, like the “Block Out” tab. KineticD normally runs continuously, backing up as files change, but you can tell it to pause at certain times if you need those system resources. You can save up to 28 versions of each file, with a minimum of 12 hours between versions.

There’s also a “clean up” option to find “orphaned” files that are stored online but no longer exist on your computer. Now, those “orphaned” files might be just the ones you need to retrieve, so you shouldn’t be in too big a hurry to get rid of them, but in some cases you really won’t need them anymore.

What I can’t find in the program interface is a STOP button to interrupt a backup. That means I’m going to have to sit here and wait for the rest of the 1.4 GB of this test run to complete before I can delete the files and wrap up, even though I’ve now determined that the open file support works. That’s annoying.

Oh, and speaking of both security and annoyance, every time you press a button in the user interface, you have to enter your password again. It gets to be like installing software on Vista.

The web interface is actually a bit easier to use than the desktop interface, and it only asks for your password once, when you sign in. (And you can have your browser remember your password for you, if you want.)

Most of what SOHO users care about is under “My Data,” though I got a good laugh out of what Lee Garrison had filled out for me under “Corporate Administration.” That section lets you set up accounts for different employees, and departments, if your business is more than one person.

Any KineticD customer can earn $10 by referring someone else to the service; when they sign up and start paying bills, you’ll see your credit under “Commissions.”  Invoices, on the other hand, are bills that KineticD sends to you for your data use. (Billed at $2/GB, regardless of the number of computers you have.) “Today’s Activity” tells you what’s been backed up and/or restored today.

If you click on “My Data,” you see a folder tree not unlike the one in Windows Explorer, if not as pretty. From there you can  choose to edit (download or delete) the items in the folder, share the folder (with an option to password protect it) or search its contents.

The sign-in for the shared folder looks like this:

And the photo album looks like this. (Yes, those are my cats.)

That’s a rather nice touch. And—ah ha!—I just discovered how to switch off the password protection on the settings. That should reduce the annoyance factor. But there’s still no STOP button.

It’s possible to restore a file while a backup job is running. The restore utility is bare-bones and simple. You select the file(s) you want to restore and click the “restore” button at the bottom of the window (not shown).

The next screen prompts you for your restore location.

The choices are all of my internal and USB drives, but not my mapped network drives. The software suggests a restore directory. I opted to go with its suggestion for the test restoration, and discovered that I got not one new folder, but several, because KineticD re-created the entire directory tree around the single file I restored. This is valuable when you are restoring whole swathes of data, but irritating when you just want one file.

Overall, I would definitely recommend the service for business users. The cost per GB is higher than consumer services like Mozy, but you save in per-computer license fees if you have multiple machines, and you get some additional tools.

But it really, really needs a CANCEL BACKUP button. I’m not sure even resorting to CTRL-ALT-DEL actually worked.

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

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

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

Given to me by my friend Ann Zerega.

Last week I had a good talk with some people from KineticD, and I’m still exploring their product, which you’ll hear about next week. This week, however, we’re going on a little detour, courtesy of an experience with a client yesterday.

I was actually at the client’s house to work on other things (like adding Google Analytics to their Facebook pages), but while I was there, they asked me to check on backups, particularly for the Windows system. The backup drive they’d been using was wonky and they hadn’t replaced it yet.

What’s more, they’d been using Mozy to back up their Macs, but their Mac guy had just told them they couldn’t rely on it because of problems with restoring data. (To the Mozy people reading this, I have no direct experience with the problem and can’t tell you any more.)

I did suggest that the client check out KineticD for online backup, since it’s targeted at small businesses with multiple computers, but the $2/GB price structure would mean considerably more than they were paying Mozy, so they weren’t too enthralled with that idea.

So I suggested a NAS drive that they could back all the machines up to, Mac and PC, and printed out some datasheets on a couple of Buffalo’s models, since I’m familiar with their products thanks to my BFF Jay Pechek. I also believe that it’s good to have both local and online backups.

A little further conversation revealed that photos made up the great bulk of the 25+ GB the client was currently backing up with Mozy (and this was just the home office, mind you; the actual business has completely separate systems).

