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.

I spent last week bouncing around between conferences and meetings, which meant there was no time to review any new backup software, but all that zipping back and forth with the netbook and the iriver (does anyone else hate it as much as I do when companies refuse to capitalize their brand names) gave me plenty of opportunities to make backups and to think about backups.

Normally when I record something, I leave the original recordings on the iriver until I’ve finished my editing on the computer. This week there was too much too record, and too little time to edit. Tuesday at the Social Media Strategies conference I recorded 8 hours of combined sessions and interviews; that’s as much as the iriver can hold. When I got home (well, when I could move again), I copied them onto Mena (the netbook) and backed them up onto the Rebit. Then I copied them onto Enna (the HP Pavilion laptop) and backed them up onto the Metro drive, the second internal hard drive, and the Quattro. I still haven’t had a chance to edit them, but boy are they backed up.

Friday was the BACN meeting, which meant another four hours of recordings. These are supplementary, since we don’t use most of them in audio form, so I settled for copying them onto Enna and from there to the D, Q, and R drives. (They actually go to the R drive twice because I still have Memeo Instant Backup running.)

Yesterday I had another all-day event to record; I still need to transfer those files onto Enna and edit them, but this time I can leave the originals on the iriver until I get my editing done, unless I take a really long time to do it. It’s almost a month before my next conference.

Anyone who goes back and forth between computers is familiar with USB sticks. That’s probably why they hand them out as swag at conferences. (Though one of the ones I got at AWSMS09 was defective, and the other overheats awfully quickly.) I’ve been in the habit of keeping data that needs to go back and forth on one or another SanDisk Cruzer Micro U3 USB sticks instead of on Mena’s hard drive. Under normal conditions, a SanDisk Cruzer Micro looks like this photo by FSSE.info. The white part is a switch that retracts the USB plug; it flashes orange when the drive is connected and working.

Back in August, the BACN board was having a special meeting. We were moving the chairs around the boardroom table when one of them ran over Mena’s cord and yanked her off the table. The USB stick took the full force of the landing; the two halves of the black case snapped apart and flew all the way across the room. They were far too warped to fit back together. (The netbook, miraculously, was all right.)

Here’s the kicker, though. The stub of the Cruzer was still in its socket—and the light was on. It was still working. You know that thing about solid state drives being more shock-resistant? it’s true. (Mena actually has ordinary hard drives that spin, but I guess they weren’t doing anything critical at the time of the fall. I do keep her in a hard plastic shell, but mostly I think I was bloody lucky.)

After I got home and copied the files I needed onto Enna, I tossed the remains of the Cruzer into the drawer I usually keep it in. Though I’d already been wondering vaguely about getting some kind of case for it, I hadn’t really thought about proper storage for the poor thing. (Nor had I thought about the fact that it could pose electrical shock danger, as the Ur-Guru pointed out to me.)

I happen to keep my count-up, count-down timer in the same drawer. And guess what the timer has on the back of it? Yep. A magnet. So of course the next time I reached into the drawer to pull out the timer, the memory stick was stuck to it.

I was sure the data would be completely wiped out. Anyone in my generation has been warned about magnets and floppy disks, hard drives, etc, etc. I was curious to see just what kind of mess would be left, so I plugged the Cruzer in.

Everything was fine.

I swear, this thing is indestructible.

I would never advise you to mistreat your equipment this way. And the injuries my Cruzer Micro suffered are just one example of how easy it is for USB sticks to come to grief, so you should always make sure to copy any information on them to your computer right away.

But I would definitely recommend SanDisk if you want a tough, reliable USB stick. And I’ve been pretty happy with their MP3 players, too.

When I first heard about Memeo Instant Backup, I objected that no program that backed up your entire hard drive could possibly be “instant.” Hard drives are getting bigger and bigger, so copying them takes longer and longer.

Robert Phillips explained to me that the “instant” part refers to the fact that the backup process starts instantly: as soon as you install the product, it begins backing you up. You don’t have to tell Instant Backup anything except where you want it to put your files. It’s designed to be easy enough for your grandparents to use, and the author of the press release tried it on hers to make sure.

I was expecting something designed to compete with Rebit, but that’s not quite what I got. Memeo Instant Backup is simple, yes. It’s got a colorful, friendly user interface, and it gets right down to work. It even works pretty quickly, and after the initial backup, its continuous monitoring doesn’t put too much drain on the system. But it’s got a little truth in advertising problem that you need to know about.

The reason I was expecting a software version of Rebit was this statement: “Protect your entire computer instantly. All files on your C drive will be included in the backup plan.” As I found out after running Memeo Instant Backup, this is simply not true. Let’s walk through it and see if you can spot what’s missing.

One minor but early irritation was the inability to choose which directory to install the program to, but that’s because I’m a “power user” type. The people this product is aimed at don’t care about things like that, if they even know they’re an option. There are very few options available in Memeo Instant Backup, but that’s a deliberate move to avoid confusing the user. In essence, there are two things you can do: back up everything, or restore everything. Oh, and you can pause a backup while it’s running if you need to, say, move or rename a file you just downloaded.

The interface is attractive and easy to understand. An illustration of a computer monitor shows the relative proportions of the different kinds of data you have on your machine, while a progress bar shows how much of the available space on your backup device is occupied.

(In case you’re wondering, I chose the new Metro drive from Buffalo as the backup destination.)

Those colorful icons and the size of the completed backup should be your first hint that Memeo Instant Backup is not really backing up the entire C drive. Enna is a fairly old laptop, so my C drive is only 80 GB, though I have a second 80 GB drive built in, as well. Right now my C drive is about half full: I’ve used 40.2 GB. The size of that backup is 15.4 GB.

What’s missing? The obvious answer is “program files.” Memeo refers specifically to documents, pictures, music, videos, and “others.” If you look at the actual backup destination folder, that’s even more explicit. Instant Backup avoids operating system folders and default program installation folders, so the “Program Files” and “Windows” directories are conspicuous by their absence, are many of the subfolders from “Documents and Settings.”

Leaving out the system files is fair enough, though I don’t think you can make a truthful claim to back up an entire drive if you skip them. But there’s something else missing here, and it’s a pretty big oversight.

Not one of those folders contains my Outlook PST folder. For the uninitiated, Outlook stores all its data in a folder called Outlook.pst that’s stored in Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. You will notice there is no such folder here. That means that my e-mail, calendar, and contacts are not backed up. (Well, not by Memeo. I am, of course, backing them up.) Maybe the assumption is that everybody’s grandparents use Yahoo! or Gmail or Hotmail.

At least the fact that these files and folders neatly replicate the structure on your C drive means that it’s possible to restore a single file via drag and drop, because you can’t do it through the Memeo Instant Backup restore interface. The only option there is to restore all your files, though you do get the choice of whether to restore them to their original location or an alternative location. Whether you will ever then be able to delete them from that alternative location seems to be an open question.

Memeo Premium Backup lets you restore individual files and has other features that the less expensive Instant Backup lacks. I’ve written about its predecessors before if you’re interested.

Instant Backup seems to do a pretty good job at the things it does. I do think the lack of e-mail backup is a serious drawback for anyone who uses a POP mail client, and that the claim to back up “your entire drive” should be adjusted to something more factual. Nevertheless, I like the program as a tool for technophobes who need to back up their photos, documents, and music. It’s friendly, easy to use, and unobtrusive. It will also probably improve in subsequent versions, the way Memeo’s other products have.