This week’s guest contributor is Confident Marketer Sue Painter, but first a brief update from Yours Truly.

The Ur-Guru and I have been traveling a lot over the past few weeks. As an incurable geek, I haul my laptop with me on all these trips, and I’ve been bringing Vesta (the Buffalo MiniStation DataVault) with me to make backups on. In fact, Vesta lives in my laptop case, since I don’t really use her when I’m at home.

While we were driving back from the Russian River Valley, the Ur-Guru noticed that his MP3 player was acting up. It insisted that every song was a bad track and wouldn’t play anything. (I considered connecting mine and forcing him to listen to podcasts, but I restrained myself.)

“You could try reformatting it,” I suggested, “but you’d lose all the music.”

He gave me his best “Do I look like an idiot?” stare and said “Who is it I’m marrying again? Did you think I wouldn’t have backups?”

So when we got home, he reformatted the player, copied the music back onto it, and all was well.

Now, on to Sue’s story about Carbonite.

I use and LOVE Carbonite for backup. No horror stories here, just really hated constantly backing up to CD’s which got disorganized and half the time didn’t work. Plus, I never got around to it in any scheduled fashion. Somehow I ran across an e-ad for Carbonite, checked it out, did a 30 day trial, then bought it. It’s a big, whopping $45 per YEAR and you can back up a second computer for $20 (or at least, that was the deal I was offered). It constantly runs in the background of your computer and gives you 24/7 backup.

Slight downside: it makes my computer run a bit slower, but I solve this by a quick click to put Carbonite on 24 hour pause, do my work, then “unpause” it before I go off to bed. Overnight, it backs anything up I’ve changed that day.

I have had to use it—my Palm Pilot died a horrible death, with all my appointments for the rest of the year, and the backup file on my computer got corrupted, too. Total panic (I am booked nearly a year out with client appointments so my Palm is my lifeblood) but I just clicked on the little icon and got everything restored to my new Palm, no problem.

I clicked on my Carbonite icon and it brought up my entire Palm calendar on the computer screen, same as I would do from my computer files. What I like is that Carbonite is for total non-techies like me—it brings up a screen that looks EXACTLY like your desktop, you click on what you want to restore, and boom, it’s done. Could not be simpler.

Once my calendar was there on my screen (stop, my heart!) I simply hot synced it back to my Palm. I could scarcely believe it was so easy! And yes, give me back floppies—I really hate CDs and can never make them work. (ARG…)

There you have it—another satisfied Carbonite customer. (David Jackson wrote about Carbonite in February 2008.) A backup is useless if you can’t restore your data, so it’s good to hear that it’s easy to get things back, and few professionals can afford to lose their business appointments.

Next week we’ll hear from the Data Doctors.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the online backup bandwagon these days. Enterprise software giant EMC bought SOHO online backup provider Mozy a while back. Now EMC is flogging Mozy Enterprise for all it’s worth. I’ve received links to no fewer than four white papers about Mozy Enterprise, the first of which boasts a provocative title: “You’re Not as Backed Up as You Think.”

EMC is coming late to the online backup game, and has the likes of LiveVault (bought by Iron Mountain in 2005) to contend with for the enterprise market. (Though there’s a difference between LiveVault’s Continuous Data Protection, which updates files as they change, and Mozy’s scheduled backups.)

Most of the new online backup providers seem to be targeting the consumer and home-office market, however. I’ve written before about Mozy Home, Carbonite, and other online backup providers. Do a search for “free online storage” in Google and you’ll be overwhelmed with possibilities. (Tip: read the reviews, and the fine print of the license agreement, before signing up with any of these services.)

The amount of storage space you get for free is usually modest even for a home or home office user, and certainly not suitable for the enterprise. But there are more and more home users producing data that needs backing up, and more of them have high-speed connections, so everyone wants to be in on it.

There’s Dell’s DataSafe™, now offered free with the purchase of a new Inspiron or XPS notebook. The first two types of files they recommend backing up are photos and music, followed by Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slide shows. 100 GB of storage costs $119.00 per year, which doesn’t dent the small-business budget too much. It isn’t clear whether it’s possible to back up more than one computer to a single DataSafe™ account, but I suspect it’s not. (This is also true for Mozy Home.)

If you want to back up your network drive online, you probably need either an enterprise product or a geeky homemade hack to upload the files to a server. My own network drive, to which all three of the computers in my household (my two laptops and my housemate’s desktop) back up automatically, backs up to a USB drive. I shudder to think how clogged our cable connection would get if I tried to send 617GB up that 6Mbps connection every week.

But I digress. (Gosh, how unusual.)

Not to be outdone by its rival, HP has also launched an online backup service, HP Upline, complete with glossy website. It even offers multi-user options. Unfortunately for HP, Upline suffered a week of downtime, with security issues for good measure. TechCrunch and its readers had some fairly pungent things to say about that, and one wonders whether the service will survive the bad publicity long enough to establish credibility. I can’t see myself signing up for the one-year limited-storage free trial.

Computer Technology Review provides a good overview of what an organization should look for in an online backup service. While not all the same considerations apply to home and home office users, it’s still worth reading the article before signing up with a service provider.

Online backup is a good supplement to your other backup methods. Unless you can guarantee that you’ll always be able to connect to the Internet in the middle of a data loss crisis, however, I wouldn’t rely on it exclusively. Especially if it’s free.

Seems like everyone’s talking about backup these days. Last week it was Marketing Over Coffee; this week it’s Morning Announcements from Dave Jackson’s School of Podcasting.

Dave had a sudden realization: if he didn’t save the uncompressed (WAV) version of his audio files, he would never be able to re-edit the episodes into an audio book and sell it the way Grammar Girl is. The problem with uncompressed audio—or uncompressed anything else, for that matter—is that it takes up a lot of space.

Now Dave has seen the light when it comes to online backup:

(You can listen to Dave tell the story in his own voice (starting at 15:23). Quotation used with permission.)

Dave even recorded a Camtasia video demonstrating how to use Carbonite.

There are a few points to note here:

1. If you want unlimited online backup (which you will for those large media files), you generally have to pay, but you don’t necessarily have to pay very much.
2. Right now, Carbonite is only available for PCs running Windows XP or Vista, but a Mac version is due out in mid-2008. You can try MozyHome Unlimited in the meantime; it’s $4.95/month, so pricing is comparable.
3. Don’t even think about using an online backup solution unless you have high-speed Internet.

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.