In that case, I said, why not use SmugMug to back up the photos?

SmugMug seems to be the best photo sharing service you’ve never heard of. Certainly my client hadn’t heard of it. But I keep hearing of it in more places. Professional photographers like it because you can sell photos directly from the site. And when I went over to check it out in more detail, I discovered that they actually offer a special backup service for your high-resolution RAW, TIFF, and PSD files, as well as your video. (Storage is provided by Amazon Web Services.)

Unlike my mother and the Ur-Guru, I’m not a serious photographer. I’m still learning how to use my camera, and I don’t shoot RAW. My hard drive is not filled with photos—though I confess that owning cats may change that. But anyone with children or grandchildren has photos to store, and the combination of a SmugMug account with the SmugVault service may well be the best deal available for both backup and sharing.

A basic SmugMug account is $39.95/year and lets you store unlimited .jpg, .gif, and .png files, so I could actually keep all of my cat photos up there at full resolution (about 4 MB apiece) without paying anything extra. And I think my client’s camera also shoots in JPG rather than RAW, so her 20 GB or so of photos would be cheaper to store on SmugMug than on Mozy, and she could display them, too.

For those of us who have amateur cameras, a Flickr Pro account might be sufficient for photo storage and backup. You get unlimited uploads of JPG files for $24.95/year. But the pros need to care for their RAW images, and the designers for their PSD files, and that’s where SmugVault comes in.

You activate SmugVault in your SmugMug control panel under “settings.”

When you click the “Get one!” link next to the SmugVault entry, you find yourself here:

So you need to hop on over to Amazon and sign up. You don’t need to have your own AWS account for this, just to have an Amazon account with a card on file so they can charge you your initial pro-rated payment. As usual with AWS, the billing is a bit confusing.

So it’s 22 cents per gigabyte for storage, but there are also upload and download (bandwidth) charges, and a minimum charge of $1/month. Compared to Mozy Pro’s 50 cents/gigabyte plus a monthly license fee, or KineticD’s $2/GB flat fee, that’s still pretty cheap, as long as you’re just uploading the files and leaving them there. As my podcaster friends have discovered, bandwidth charges are what will kill you with Amazon S3 and their other web services.

It’s easy to use the SmugVault interface. You just click the green “add files” button and create a gallery for the vault by selecting and uploading files from your drive. I selected 3 PSD files, one of them 41 MB in size, and they went up pretty quickly.

Once the files have been uploaded, you see more information in your main vault screen.

When you browse the archives, you can delete the files, hover over them for information, or click on them to be taken to their gallery, where you can download them.

Since I made this gallery private, people browsing around my site can’t see those files. You can also password-protect galleries, which is probably a good idea for your backups, since otherwise they won’t be very secure.

There are only two drawbacks. The first holds true for any online service: doing your first upload is going to be very time-consuming if you have a lot of photos. The second is that SmugMug doesn’t automatically upload your photos, so you have to remember to put them in your SmugVault. For some people, that’s a dealbreaker, but I’d still recommend it to anyone whose data consists primarily of photographs.

At the beginning of June, I got a new computer. It was high time: Enna is more than four years old now, and she’s pretty sluggish, and Windows XP is getting just a tiny bit outdated, though I preferred it to Vista.

The new machine is a thing of beauty: a 17.3” ASUS G72GX with 6 GB RAM and a bunch of other drool-inspiring specs, plus flash gamer details like a backlit keyboard (the Ur-Guru especially liked that one) and a glowing blue Republic of Games logo on the back. Seen in the sunlight (a rare occurrence), the paint reflects blue sparkles.

And, of course, it comes with a whole new operating system: Windows 7. So far I quite like it, but it’s a big jump from XP, and I’ve just checked Windows 7 Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Solutions (affiliate link) out of the library to help me find my way around.

