Yep, this is late again. Sorry. I had a completely insane week last week. Part of the insanity gave me the topic for this week’s Backup Reminder, but I had to sleep for two days before I could write it.
I hardly do any computer consulting work anymore, but I have a few legacy clients (not to mention the occasional friend or family member) who can persuade me to wade into the trenches now and again. In this case, the client had temporary custody of my Maxtor OneTouch Plus drive (otherwise known as Mama Bear, but designated “P” for “Plus” in my drive lettering system), so I had an added motive.
In any case, most of the job was more than usually straightforward, and I was starting to feel pretty good about everything. The new machine is a perfectly decent piece of hardware, running XP with 2 GB RAM, which meant it was a lot speedier and easier to work with than the old one. (We will pass over all the problems the client had setting it up; I was spared involvement at that point.) Copying data from Mama Bear onto the new machine and the laptop—no problem. (It just needed a new USB cable, as someone had stepped on the connector for the old one and bent it into an interesting but non-useful shape.) Consolidating Outlook data into one file—easy. Replacing the expired trial anti-virus—made easier by recommendations from the LinkedIn community. Etc.
Then we came to setting up the Dell DataSafe™ online backup account that my client had purchased with her computer back in March. Supposedly, a free year’s subscription had been included in the package, but either she never received the username and password necessary to access the account, or it had gotten lost in the course of previous disputes with Dell Tech Support. The invoice listed the account as a line item, but provided no useful information.
My client ended up spending 90 minutes on the phone with Dell, bouncing back and forth between Customer Care and Tech Support, who insisted that she was supposed to activate her account within 30 days of purchase. That was after I’d led the Tech Support guy through all the appropriate screens and files to show him that no, really, we hadn’t been given any information and there wasn’t an option for “I already got a subscription with my computer” in the sign-up section.
Now, given that a one-year’s subscription for 3 GB storage costs all of $9, trying to get credit for what my client had already paid for was almost certainly not worth the cost of either my time or hers. But I wasn’t about to hand Dell her money without her permission, either.
I went through the process of setting up the free 30-day trial account, and that was easy enough to do. You enter your e-mail address and create a password, and then download some software. (You don’t have to provide credit card information at that time.) It’s no harder than setting up, say, Mozy.
But I ran into a problem fairly early on. Among the various files I’d copied onto the 500 GB hard drive of the new PC were several backups of Outlook data files, with varying dates on them. Even though none of the individual .pst files was unusually large (for a .pst file), the combination of those files with the ones already in the folder with the current file meant that there were more than 3 GB of .pst files alone.
I’ve run into the “over quota” problem with Mozy a few times—and I don’t even back up my .pst files online. It’s not that hard, in this day and age, to accumulate more than 2 (for Mozy’s free service) or 3 (for DataSafe’s free trial) gigabytes of data. Online backup always requires prioritizing your data.
With Mozy, I usually collect large files that push me over quota and don’t really need to be backed up offsite into a sub-folder and then exclude that sub-folder from the backup configuration.
I could not find a way to do this with Dell DataSafe. There are two options for selecting the files to be backed up: by overall type of file (documents, e-mail, financial, photos, music, video), or by file extension. So I could either tell it to back up all the Outlook data files, or none of them. “All” wouldn’t fit, and “none” isn’t such a good choice for someone who doesn’t have another backup system in place.
In the short term, my client’s options are either to increase the size of her account (10 GB is only $19/year) or to copy the older Outlook files onto a DVD and then delete them from her hard drive to keep her within her 3 GB.
In the longer term, however, the inability to tell DataSafe which specific documents are critical and need backing up is going to be a problem. Even with duplicates and archives cleared out, data will start to accumulate. Everything takes up more storage space these days, and with families owning multiple digital cameras and videocams, it starts to fill up. And those photos and videos are just the kind of thing people don’t want to lose, whether or not they have any intrinsic or business value.
Because online transfer speeds—particularly for uploading data—are inconveniently slow, backing up an entire 500 GB drive online isn’t likely to become feasible any time soon. So it would probably be a good idea for my client to get an external hard drive or a NAS drive as an offline backup method.
But as long as DataSafe doesn’t let you decide exactly which files and folders to back up, she’s also going to need a different online backup service.
I’ve already put Mozy onto her laptop.
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The exact thing happened to me. I purchased a new dell laptop and they said that it came with the Dell Datasafe. The application was never on my computer, though it was a line item on my receipt. Like you said, I had to call dell and get them to set up my account free. The only good thing is that they made a mistake and gave me the 50GB account instead of the free 3GB account that is advertised. The only thing that I do not like about the Dell Datasafe is that it takes forever for files to backup! If I read your blog correctly I understood that you couldn’t select specific files to backup. Well, now they have included that feature so that is not a problem now.
Please, does anyone know how to delete large Dell Datasafe backup files? I inadvertantly backed up some large files and need to delete them to free up some Dell Datasafe space.
Bob,
I work on the DataSafe program and just noticed this blog. To exclude a large file, open DataSafe and click the “Edit Plan” button. This will bring you to where you can select specific files. Click on “folder view” at the bottom and this will allow you to navigate and choose a specific file to remove.
