Seems like everyone’s talking about backup these days. Last week it was Marketing Over Coffee; this week it’s Morning Announcements from Dave Jackson’s School of Podcasting.
Dave had a sudden realization: if he didn’t save the uncompressed (WAV) version of his audio files, he would never be able to re-edit the episodes into an audio book and sell it the way Grammar Girl is. The problem with uncompressed audio—or uncompressed anything else, for that matter—is that it takes up a lot of space.
Now Dave has seen the light when it comes to online backup:
“So I found this tool. It’s called Carbonite. I’ve talked about it on all my podcasts because I think it’s so cool. I have backed up 52,609 files on my computer—13 Gigs—for fifty bucks a year.
Here’s how this works. What I’m gonna do is save this as a WAV file. Carbonite will back it up and move it offline to this great hard drive in the sky. So if not only does my computer burn down, but my CD backups and my office burn down, my podcast files are off in this hard drive in the sky. If a publisher says ‘Hey, can we take some of this and turn it into a book’ all I have to do is use their Easy Restore function and download it to my hard drive.
All you have to do is save it as a WAV file. Probably overnight, Carbonite will upload that WAV file to the hard drive in the sky, and then you can delete it off your hard drive. You’ve already got it saved out there in Carbonite-land.
I’ve never been totally sucked into a product like this one, just because it’s so easy. And in my opinion, five bucks—less than five bucks—a month is affordable, because I do website design, I help people with their podcasts, I have all my customer files, and I don’t have to worry about if my hard drive crashes.
My girlfriend’s computer crashed about a week ago, and it just wouldn’t boot up. She had all these family photos, she had the wireless router settings on there, things like that. We eventually got it back. It was kind of costly, kind of time-consuming, but if she had backed up her computer, we wouldn’t have had that problem.”
(You can listen to Dave tell the story in his own voice (starting at 15:23). Quotation used with permission.)
Dave even recorded a Camtasia video demonstrating how to use Carbonite.
There are a few points to note here:
- If you want unlimited online backup (which you will for those large media files), you generally have to pay, but you don’t necessarily have to pay very much.
- Right now, Carbonite is only available for PCs running Windows XP or Vista, but a Mac version is due out in mid-2008. You can try MozyHome Unlimited in the meantime; it’s $4.95/month, so pricing is comparable.
- Don’t even think about using an online backup solution unless you have high-speed Internet.
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