My in-flight reading for last week’s trip to Cleveland was Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. (Yes, oh FTC inspectors, that’s an Amazon Affiliate Link.) I don’t buy hardcover books by just anyone, but I’m a big fan of Chris Brogan’s, and increasingly impressed by what I hear of Julien Smith on the Media Hacks podcast, f-bombs notwithstanding.

The subheading on page 169 on this guidebook for “how to be human at a distance” is “You Live or Die by Your Database.” I’ve talked about backing up your WordPress database on this blog, but the database Chris and Julien mean is the one you store contact information in.

There are several online applications that people use for contact management. Some use their Gmail account. Others use Plaxo. Still others consider LinkedIn a great place to store professional information. Software built specifically for contact management includes Highrise from 37 Signals, BatchBook from BatchBlue Software, and beyond that, there are several other applications. (p. 171)

It’s no surprise that authors who co-wrote their book on Google Docs should mention online contact management tools. In the next breath (or at least the next paragraph), however, they remind readers of the importance of keeping a local copy of that online database—in other words, a backup. “If, as we say, you live or die by your database, why would you trust a third party with its ultimate integrity?”

Amen, brothers.

Exporting to CSV

Of the tools they mention, the only one I use is LinkedIn. (I have a Gmail account, but I almost never use it, so I don’t have any useful contact information stored there, and Plaxo developed such a reputation for spamming everyone in your address book back at the turn of the millennium that I still won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.) It’s quite easy to back up your LinkedIn contacts as a group. In the bottom right corner of your Connections page, there’s a link that says “Export Connections.” When you click it, you go to the export page:

If you would like to back up your LinkedIn connections to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Address Book, or Mac OS Address Book, please select your application and file type from the menu below, then click “Export.”

The file type for Outlook, Outlook Express, and Yahoo! is CSV, which stands for “Comma-Separated Values.” That’s a very old format for storing data in a plain text file, and while it looks like gibberish to the human eye, you can import it into almost any kind of contact manager, from Outlook or Entourage to Excel. You can even upload it into another LinkedIn profile if you’ve made the mistake of creating two of them, or into an e-mail service provider. (Don’t even think of doing that without permission.) Sometimes you’ll have to manually match up the names of the data fields in one program with the field names in another, but a CSV file is an almost universally usable form of backup.

In fact, if you want to back up your Outlook contacts, go to File|Import and Export and select “Export to a File.” Comma Separated Values is your first choice—and also your second, since you get both DOS and Windows flavors. This is what you do if you want to move your Outlook contacts to LinkedIn, instead of the other way around.

I’ve just produced CSV files from both sources and put them into my Dropbox. CSV files are quite small, since they’re “flat” files: just text, nothing else.

The only problem with creating CSV files from these programs is that you can’t automate the process. If I want a backup of my LinkedIn connections, I have to remember to go in and make one; likewise if I want my Outlook contacts in CSV rather than PST format.

Where Else Are Your Contacts?

Once upon a time, there was a thing called a Rolodex. You filled it with cards on which you had written people’s contact information. Maybe you pasted in their business cards.

These  days, not many people have one. Instead, they have cell phones. And the easiest place to store a phone number someone gives you when you’re away from your desk is inevitably your cell phone.

A cell phone leads a dangerous life, thanks to being carried around everywhere. And you don’t have to be in a high-tech business to depend on yours. My mother’s phone recently suffered an unfortunate encounter with a glass of water in the middle of the night, and Verizon couldn’t get her contacts back. (Verizon does offer a backup service for its users, but doesn’t make a big deal out of advertising it.)

If you have a smartphone, you probably sync it with your computer. If your iPhone or BlackBerry dies, you most likely have a copy of the phone numbers and e-mail addresses it contains right on your PC (or Mac). But those of us with “dumbphones” either need to sign up for programs like Verizon’s Backup Assistant, develop an unfailing habit of manually copying phone numbers from the phone into the computer or a paper address book—or find ourselves digging through scraps of paper and old appointment books in an attempt to reconstruct the information. (My mother actually ended up driving to a client’s house instead of returning his call because she couldn’t find his phone number and he had Caller ID blocked.)

Is Paper Best After All?

Personal productivity and brain style expert Eve Abbott used to print out all her ACT! contacts once a year just in case the computer crashed, but using paper to back up your contacts gets to be unwieldy when your contacts number in the thousands. (I haven’t seen one of those printouts since she switched to Outlook a few years ago.) And with so many people changing jobs these days, the information on those printouts can get to be obsolete pretty quickly.

