I did actually have a plan for what to write about this week. Two plans, even, depending on whether the VIA ARTiGO A2000 I’m supposed to be reviewing arrived. But the ARTiGO has yet to show up, and while I’ve taken a quick look at the demo and downloaded some of the sales docs for Hosted FTP, I haven’t had a chance to examine it properly. (And we won’t even go into the argument I lost with my CD drive…)

Those of you who follow the blog rather than reading the e-zine version of the Backup Reminder—which is most of you, by the stats—know that I bookmark a lot of backup-related articles in Delicious. (Which used to be del.icio.us, until Yahoo! bought them.) I don’t include these in the e-zines, because I know enough of the subscribers personally to be pretty sure you wouldn’t be that interested in a collection of headlines and links. Delicious is very handy, and I’ve written about it here before, but I mostly use it for bookmarking, not as a social network or for any other purpose.

Yesterday, however, I discovered that people can send you bookmarks within the Delicious system, because one of my fans had done so. I didn’t know I had fans until one of them sent me a bookmark. The fan was “CommVault”, and the bookmark was a New York Times story mentioning CommVault. Well, fair enough, it was relevant. My two other fans are “seagatetechnology” (wonder what business they’re in, eh?) and “Wordworker”—a fellow writer and naming consultant whom I taught to blog. I much suspect that the reason I’m being followed on Delicious.com by people in the backup industry is that I’m posting the bookmarks here on the blog—and “backup” is one of my top 10 tags, along with “podcasting.” If people start sending me links, then I’ll have even more backup tags, and even more potential blog posts—and even less time to write them, no doubt.

I also got a reader question this week, which is great—but I wasn’t able to answer it, so I’d like to post it here in the hope that someone reading this will be able to help out. Is anyone out there using Dmailer Backup? Is anyone from Dmailer reading this blog? Here’s the question, corrected for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, because I am a Natural Born Pedant and my day job is writing and editing:

Currently I have a Western Digital Passport. It came with Dmailer Sync installed. That is very nice; it works great. However…I want a backup of my data, NOT a synced copy. Meaning, if I copy a file from my PC to the Passport, then delete that file from my PC, the file should remain on the Passport. This is NOT what Dmailer sync does; it deletes the file from the passport. So I would like to use Dmailer Backup, which as far as I can tell does what I want: keeps all files on the Passport. My question is…is Dmailer Backup something that you would recommend? Is there an alternative? To switch, can I just delete the Sync and install Backup?

I’ve never actually used Dmailer myself—perhaps because Western Digital has been less generous than certain other companies with its drives, though actually the Ur-Guru has bought a good half-dozen of those little WD drives and I don’t think any of them came with Dmailer.

My colleague Lee Hopkins in Australia uses both Dmailer Sync and Dmailer Backup, but when I asked him for a review, he was up to the eyeballs in work on his PhD and couldn’t write one. I suggested that the person who asked the question contact Lee, who could probably answer the “Is it worth buying this thing?” question quickly enough by e-mail, but it did seem like it would be a good idea to add reviews of the Dmailer products to this blog.

With my backlog of backup hardware and software to write about, however, what I’d really like is for someone who’s already using Dmailer to send me a guest column (that’s sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com).

I do want to point out to everyone, however, that if you delete a file from your PC (or Mac!) and then have only the copy on your external hard drive, it’s not a backup. While it’s by no means necessary to go into backup overkill mode the way I have (see last week’s backup diagram), a single copy of a file cannot, by definition, be a backup. I’m all for clearing out your computer’s C drive to keep it running smoothly, but make another copy of those files you’re removing if they’re important to you.

And I really would like to hear from ‘Professor’ Hopkins, when he has time, about the way he uses Dmailer Sync to keep his data synchronized across multiple computers, even though that’s not strictly backup if file deletions are replicated in real time. (Gosh, Sallie, could you make that sound more techie?) I’m planning to get myself a netbook soon, so I have a vested interest in the answer.

By next week I should have either the HostedFTP.com review or the ARTiGO A2000 review for you. There’s also a review of Memeo for Mac in the works (from a Mac user, natch). And maybe we’ll hear more about Dmailer. Plus I have a client who wants to know about the latest in drive imaging—any recommendations?

Whether or not you have any hot new hardware or software, back up.

Last week I talked about backups for two different Web 2.0 services: del.icio.us and LinkedIn. I chose those two because they’re the ones I use the most often.

This week I’m going to start by talking about Flickr, a popular photo-sharing service that doubles as a social network. I don’t post photos to Flickr myself, but the Ur-Guru does. (Yes, lots of them are pictures of me. What did you expect?)

I first noticed the existence of Flickr backup tools a couple of years ago. I had a bit of trouble understanding why you would need them. After all, the photos can’t get to Flickr unless you first have them on your computer (or a camera connected to the Internet). Surely if they’re worth sharing with the world, you’re going to save them on your hard drive or a CD, and they’ll get backed up with the rest of your data.

