This week we have a guest post from Sally Davison from Fire Science Degree. And a good thing, too, because I’ve been so swamped that I still haven’t had time to test the StarTech SATA drive USB dock.

Online data storage is all the rage now; what with cloud service providers vying with one another to provide free storage for all your documents and other data, most people have moved all their stuff online. At the other end of the spectrum however are the naysayers and predictors of doom – they feel that the cloud is tenuous and unsafe and that your data could be seen by prying eyes, stolen by greedy opportunists, or lost due to ineffective backup and security measures. In spite of these varying opinions, the cloud is doing quite well and it seems like it’s here to stay. So the question that you need to ask yourself is, would you move your data to the cloud?

The answer is actually pretty simple – if your needs demand it, then by all means patronize the cloud; in my opinion, it’s the best thing that’s happened to data storage and file management. Online data storage offers a host of advantages:

• You don’t have to carry your data around with you – it’s easily accessible if you have a computer and an Internet connection.
• Most online file management systems sync the data on your system to the files online and vice versa – so when you update the files on your side, the master copy online is also updated when you save them. Similarly, when you download the stored data to your computer, the same file management system is maintained.

There are two kinds of online file management systems, and both have their benefits and drawbacks. One demands that you download software onto your system; however, you don’t have to explicitly upload your files every time you need to move them online – all you need to do is save them in a particular folder and if you’re connected to the net, the job is taken care of behind the scenes. The other does not ask you to download any kind of application, but you do have to upload your files every time you want them saved – it’s like storing attachments on your email, only a lot simpler and more convenient. You log in with your username and password and upload or download files as and when you need to.

If you do decide to store your data online with a random service provider, you must remember that there is a tiny possibility that it could fall into the wrong hands or be deleted for good. Using a second provider as backup is not a bad idea, but there’s still the chance that someone could get at your data if they had the means to. So if your data is very sensitive in nature and cannot fall into the wrong hands, it’s best to trust no one but yourself to safeguard it.

This guest post is contributed by Sally Davison, who writes on the topic of fire science degrees . She welcomes your comments at sally [dot] davison091 [at] gmail [dot] com.

There’s a certain irony to this, because I’m a laptop-only person, so I’m not going to be building my own computer anytime soon, but last week Dave Wiebe of the Build My Home Computer site asked if he could interview me about backups. I agreed, and the resulting interview is now posted on his site. Dave also has his own page about backup.

I didn’t reveal any deep, dark, never-before-mentioned secrets in the interview, but if you’re new to this blog, you might find it useful.

And if you’ve come here because of reading that interview, welcome! Hope you stick around for a while.

Last week I had a good talk with some people from KineticD, and I’m still exploring their product, which you’ll hear about next week. This week, however, we’re going on a little detour, courtesy of an experience with a client yesterday.

I was actually at the client’s house to work on other things (like adding Google Analytics to their Facebook pages), but while I was there, they asked me to check on backups, particularly for the Windows system. The backup drive they’d been using was wonky and they hadn’t replaced it yet.

What’s more, they’d been using Mozy to back up their Macs, but their Mac guy had just told them they couldn’t rely on it because of problems with restoring data. (To the Mozy people reading this, I have no direct experience with the problem and can’t tell you any more.)

I did suggest that the client check out KineticD for online backup, since it’s targeted at small businesses with multiple computers, but the $2/GB price structure would mean considerably more than they were paying Mozy, so they weren’t too enthralled with that idea.

So I suggested a NAS drive that they could back all the machines up to, Mac and PC, and printed out some datasheets on a couple of Buffalo’s models, since I’m familiar with their products thanks to my BFF Jay Pechek. I also believe that it’s good to have both local and online backups.

A little further conversation revealed that photos made up the great bulk of the 25+ GB the client was currently backing up with Mozy (and this was just the home office, mind you; the actual business has completely separate systems).

In that case, I said, why not use SmugMug to back up the photos?

SmugMug seems to be the best photo sharing service you’ve never heard of. Certainly my client hadn’t heard of it. But I keep hearing of it in more places. Professional photographers like it because you can sell photos directly from the site. And when I went over to check it out in more detail, I discovered that they actually offer a special backup service for your high-resolution RAW, TIFF, and PSD files, as well as your video. (Storage is provided by Amazon Web Services.)

Unlike my mother and the Ur-Guru, I’m not a serious photographer. I’m still learning how to use my camera, and I don’t shoot RAW. My hard drive is not filled with photos—though I confess that owning cats may change that. But anyone with children or grandchildren has photos to store, and the combination of a SmugMug account with the SmugVault service may well be the best deal available for both backup and sharing.

A basic SmugMug account is $39.95/year and lets you store unlimited .jpg, .gif, and .png files, so I could actually keep all of my cat photos up there at full resolution (about 4 MB apiece) without paying anything extra. And I think my client’s camera also shoots in JPG rather than RAW, so her 20 GB or so of photos would be cheaper to store on SmugMug than on Mozy, and she could display them, too.