The new OS isn’t the only reason to re-evaluate my existing backup system. Enna had two physical 80 GB drives, C and D. I used the C drive for both programs and data/documents, and backed up data and documents from the C drive to the D drive using SyncBack Freeware. I also backed the C drive up to both a USB drive (Ruby) using Karen’s Replicator and to a NAS drive (Teratides) using the built-in Maxtor backup software. I backed the D drive up to my Buffalo Quattro (Qualora) using SyncBack, and likewise backed Ruby up to my second NAS drive, Lachesis. (Confused yet? I posted a map in February 2009, when I was still using Freya instead of Ruby.)

The new machine, Auset (that’s how scholars think Egyptians pronounced the name of the goddess we know as Isis), has one drive of 500 GB. It’s partitioned into a recovery area (50 GB, no drive letter) , the C drive (116 GB) for the operating system and program files, and the D drive (334 GB) for my data.

There would be no point backing up from my C drive to my D drive on Auset, because they’re actually the same hardware. Backups all have to go somewhere else. On the other hand, the new folder structure has made my Replicator Jobs List very short. Instead of a dozen separate jobs backing up different folders, I only have to back up the “data” folder and the “docs” folder to appropriate places on Ruby, and all the subfolders will take care of themselves.

I’m going to have to add at least one more job, I think, unless I can persuade Microsoft that it really doesn’t want to keep any documents on the C drive. (I did figure out how to set the “Docs” folder on D:\ as the default location in the library, even though I’m not really sure what this library business is about.)

I won’t say any more about Replicator here because I’ve written about this handy free tool ad infinitum, starting in 2004.

I also decided to check out the new Windows 7 Backup and Restore program. It’s been a long time since I looked at Windows Backup—probably not since my first days with XP. It left rather a lot to be desired at that point. I figured it was worth checking out, even though the Ur-Guru had already set me up with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 for disk images. (I’ll talk about that in detail in a future post.)

You can find Windows Backup and Restore in the control panel—at least, you can if you switch to the icon view. If you view the control panel by category, you may be hunting around for a while.

As you can see (at least if you click through to the full-size version of this image), when I went  in to inspect, I found that my last backup hadn’t completed. This was probably because I’d elected to make a system image but not turned off all my programs when running the backup. (Oops.) I changed my settings to leave out the system image (it’s that checkbox down at the bottom.)

Then I shut down all my programs anyway, just to be safe. Some things, like your Outlook PST file and your Quicken data, can’t be backed up while the program is running. You can schedule automatic backups, but if they’re going to work, you have to remember to have those programs shut down at that time.

This time the backup completed successfully, and in a fairly short period of time. If I want to restore only some of the files, I can click the “browse for files” button after clicking the “restore my files” button.

Note: the “Recover system settings” option sends you to System Restore.

(Notice that it does versioning, since it offers you multiple dates to restore the files to.)

Once you pick a file to restore, you get a choice of destinations:

And then (if you’re just testing, and didn’t actually lose the file) you get the Win 7 file overwrite dialog:

What the heck, at least it’s prettier than the Windows XP version of the same message, as well as having one more option.

As backup programs go, this one has come a long way since the first time I looked at the built-in Windows Backup tool. I haven’t tested the system image against other imaging tools (perhaps I’ll include that in the Acronis writeup next issue), but as file backup programs go, it’s perfectly adequate. It doesn’t have the flexibility of a SyncBack, where I can create several jobs and schedule them to run on system idle, but an initial examination suggests it’s the equal of several products I’ve covered here.

And just to make me glad I had backups, less than a month after I’d bought her, Auset experienced the Black Screen of Death. When I turned her on, nothing happened. No drive light. No drive sounds. Nothing on the screen. I mean, nothing. Naturally I panicked and called the Ur-Guru, while digging out the info I’d need for a warranty return. (We—he—found the solution, which was to unplug the machine, remove the battery, and press the power button for 45 seconds.) Throughout the whole harrowing scenario, there was one comforting thought: at least I had backups.

Well, this is embarrassing.

