Sometimes I get backup questions from readers. They make my life much easier, as I don’t have to think about what to write. On May 18th I got a query from Brenton Webster. It’s a question I hadn’t been asked before.

I came across your blog looking for some sync software to support a specific scenario, and thought I’d drop you a line and see if you might have a suggestion.

I recently introduced a Windows Home Server into my network, but unfortunately my Mozy client won’t back up from my network drive. The Home Server gives me a good local backup solution, but I want something offsite as well. My solution to this problem is to sync my Home Server content (the master copy) to a local drive on one of my client machines and then have Mozy back up from the local drive. This copy on the client machine will not be used for anything but sending data to Mozy.

I’m looking for an efficient way to sync from my Home Server to my client machine, ideally something that can just monitor changes on the Home Server and sync them to the client machine (a) in real time when the client machine is available (the client machine won’t always be on) or (b) queue up those changes and sync whenever the client machine is available again. Ideally this would be program on the Windows Home Server and require no installation on the client machine. I’m using SyncToy 2.0 at the moment, but it’s way too slow since it needs to compare all of the files (224,000+ files totaling about 150Gb) and then propagate the changes.

I was wondering if you might have some pointers to sync software that would be appropriate for this scenario? Thanks in advance for your help!

What a great question! I’d never actually heard of SyncToy before, but the “toy” part of its name and the fact that it’s a free download from Microsoft should cue you in to the fact that it’s not meant for heavy-duty use. It looks from the description as if it’s not too bad a tool for all that, but it’s clearly not cutting it for Brenton.

So I had to think a bit, and I passed the question on to the Ur-Guru so he could think about it, too. There are many file backup and sync tools that continually monitor your drive for changes, but few of them meet requirement (b). In fact, the only one I’ve used myself is Memeo Autobackup. I used to have a backup setup for the V drive, which I only use when traveling, and it would just save up the changes until I connected the drive.

There’s another problem here, though, the same one Brenton has with Mozy. Many home-user backup products will not back up from a network drive, which is what Windows Home Server is. (Some won’t even back up to a network drive, though as consumer NAS becomes more popular, that’s less common.) And, in fact, the version of Memeo that came with my Buffalo drives doesn’t do the trick. To back up from Windows Home Server to a second machine, Brenton would need Memeo Backup Professional. Naturally that costs more than the regular version of Memeo: $79.95 (discounted from $99.95) to Memeo Backup 4’s $29.95 (discounted from $39.95).

The Ur-Guru suggested SyncBack Pro, which he uses to run fiendishly complex backup routines on his world-famous array of workstations. At $49.95, it’s less expensive than Memeo. I use SyncBack Free, which seems quite fast and efficient at doing that file compare-and-copy between my C drive and my D drive, but it doesn’t have as many configuration options as the pro version.

Brenton promised to let me know what kind of results he gets.

Of course, he could also try another approach: looking for an online backup company that will back up from Windows Home Server. I’m guessing he already has a commitment, possibly financial, to Mozy, and that makes moving somewhat problematic. In any case, most of the inexpensive online backup services are focused on the consumer market, and aim at backing up your internal hard drive. For backup from a NAS drive, you might need to investigate continuous data protection of the enterprise sort—and that doesn’t come cheaply. Brenton’s solution is more economical.

But if you’re an online backup service that backs up from NAS drives (or from any external drive), write in and tell the readers about it. And if you’ve got a backup or sync program that will solve Brenton’s problem for him, tell me so I can pass it on. (That’s sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com, if you don’t want to post a comment to the blog. Note that blog comments are moderated, and it may take me a while to get to them.)

And if you have a backup question of your own, feel free to send it in!

When I got the invitation to interview the CEO and CTO of “online data manager” SpiderOak, my first thought was “Another one!” Everyone and his brother seems to be starting an online backup service these days, and I’ve written about quite a few of them already. I agreed to the interview with Ethan and Alan with some skepticism. Would there really be anything new here?

Actually, yes. SpiderOak bills itself as five services in one, though the fifth, sync, isn’t finished yet. Ethan and Alan told me that they actually focus their marketing on the file-sharing features, because backup is just not sexy enough. (Don’t I know it.)

But there are a lot of file-sharing services out there, too. That wasn’t going to do it for me. Fortunately for all of us (they’re likeable guys and I’d hate to diss their product), there’s more.

If you’re a multi-platform family (for a while I had both a Mac and a PC, and these days Linux-based UMPCs are becoming popular), SpiderOak has a definite advantage over Windows-only services, because it lets you share files between your Mac, your PC, and your Linux machine. It also lets you connect multiple machines to the same account. They bill by the amount of storage space you use, not the number of computers you connect. If you’ve ever contended  with the need to license multiple “seats” of the same program, you’re sure to appreciate that.