For those of us who have amateur cameras, a Flickr Pro account might be sufficient for photo storage and backup. You get unlimited uploads of JPG files for $24.95/year. But the pros need to care for their RAW images, and the designers for their PSD files, and that’s where SmugVault comes in.

You activate SmugVault in your SmugMug control panel under “settings.”

When you click the “Get one!” link next to the SmugVault entry, you find yourself here:

So you need to hop on over to Amazon and sign up. You don’t need to have your own AWS account for this, just to have an Amazon account with a card on file so they can charge you your initial pro-rated payment. As usual with AWS, the billing is a bit confusing.

So it’s 22 cents per gigabyte for storage, but there are also upload and download (bandwidth) charges, and a minimum charge of $1/month. Compared to Mozy Pro’s 50 cents/gigabyte plus a monthly license fee, or KineticD’s $2/GB flat fee, that’s still pretty cheap, as long as you’re just uploading the files and leaving them there. As my podcaster friends have discovered, bandwidth charges are what will kill you with Amazon S3 and their other web services.

It’s easy to use the SmugVault interface. You just click the green “add files” button and create a gallery for the vault by selecting and uploading files from your drive. I selected 3 PSD files, one of them 41 MB in size, and they went up pretty quickly.

Once the files have been uploaded, you see more information in your main vault screen.

When you browse the archives, you can delete the files, hover over them for information, or click on them to be taken to their gallery, where you can download them.

Since I made this gallery private, people browsing around my site can’t see those files. You can also password-protect galleries, which is probably a good idea for your backups, since otherwise they won’t be very secure.

There are only two drawbacks. The first holds true for any online service: doing your first upload is going to be very time-consuming if you have a lot of photos. The second is that SmugMug doesn’t automatically upload your photos, so you have to remember to put them in your SmugVault. For some people, that’s a dealbreaker, but I’d still recommend it to anyone whose data consists primarily of photographs.

Last week I got a call from someone whose name I won’t reveal but whose story should be a lesson to everyone reading this. The person in question is someone who uses her laptop continually, but doesn’t know that much about it.

“My computer went black,” she said.

“Totally black?” I asked.

“No, it has white letters on it. It says ‘Operating system not found.’”

“Oh,” I said intelligently. “That’s not good. Have you been using the backup drive?” (I knew this person had a supposedly foolproof, plug-it-in-and-it-backs-you-up Rebit SaveMe drive.)

“No—it doesn’t fit on the desk.”

Beat. Head. On. Wall.

As with exercise, the best backup system is the one you’re going to use. This one had seemed just about foolproof, but you do have to actually connect the drive to the computer. And while online backup might be more foolproof, particularly for someone who’s usually connected, it’s not that practical for RAW photos in the thousands.

A simple reboot actually brought the operating system back, but only temporarily. The machine continued to crash, and the “check hardware” message made my client suspect (incorrectly) that the backup drive might be the cause of the problem, so she disconnected it before it could complete its backup cycle. (Though there really did seem to be something wrong there, as transfer speeds to that drive were insanely slow when I later tried to copy some photos to it directly. I had, however, tested the drive myself, and it performed normally with my own older and slower machine.)

A few days later, the Ur-Guru and I actually got to see the machine bluescreen. By this time I’d already looked through the Event Log without finding any explanations for the problems and checked the health of the hard drive with the Computer Management tool. We’d even cleared off about 100 GB of old photos so the drive wasn’t red-lining in the space department. Everything seemed normal, but obviously wasn’t—especially when the machine crashed again. This time it reported memory errors, so we tried running the Vista memory diagnostics tool. (I never use Vista, so didn’t know about this.)

The test reported no problems, but the machine was obviously having problems. The Ur-Guru downloaded Memtest86 to give the RAM a further workout.

Still no problems found. But the machine kept acting up. I hate problems I can’t understand, especially serious ones like that. At this point, voodoo starts to seem like a viable option.

The only remaining thing to try to see whether the problem was with the hardware or the software was to reinstall the machine—preferably with Windows 7 instead of Vista. But that would reformat the entire drive, erasing all the data. And there was no guarantee the drive (or other hardware) was really stable enough for that to work.

Or, of course, you could just replace the computer, in which case it might be possible to salvage the data by taking the drive out of the machine, putting it into a 2.5” drive case, and connecting it to the new machine by USB. But that’s a somewhat iffy proposition with a drive whose soundness is in question, and not something a novice computer user can do anyway.

This mysteriously failing laptop is less than two years old. There’s no real reason (well, apart from the Vista operating system) to expect it to have serious problems so soon. But you never know what’s going to happen to your computer, and that’s especially true for laptops, which are much more at risk of being dropped, spilled on, or stolen. That’s why you need to start backing your machine up as soon as you get it—or at least as soon as you start putting data on it.

In this case, it looks as if installing Windows 7 (and reformatting the hard drive) has restored the laptop to a functioning state, though it’s too soon to be sure. But everything that was stored on that 320 GB hard drive is gone now.

Don’t let it happen to you.