The last time I wrote my so-called weekly column was more than a month ago. And, believe me, it’s not because nothing has been happening in the world of backups. Life got just a bit out of hand and blogging slipped down the priority list. But now the Ur-Guru has gone home, the cats have settled in, the housemate situation is more or less sorted out, and I really have no excuses left. It’s time to wade in and deal with all those outstanding backup issues from the last 6 weeks so we can get back to our regularly scheduled program of product reviews and tales from the backup trenches.

• To start with, our winner (and only entrant) in the Gladinet contest is Todd Vierling. Todd told an entertaining if manifestly apocryphal story about how Microsoft’s Azure Blob got its name.
• I missed a pre-briefing on the new KineticD service from Data Deposit Box, so I’m following up on that.
• Mozy launched Mozy 2.0 for Windows. According to the press release, “New enhancements include faster upload speeds and decreased bandwidth usage, new convenience and access features, and Mozy 2xProtect™ – a new feature which allows Mozy users to back up to a local external drive in addition to Mozy’s online data centers at no additional cost.” Could this be in response to Dmailer’s move into the online space? I haven’t had a chance to ask Mozy. Meanwhile, I guess Mac users are still stuck with the 1.0 version until the developers catch up.
• I got a link request from BackupTechnology in  England. As it happened, I’d just installed their Online Backup for WordPress plugin on a client’s site and was about to try it. I’ve since set it up, and it backs up on schedule; I haven’t tested the restore function. Look for a more detailed review soon. (Though I might not do the restore test on a client site.)
• There’s a new beta version of the Automatic WordPress Backup plugin. It now runs a nice little diagnostic of your server when you activate it. It still doesn’t seem very fond of my test blog on Dreamhost, though, so I may have to test it on a different host. (I admit to not being very fond of Dreamhost myself.)
• Amazon S3 introduced something called Reduced Redundancy Storage. It lets you prioritize your data so you save fewer copies of less important stuff, thus taking up less space. Prices start at $.10 per gigabyte and go down (per gigabyte) from there.
• Gladinet came out with a new product called CloudAFS (attached file storage). On the face of it, it sounds like the kind of enterprise product that most readers of this blog wouldn’t be interested in: “CloudAFS allows local storage to be used as tier one for fast access and delivers unprecedented storage space by using the cloud as tier two. If you have storage expansion needs, want to replace a tape backup solution or just want to leverage the efficiencies of cloud computing, you can now attach cloud storage to your existing IT infrastructure to create a cost-effective, multi-tiered storage solution with low impact and faster backup or recovery times.” But if you use a server at all for your business, you might check it out, since it’s only $4.99/month for a single license, and there are bulk discounts.
• I got another link request from ProFusion Backups. I’d feel a bit better about them if they hadn’t left their fill-in-the-blank template below the part they filled out for the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog. I’m willing to take a look at it, but it won’t be first on my list.
• Our friends at the Windows Azure Blob are now charging for their formerly free service. (Well, the introductory offer is still listed despite the fact that July 1 has passed, but that’s probably an oversight.) We knew they would someday. My only use for them was to test Gladinet; Windows Azure is trickier to use than Amazon S3. The prices are very similar, however:
  • $0.15 per GB for data transfers from European and North American locations
  • $0.20 per GB for data transfers from other locations
  • $0.01 per 10,000 transactions
• Andy from CloudBerry Lab wrote to tell me that CloudBerry had upgraded its online backup product to include support for Amazon’s Reduced Redundancy Storage (see above). They also have a beta version of CloudBerry for Azure Blob Storage. That product is free while in beta, even though Azure Blob no longer is.
• iConfidential asked for a review of their cloud storage/file sharing/backup product by posting a comment to the announcement about Dmailer’s contest. I deleted the comment, but I’ll probably review the product eventually. (Look, folks, if you want me to review something, read the Review Policy page and then e-mail me.)
• BackupBuddy also got an upgrade and can now store your backups on Amazon S3. I did that with my backup of this blog before upgrading it to WordPress 3.0. I haven’t had any problems with the other dozen upgrades I’ve done to WP 3.0, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to back up the site, which uses a lot of plugins and an older (relatively speaking) theme. It worked like a charm, including the upload, which I checked on with S3Fox. (Sorry, Andy, but that was handiest.) Even though GoDaddy, the host I still have the Backup Blog on, doesn’t have its servers set up properly to use the magic restore function that makes BackupBuddy the Holy Grail of WordPress backup plugins, the backup still contains absolutely everything in a nice handy zip file, and I could if necessary unzip it and restore it manually.
• Amazon Web Services finally got around to adding Amazon S3 to its AWS Management Console, so you can see what’s in your buckets without a third-party tool. Good of them.
• I’ve been getting lots of e-mail from Zetta about their enterprise storage-as-a-service. They charge $0.25/GB/month and there’s a 15-day free trial—the kind you have to provide a credit card for. Another thing to follow up on. Maybe I could get them and Data Deposit Box in the same room to duke it out.
• My former client Spare Backup seems to have landed a $10 million equity line, because they’re publishing press releases about it.
• I have a new computer. Expect to start hearing about Windows 7 soon.