You can also subscribe to a SpiderOak “share room” via RSS feed. Like most bloggers, I’m an RSS fan, and I hadn’t encountered that in relation to a backup service before.

What really caught my attention, however, was the claim to be “zero-knowledge backup.” That means that SpiderOak has no idea what you’re backing up or sharing. Alan explained it this way:

We know absolutely nothing about the content of a user’s data. Most storage companies when they do encryption, if they do encryption at all, maybe they just do it during the transmission, but the files are still stored in plain text. With Mozy, for example, you have to choose a different option to use your own key, and if you don’t choose that option, then Mozy can decrypt your files at any time, so it’s sort of like they’re not really encrypted. Even if you do choose your own keys, they still know all of your file names, and your file sizes, and the time the file was stored, which is a tremendous amount of information to know about somebody’s data.

At SpiderOak we only see sequentially-numbered encrypted data blocks. We have some idea of how much space you’re using after it’s been compressed and de-duplicated, but that’s really about all we know.

The Ur-Guru insists that if SpiderOak built the software, they could crack the encryption. (The exact quote was “If they really wanted to know the names of files, details, or even copy and extract they could do that. They designed the system so saying things like ‘even we can’t look at it’ is more or less a statement that is aimed at inspiring confidence but in reality means nothing at all.”) I’m not in a position to dispute the ways and means of software with him, yet I found what Alan told me compelling. It still sounds more secure than the alternatives, except possibly in cases like Spare Backup where they use a third-party escrow service to hold your encryption key.

The password-creation screen in SpiderOak explains their zero-knowledge policy this way:

SPIDEROAK WILL NEVER KNOW YOUR PASSWORD AND, THEREFORE, WILL NEVER HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR DATA. ALL OF THE DIGITAL POSSESSIONS STORED ON YOUR SPIDEROAK NETWORK WILL BE IN AN UNREADABLE CRYPTOGRAPHICALLY SECURE FORMAT FROM THE MOMENT THE DATA LEAVES YOUR COMPUTER, THOUGH THE ENTIRE STORAGE PROCESS, UNTIL IT ARRIVES SAFELY BACK ON THE DEVICE OF YOUR CHOOSING. TO RETRIEVE THE DATA YOU HAVE STORED ON SPIDEROAK, YOUR PASSWORD IS ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED. PLEASE MAKE A RECORD OF THE PASSWORD THAT YOU HAVE SELECTED. SHOULD YOU FORGET YOUR PASSWORD, SPIDEROAK WILL STORE A ‘PASSWORD HINT’ TO HELP YOU RECOVER YOUR PASSWORD. THE ‘PASSWORD HINT’ CAN BE RETRIEVED ON THE SPIDEROAK WEB PAGE ANYTIME.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO E-MAIL US ANYTIME AT: PASSWORD@SPIDEROAK.COM.

Given that I’m already taking my chances with Mozy, and haven’t had any problem there, I didn’t hesitate to download an install SpiderOak. Setup is simple, and the program has an attractive interface. SpiderOak recognized my network drives and external hard drives immediately. One curiosity: it doesn’t seem to see the !Author-izer, !FileSlinger, and !Podcast Asylum folders on my C drive, though it can see them just fine on the D drive. Those are the folders with all my business data in them (barring the Quicken data and Outlook data, which live elsewhere), so not being able to see them is a bit of an issue, but since I have everything in those files backed up to the D drive, it’s only a minor issue for me. And it probably wouldn’t be an issue for ordinary users, who probably don’t name their folders with ! or keep them outside “My Documents.”

There are several handy video tutorials for the different features on the SpiderOak website, and even screenshots from all three supported operating systems. These helped explain to me that when the backup was finished, the status would say “built” instead of showing a number representing percentage complete. Not that the explanation does much to speed up the initial upload time for the videos I recorded yesterday at the BACN Board holiday party, but that’s a bandwidth problem as much as anything. Perhaps when Comcast finally rolls out its 50-megabit cable service, the Ur-Guru and I can split the bill.

Meanwhile, I’m going to experiment with SpiderOak a bit. If you still don’t have a backup system, maybe you should, too. One thing they do have in common with Mozy is a free service with 2 GB of storage.

This is not the Backup Reminder I was planning to write this week. Either of them. But I woke up without my higher mental functions this morning and was dozing the day away playing Solitaire (not a good idea when you have a banjaxed wrist) until I got a notice saying there were packages to pick up.

One of the packages was the monochrome laser printer I’d ordered in order to conserve the expensive ink used by the Epson Artisan 800. The other was a box from Mozy. When I saw the box, I remembered that they’d said they would be sending some goodies.