A couple of weeks ago a representative of Dmailer contacted me with information about their forthcoming, still-under-embargo release of a free version of their software that would also include 2 GB of free online storage. Because I have a bit of editorial backlog on this blog, it was not difficult to keep this news under wraps until after the official March 23rd announcement.

Dmailer is a French company (though the name is pronounced “Dee-mailer,” at least by English-speaking users), and the only person I know who uses their software is my colleague Lee Hopkins in Australia. When I posted a request for someone to write about it, quite some time back, no one responded, and by this time I’d stopped ever expecting to hear anything from Dmailer themselves. But with this push into the crowded online backup market, they clearly want as much coverage as they can get, in as many markets as possible.

Like Mozy, Dmailer gives you 2 GB free online backup. Unlike Mozy, Dmailer also gives you a full-featured offline backup product, Dmailer Backup v3.

There are definitely advantages to being able to use the same software for your online and offline backups. Fewer programs to install and manage. Less space taken up on your hard drive by those programs. Just one interface to get to know. Less likelihood that the two will interfere with one another. And, perhaps the most important for the “set it and forget it” generation (which is most of us, given the option)—no extra steps to take to make sure you have both local and online backups covered, at least not once you’ve signed up for your online backup account.

In theory, anyway.

Installing Dmailer Backup v3 was easy. The user interface is attractive and easy to understand, and leads you through each of the steps, giving you several options along the way.

First, you choose your installation location: “Dmailer Backup must be installed on an external storage drive.” The program recognizes both USB and network storage as well as secondary internal disks. I chose the USB drive with the most available space on it for the test.

Next, Dmailer asks whether you want automatic, continuous backup of certain folders, or to choose what to back up. I chose to customize, but novice users will find that automatic option extremely comforting and convenient.

If you’re customizing your backups, you can do so both by file location and by file type. Personally, I don’t need my desktop backed up (nothing there but a very few shortcuts; I don’t know why people clutter their desktops with folders), but I do want my Outlook data copied. (Note that “e-mail messages” is not an option under “file types”—if you want your e-mail backed up, you have to back up the folder where it gets stored.)

Then there are the Backup Settings. The one to watch out for here is “Live Backup” That means Dmailer runs in the background and backs files up continuously as you change them. For some types of files and some people, this is great. It’s the essence of continuous data protection.

For me, on the other hand, it’s trouble. There are some kinds of files you can’t back up while they’re open, notably Quicken data files and Outlook data files. And then there’s what happens if you’re running a continuous backup program while you’re recording audio or video. The computer overloads and freezes, or at least that’s what happened to me with Memeo Instant Backup. So I turn that feature off, because I can’t count on remembering to turn the backup program off when I need to record something, and I can put a shortcut to the program in the Startup folder so I get a backup whenever I boot my system, which is often enough for me.

Once I’d been through all these options, I saved the backup job and started backing up.

The program works pretty quickly; it copied my 12.7 GB of files over in an hour.

Despite offering versioning and password protection, Dmailer doesn’t use any kind of proprietary format to store your backups, so you can just drag a file back from the backup folder to restore it. Or you can use the restore wizard to restore as many or as few of those files as you want.

The next step after local backup is online backup, but for some reason I ran into trouble here. Even though I filled in all the fields, read the EULA and clicked the button to say I had, I kept getting an error when I tried to create an account.

I tried with a different e-mail account; same result. Tried logging in on the website in case the error message was a mistake; no luck. I figured it would take forever to hear back from support, because it’s Easter Weekend.

When I re-started Dmailer a bit later and filled in the product registration information, however, I was suddenly able to create an online account. Maybe that was the missing link, or maybe whatever was glitching got fixed.

Success bred its own problems, however. Dmailer suddenly sucked up all my CPU cycles as it began running the online backup—before I had even configured it. Which was a big oops, since I needed to specify a much smaller subset of folders to back up online in order to stay within that 2 GB limit. But unless you click “Advanced Settings,” Dmailer will use the same backup definitions for your online backup as for your offline backup.

I eventually managed to fight my way through to the settings I wanted, apply them, turn off the “start online backups automatically” option, stop the backup that was in process, and start over again. I then clicked the “Go Online” button to see whether I could remove anything that I hadn’t wanted backed up.

This, fortunately, is perfectly possible. Just click those little blue drop-down arrows and select “Delete” if you want to get rid of something. (You also have the option to download it, so you can restore the file to a computer without the Dmailer software installed, or to share it.)

Upload speeds are not what I’d call record-setting, but they’re certainly no slower than Mozy. It wouldn’t hurt Dmailer to add in an option that let you determine how much of the computer’s resources to dedicate to the backup, however. I know Enna is getting on in years and her RAM and processor aren’t impressive by 2010 standards, but given the length of time any online backup usually takes, it’s a good idea to be able to relegate it to the background and get on with other things, unless you plan to run it overnight.

Minor issues aside, however, Dmailer Online Backup looks like a viable alternative to Mozy Home Free, combined with a solid offline backup tool. Whether it will scale as well as the EMC-owned Mozy remains to be seen, but if you don’t have an online backup solution yet, this is a good place to start.