Whew! That took me more than an hour just to list. (I did have to check a few links.) Actually testing the new products is going to take longer. But I promise to be back next week to tell you about my initial experiences backing up on my new computer.

“My computer went black,” she said.

“Totally black?” I asked.

“No, it has white letters on it. It says ‘Operating system not found.’”

“Oh,” I said intelligently. “That’s not good. Have you been using the backup drive?” (I knew this person had a supposedly foolproof, plug-it-in-and-it-backs-you-up Rebit SaveMe drive.)

“No—it doesn’t fit on the desk.”

Beat. Head. On. Wall.

As with exercise, the best backup system is the one you’re going to use. This one had seemed just about foolproof, but you do have to actually connect the drive to the computer. And while online backup might be more foolproof, particularly for someone who’s usually connected, it’s not that practical for RAW photos in the thousands.

A simple reboot actually brought the operating system back, but only temporarily. The machine continued to crash, and the “check hardware” message made my client suspect (incorrectly) that the backup drive might be the cause of the problem, so she disconnected it before it could complete its backup cycle. (Though there really did seem to be something wrong there, as transfer speeds to that drive were insanely slow when I later tried to copy some photos to it directly. I had, however, tested the drive myself, and it performed normally with my own older and slower machine.)

A few days later, the Ur-Guru and I actually got to see the machine bluescreen. By this time I’d already looked through the Event Log without finding any explanations for the problems and checked the health of the hard drive with the Computer Management tool. We’d even cleared off about 100 GB of old photos so the drive wasn’t red-lining in the space department. Everything seemed normal, but obviously wasn’t—especially when the machine crashed again. This time it reported memory errors, so we tried running the Vista memory diagnostics tool. (I never use Vista, so didn’t know about this.)

The test reported no problems, but the machine was obviously having problems. The Ur-Guru downloaded Memtest86 to give the RAM a further workout.

Still no problems found. But the machine kept acting up. I hate problems I can’t understand, especially serious ones like that. At this point, voodoo starts to seem like a viable option.

The only remaining thing to try to see whether the problem was with the hardware or the software was to reinstall the machine—preferably with Windows 7 instead of Vista. But that would reformat the entire drive, erasing all the data. And there was no guarantee the drive (or other hardware) was really stable enough for that to work.

Or, of course, you could just replace the computer, in which case it might be possible to salvage the data by taking the drive out of the machine, putting it into a 2.5” drive case, and connecting it to the new machine by USB. But that’s a somewhat iffy proposition with a drive whose soundness is in question, and not something a novice computer user can do anyway.

This mysteriously failing laptop is less than two years old. There’s no real reason (well, apart from the Vista operating system) to expect it to have serious problems so soon. But you never know what’s going to happen to your computer, and that’s especially true for laptops, which are much more at risk of being dropped, spilled on, or stolen. That’s why you need to start backing your machine up as soon as you get it—or at least as soon as you start putting data on it.

In this case, it looks as if installing Windows 7 (and reformatting the hard drive) has restored the laptop to a functioning state, though it’s too soon to be sure. But everything that was stored on that 320 GB hard drive is gone now.

Don’t let it happen to you.

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.