The box contained two T-shirts, a DVD, and a card good for one year of Mozy Home Unlimited. The T-shirts are the best part, with the provocative injunction to “Back the F:\ Up!” emblazoned on them in bright orange. (They’re also rather provocatively see-through.)

I do, in fact, back my F:\ drive up, daily, to my L:\ drive. But I only started doing that recently. Most people (if they aren’t the Ur-Guru) don’t even have an F:\ drive. But anyone who understands Windows’ drive lettering system will get the joke.

The T-shirts are part of a new campaign by Mozy, which may be feeling the pressure to differentiate from its many competitors. (One of the columns I was thinking of writing today involves a new online backup service, about which more next week.)

The other part of the campaign is explained on the DVD: the computer nightmare video contest. Submit your 60-second video about your worst computer nightmare (staged or real) for a chance to win an assortment of snazzy prizes, including some Mac hardware and a Flip video camera. (Excuse me, but if you’re capable of making a video to enter in the contest, do you need a Flip video camera?)

In honor of all this excitement, and because I can’t see myself actually wearing that T-shirt in public, I’m going to have my own contest, and give away the T-shirts and the test license. (I do fine with Mozy free.) Just post a comment to my blog before next week’s backup reminder appears and tell me when and how you last backed up. Note that the T-shirts are size medium (the one I’m wearing in the picture) and large (not very large, given how snug the medium is on me, and I usually wear a small). If there are more comments than prizes, I’ll select one at random. Make sure you give me a way to get in touch with you!

Until next week—back the F:\ Up. Or at least back the C:\ up.

Today’s Backup Reminder comes courtesy of Caroline Xerxes, who posted a comment to the Backup Blog asking us to cover BackUPMax. (Apparently there are two spellings of this: the personal version is BackUPMax and the business version is BackUPMAX.) She explained that she’d switched to them after problems with Mozy.

Since I’d never actually heard of BackUPMax, I invited her to write the review herself, and here it is.

I used to be a customer of Mozy. However, after months of poor customer service and virtually non-existent technical support, I decided it was time to look for another solution for my data backup needs.

After some digging, I found a company called BackUPMax. They are a technology partner of Remote Backup Systems, a company in business since 1987, the largest distributors of online backup software in the world, and the original founders of online data backup. Their pricing was reasonable for the features I was looking for (less than five bucks a month), and I liked the look and feel far better than Carbonite and iDrive, which I also considered. So, I downloaded their free trial.

The software turned out to be extremely user-friendly and versatile. Accounting data, pictures, word documents, spreadsheets… It backed up everything I needed it to, and the software does not have a cap set on individual file size. They don’t allow backup of music or movies yet, but they say it’s on the agenda. It even backs up open and locked files. Since it does not require configuration of Windows VSS, it will back up open files on any Windows system, regardless of whether the system is NTFS or FAT32.

Once you’ve got everything set up the way you like it, the backups run automatically with no interference from you. They use military-grade 448-bit encryption, so no one can see your files but you. A 128-256-bit SSL is used to protect your files during transmission to their two different data centers.

I really like their restore interface, as well; you can restore a file using the BackUPMAX software itself or from another computer using their web interface. (It stores up to three different versions for a full 45 days; you can choose one of the three, or just select “show most recent version.”) Since the software will run on both Windows and Macintosh machines, you can restore a file to a PC that you originally backed up from your Mac.

BackUPMAX also offers something neither Mozy nor Carbonite offer: the Security Suite. If your laptop is stolen, you can log into the BackUPMAX website from any computer to activate any of the options included. It can use the computer’s onboard webcam to take pictures and record video/audio of the thief, halt all BackUPMAX operations, send details of the networks it has connected to, or even shred the hard drive so the thief can’t access your data. There is also a geo-location function that can help pinpoint the location of your laptop without a GPS, using only your laptop’s built-in network card.

BackUPMAX also provides a business edition, for the backup and restore of Windows Server operating systems, as well as SQL and Exchange servers.

All in all, this software provided everything Mozy does and then some, for the same price. The customer support is fabulous, the technical support team is responsive and knowledgeable, and I get the security and reliability I wanted from an online backup service. Needless to say, I am now a paying customer.

If you have a favorite backup product that you’d like to write about, send your review (along with your contact information) to sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.

If you’re thinking of signing up for Mozy Home Unlimited (the $4.95/month plan for Mac and PC users), now is probably the time to do it. In honor of Apple’s new product launch, Mozy decided to offer a 20% discount on Mozy subscriptions—even if you didn’t buy a new MacBook. (And yes, even if you use Windows; I checked.)

To get your discount, sign up for Mozy Home Unlimited by tomorrow and enter the code “CelebrateApple” in the discount code box.