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.

This week we have a guest column from my colleague Ted Prodromou of Net Biz Experts. Ted and I are both members of the Executive Team for the Bay Area Consultants Network. For those who are interested, he’s leading a series of free webinars about Web 2.0, and on February 8th, I’ll be presenting about podcasting.

I thought my non-geek readers would appreciate a story that demonstrates that even IT experts suffer from computer disasters.

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I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times, BACKUP YOUR DATA! I’ve heard it a million times and I’ve been telling my clients to back up their data for almost 30 years (am I really that old?) My friend Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with “sketch”) is a backup evangelist. She is the queen of backups and constantly reminds everyone she meets to back up your data at least once a week.

Of course I backup my data occasionally. I have backup programs installed on my computer but I don’t run them regularly because they take too long to run. I have tons of data on 3 computers and most of it isn’t backed up regularly even though I know better.

I was running out of disk space on 2 of my computers so I ventured down to Best Buy to check out the fancy new external USB hard drives. For almost nothing I could add more disk space than I can even fill up. I ended up purchasing 2 new hard drives, one portable 320 GB drive for my laptop and a 1 TB (yes that’s terabyte) drive so I could back up all 3 computers to one drive.

I ended up purchasing the Western Digital Passport portable drive that constantly syncs my data as it’s created. I also purchased the Western Digital MyBook terabyte hard drive so I could back up data from all 3 computers to a central location.

I ran home and plugged in my new Western Digital Passport and instantly it appeared on My Computer. No installation hassles. Nothing to configure. Presto I had more disk space instantly. I installed the Memeo backup software that comes installed on the drive and I was syncing my data with the Western Digital Passport in less than 5 minutes.

Next I installed the Western Digital MyBook on my other computer and instantly I had an entire terabyte of disk space to play with. I configured a backup with the Memeo software and I was backing up 3 computers to my Western Digital MyBook in no time. In less than one hour I had all 3 computers backing up to my Western Digital MyBook and my primary computer syncing data to my Western Digital Passport. Unbelievable!

And as fate would have it, today I turned on my computer and Outlook wouldn’t open. The PST database file was corrupt and the repair program could only salvage part of my data. I would have lost most of my email archive, my contact database and my calendar. Well I simply found the backup file on my Western Digital MyBook and I was back in business!

Thank you Sallie and thank you Western Digital. You are lifesavers!!

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Reposted from Ted’s Blog.

Okay, be honest: who forgot to back up last week? Anyone?

That’s the “Does anyone actually need me?” question. Because if you’ve all got your backups automated by now, does it matter whether I actually write this reminder? Do people even notice if I don’t produce one?

Not that I’m trying to let myself off the hook for not producing a post last week, mind you, but no one on my less-than-enormous mailing list (backups are never going to win the e-zine popularity contest) wrote to ask where I was last week. (I was at the Podcast Expo in Ontario, California, having a great time but with scarcely time to check my e-mail, never mind compose a Backup Reminder.)

Just because I was on the road doesn’t mean I didn’t back up. I took my new FreeAgent Go drive with me in a pocket of my laptop case, and it worked just fine. The Ur-Guru took all six of his Western Digital XHDs–and a lot of pictures, which you can see on Flickr if you search under the tag “newmediaexpo2007.” We heard more than a few people mention what they did to back up their photos and their audio and video files, but mostly it came down to DVDs (which they were trying to get away from) and external hard drives. Nothing really new there.

Nothing new from Seagate about my dead Shared Storage II, either. Oh, I had a bit of back and forth with the tech support team, who were baffled by the serial number I gave them and asked for a photo of the label and a proof of purchase. Um, guys? My point was that I didn’t purchase it at all. After I explained that and sent them everything they asked for, they decided to pass the buck to another division and told me they’d get back to me, which they haven’t.

Suggestions for more reliable NAS drives to replace the late Teras are welcome.

I also did a comparison test of Norton Ghost 8 versus TrueImage 9. The Ur-Guru has been using TrueImage on all his systems (actual and virtual) for some time now, and he suggested I try it. First I did a Ghost backup of my hard drive. It worked the way it always does, and took a good while but performed as expected. The TrueImage backup projected that it would take somewhat less time, but I got a strange error message in the middle, even though everything thereafter appeared to work normally and TrueImage told me it had completed the backup successfully.

“I wouldn’t trust that backup,” the Ur-Guru said. Well, no, not if I had to try to restore my whole system from it. So I’ll stick to using Ghost 8 until I find something that works better.

But why TrueImage should work for him–and many others–and not for me, I haven’t a clue.

I’ll conclude on a humorous note. The Ur-Guru and I attended the Halo 3 launch party in Silicon Valley on September 23rd. The only game I play on my computer is Solitaire, but I knew the guy organizing the party from the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology.

In addition to the gaming competitions, Microsoft was showing off some of its other projects, including the new improved Hotmail and the Silverlight/Popfly combination. We were talking to the Hotmail guy and I asked him what they did about backups.

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. “I know the answer to that question,” he said, “but I’m not sure I’m allowed to tell you.”