So while the business cards in plastic sleeves or even the scribbled numbers in the appointment book might save you in the event of a drive failure or drowned phone,  they’re no substitute for regular electronic backups. Create a cell phone backup plan, automate any contact backups you can, and set yourself reminders to create CSV files from your online databases on a regular basis.

Because the important thing about your contact database isn’t where you store it, but being able to reach the people you keep in it.

Making your hard drives more secure seems to be the trendy thing to do these days. Within the past couple of months, I’ve been contacted about two similar products for protecting your external hard drives from fire and water—not to mention spilled coffee. I haven’t had the chance to test either product myself, so I can’t give you a firsthand account, but it seemed worth mentioning them in case fire hazards or water hazards are particularly high in your office.

The first is the MediaVault HD, which I first heard about in a LinkedIn question from Chuck Fetta of Office Furniture Warehouse asking for feedback from IT professionals. MediaVault’s main claim to fame is that it’s fireproof (up to a point, the point in fact being a UL 125°F 1 Hour rating), semi-waterproof (it will probably survive your sprinkler system), and locks to reduce the risk of theft (but you’re not supposed to bolt it down).

The IT professionals consulted suggested that online or other off-site backup was almost certain to be better protection against disasters (including fires) and that as an anti-theft device, the MediaVault didn’t look too impressive. I have to agree with that last objection. I have friends who had their safe stolen because it wasn’t built into their wall or floor. The MediaVault just isn’t large or heavy enough to deter thieves, even the casual sort who didn’t come prepared with a dolly and a moving truck.

The Ur-Guru also pointed out that any USB port was likely to melt off immediately in a fire (perhaps causing interesting electrical problems to your drives and your data). The backup advantage of leaving the device connected is countered by the security disadvantage. Better to get a genuine fireproof safe (the built-in kind that will still be there when nothing is left of your house but cinders) and put your external drives there. Of course, that does require an extra step: remembering to take the drives out of the safe to make the backups and put them back into the safe for storage.

The MediaVault HD ships with Seagate drives and Genie Backup Manager Pro. This is another product I’ve heard of but never used. You can get it with or without disaster recovery. Somewhere in my copious spare time, I’ll have to give it a try, though the Ur-Guru might not forgive me if I start cluttering up the machine he’s been spending the weekend reinstalling.

It seemed hardly a moment after the LinkedIn discussion of MediaVault that I heard from Brett Callow about ioSafe, but it was actually a month or so. Brett started out by asking for a link, as many companies do. I gave him the same answer I give everyone: “Why not write a guest post?” I did have to warn him that he’d have to disclose the fact that ioSafe is paying him to talk up their product, even though he’s not one of their employees. This is what he sent me.

Where should you keep your backups?

Backing up to an external hard drive is an easy and reasonably economical way to protect your data against loss due to computer failure — but it will not protect your data against disasters. Should you be unlucky enough to have a fire, chances are that both your computer and external drive will be toast. (And, if the flames don’t get it, the water from the fire department’s hoses almost certainly will!)

So, how can you minimize the risks? One solution would be to store your drive in a waterproof and fireproof safe when it’s not in use or to keep the drive at somebody else’s house. A much better solution, however, is to use more than one best-in-class solution to protect your data.

ioSafe makes a range of fireproof and waterproof drives which provide rock-solid protection for your critical data. The ioSafe Solo range are waterproof to 10 feet for 3 days and can withstand temperatures up to 1550°F for 30 minutes. The Solo can even be bolted to the floor to make theft more difficult. In short, it provides the best possible protection for data. Even if everything else in your house is lost to a disaster, at least your backups will still be safe and secure. With prices starting at $149.99 for a 500 GB model, ioSafes are a bit more expensive than other drives, but not by much. And, if you really value your data, the extra bucks are certainly money well spent.

But don’t stop there. Every mechanical device — hard drives included — will eventually fail. Consequently, you should be keeping your data in more than one spot. Unless you have an exceptionally large amount of data, the easiest way to do that is to use an online backup service. When choosing a service provider, don’t simply go with the cheapest option. Shop around, do some research and choose a well-established company. (A startup may offer you the best deal, but will they still be around in a week, month or year from now?)

By keeping more than one backup and keeping the backups in different locations, you’ll be protecting your data against pretty much every eventuality.

For more information about ioSafe, visit the company website.

This was a bit more of a sales pitch than I’d hoped for, paid post or not. Examination of the specs on the ioSafe site does, however, suggest that it’s likely to provide better protection against fire, water, and theft, than the MediaVault, and the price is not that much higher than for an ordinary external hard drive. If you’re prone to spilling your coffee, it might not be a bad investment.

But if you’re really concerned about fires and floods, you’re going to need more serious protection than this.

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!

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.