All,
Thanks for the feedback on the DataSafe product. We have made improvements to the product based on customer feedback and have simplified the setup. In addition to backup and recovery, you can also go to http://www.delldatasafe.com to login and access or send a file to someone if you are not in front of your computer.
Thanks,
Marc
Thanks for taking the time to post here Marc. I hope Bob sees your answer. If there are any Dell users who would like to write about the new version of DataSafe, I’d be happy to hear from them.
Last weekend I had a catastrophic problem that wiped out my harddrive. I had to reinstall everything. I thought, luckily I have all my files on dell datasafe. Well, I have been downloading my 8 GB of data for more than 24 hours and I am only at 22%. If my network connection blips I will probably lose what is transmitting and have to start again. I estimate this will take about 5 days to get all my data back if I’m lucky and in the meantime it’s not like I have access to what is downloading. I am soooooo disappointed in dell datasafe I will be switching online data storage as soon as I get my files back from dell.
All
I can only agree with all of this. I paid £14.99 for one year of 10GB and it took forever to back up. I have tried to log onto their website. Sometimes it accepts your user name and password, sometimes not. When it does there is an option to unsubscribe and get your money back. Guess what, It always fails – What a con !!
I also purchased a new Dell XPS computer, and attempted to evaluate the free datasafe program. I set it to run only document files with no music, picture or videos which would have exceeded the capacity of the program.
Somehow, the files selected were large enough to almost fill the available space. I got an error message to this effect.
I have looked on-line, and through all the program options, but find no mention about how to delete files within the datasafe. Therefore, I have never for the last 3 months had a successful backup.
In addition to the frustration of this not working, I am concerned about control of the files that are on the Datasafe location. They belong to me, are a security issue, and I find no means to delete them.
Please help, thanks,
Al
Marc never answered Bob’s question. He only told him how to exclude large files from being uploaded to Dell Datasafe. I want to know how to delete my large files that I backed up to datasafe. Does anyone have any ideas?
I concur with Jan and Marc. I have a similar issue. I backed up while a PC was on Vista and subsequently downgraded to XP so the path to the data is wrong and I do not have enough space purchased to back it all up again. I need to delete the first backup that has everything under “Users”. How is that done?
Alas, I can’t offer any help here. I only used it the one time. Little as I like saying it (since it seems most of you have tried without much success), my only recommendation is to get help from Dell. See if you can reach Richard Binhammer (Richard@Dell on Twitter and elsewhere.)
I concur with Jan and Bob. I have a similar issue. I backed up while a PC was on Vista and subsequently downgraded to XP so the path to the data is wrong and I do not have enough space purchased to back it all up again. I need to delete the first backup that has everything under “Users”. How is that done?
looking for good backup method
What are you backing up? How much data is there? What degree of redundancy is required? The best method depends on your needs, though in general it’s good to have both local and offsite backups. Online backup solutions are best for small quantities of important data; local backups, including complete drive images, can contain software and system information as well as data. If you have a local network, you may want to use a network drive rather than a USB drive for local backups. You might prefer scheduled backups to continuous backups, or vice-versa–the continuous backups mean you lose less in the event of a crash, but they use system resources in the background.
I like the automatic backup feature and I like the customization options as far as what gets uploaded. Unfortunately I’ve had multiple hard drive failures on my dell laptop—which ultimately turned out to be a motherboard issue after several hard drive replacements. Anyway, thanks to Dell Data Safe I never lost any of my files in between hardware failures. The only drawback seems to be that it takes…FOREVER to download anything. But the files are definitely there at least.
It’s possible that the service has improved since I wrote that post in 2008. Indeed, I certainly hope it has. And just about any backup is better than no backup at all.
I am backing up on Dell datasafe online’s latest version…I think 2.0. It has been running for 36 hours and still says it has 21 hours to go! I did not check to backup video, music or photos! My files aren’t that big and I think something must be wrong, but hate to stop it. If I do, will it just quit at 36% done or not copy anything? This is not my first backup, but is the first backup with the latest version just downloaded.
Hi, Pat.
It sounds like something is wrong. I’m not sure whether the backup will be lost entirely if you cancel it, but there’s a possibility. You should probably contact Dell support.
My Dell system TAG is DY8K6Q1, I have also talking and very tired with this laptop, Dell team saying always false, because I have suffer with some points like this::
1) Mother board change 16 times.
2) Display change 15 Times
3) Touch pad change 12 Times
4) Charger change 5 times
5) Battery change 1 times
6) RAM Change 6 time both 4GB & 2GB both.
7) Team always saying false commute like latest case talk with Sr. Dell team but saying to me some other doing other things.
8) Always saying date lapse on the date time etc…
9) Dell team very false saying how can trust him. I am also customer of Dell but very unsatisfied of this.
10) Hard disk change 8 times
11) Heat Sink fan change 12 Times
If any person saying / verifying /asking to contact me on 9716985152
System Configuration: DY8K6Q1 DELL XPS L502