On the other hand, if something happened and you needed to re-upload your photos, remembering which ones you’d had there and which tags you’d used to identify each image could get to be a real challenge. That’s why there are programs like Flickredit, a Java-based program for editing, tagging, uploading, and backing up your photos and their associated metadata (copyright info, title, description, tags). If you’ve put hours into creating this metadata for your Flickr photos, I’d recommend checking it out.

Photobucket, another popular photo-sharing site, lets its pro users back up via FTP download. Regular users can order backup CDs or DVDs from the Photobucket Store.

Enough people who belong to multiple social networking sites have expressed a desire to import their profiles without typing everything over again that there’s now a Data Portability Project. There’s a long list of the benefits of data portability over on the Use Cases page. They look particularly useful for people who use a lot of job-search or social networking sites.

Interestingly, however, while the list mentions transferring, aggregating, and exporting contacts and other data, it doesn’t specifically address backup. If your data is that portable, however, it should be possible to port it onto your hard drive and back it up. And, of course, having the same information duplicated across several sites can also act as a backup, though if you delete something by accident, the deletion might propagate across all the sites. Which leads me to wonder whether there’s an “Undo Portability Project” in the making. (Repeat after me: synchronization is not backup.)

It will take a while before the Data Portability Project produces useful results, so remember to check out the possibilities for backing up your profile information and other data before you sign up. If you need to keep your profile info in a Word doc in order to keep from having to re-type it, then that’s probably what you should do. And if you can get new messages, photos, and the like from your friends as an RSS feed, remember to subscribe to your own feed in order to keep a copy.

In most cases, anything you post on these sites goes up there at your own risk, and it may well become the property of the social networking site once you put it there.

If you’re an avid user of MySpace, Facebook, or other social networks, why not share your method for backing up your profile and other data—or your reason for not bothering.

I’ve been using del.icio.us profligately in the last six months or so. It’s a handy way to keep track of things I want to read, and things I want other people to read. But it suddenly occurred to me yesterday that whereas my Firefox bookmarks get backed up along with the rest of my critical data thanks to Karen’s Replicator, I had no backup of my del.icio.us bookmarks.

It turns out that it’s just as easy to export bookmarks from del.icio.us as to import them: just go to “Settings” and check “export/backup” under “Bookmarks.”

Admittedly, the resulting HTML file is just a long list of links, rather than having the formatting provided by del.icio.us tags, but it beats losing the links altogether if you’re still in the middle of using them for research. (Not that I’ve ever experienced a del.icio.us outage, but it’s always possible.)

You can also export your del.icio.us bookmarks to an XML file by pasting the following link into your browser and entering your del.icio.us username and password: http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all. But unless you know what to do with an unformatted XML file, I’d recommend the first method.

Once I had my bookmarks backed up, I started to think about other “social” sites. I’ve been spending a lot of time answering (and occasionally asking) questions on LinkedIn. A few months ago I asked my network about their backup practices and got enough information to fill up a Reminder column. For today’s column, I searched the existing LinkedIn Answers for information about backing up LinkedIn itself.

The easy part is backing up your connections: you can export them to a .csv (that stands for “comma-separated values,” if you wanted to pick up some additional jargon today) file and then import them into Outlook or pretty well any other contact-management program. If you go to your Connections page in LinkedIn and scroll to the bottom, you’ll see an “Export Connections” button. This takes you to a page with instructions for exporting to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Mail, or Max OS X Address Book.

That’s all well and good, but anyone I’m connected to on LinkedIn is pretty much guaranteed to be in my Outlook contacts already, because I’m scrupulous about not connecting to people I don’t know well enough to recommend in some capacity, and if I know you that well, chances are I have your e-mail and phone number already. (And LinkedIn doesn’t include phone numbers in their contact info anyway.)

I was more interested in whether I could back up my profile, my recommendations, and my answers to questions. It turns out that it’s possible to back up your profile, after a fashion, by saving it as a PDF file. This includes recommendations people have written for you, though not recommendations you have written for others. You can do this with other people’s profiles, as well, which may be more useful than just exporting their contact info, if also more cumbersome.

It’s possible to copy and paste text out of this PDF, so having it would spare you from re-typing everything if something happened and you had to re-create your profile from scratch. And it would save you some typing if you wanted to re-use the information for another social network.

Curiously, this handy convert-to-PDF feature is not available for your recommendations or your answers. My recommendations page at least shows the full text of the recommendations I’ve written, so I can use the “print” function to create a PDF version. But the tab with my answers doesn’t show the full text (perhaps because I’m inclined to give long answers), and if there’s an option to subscribe to your own answers, I haven’t seen it. (Besides, the feeds you get from LinkedIn aren’t full-text feeds, anyway.) And it only shows the 30 most recent answers.

I guess I know what new features I’ll be requesting from LinkedIn!