Back in August, I posted a bit about my backup solution.  I’ve been doing a more work in this category and wanted to follow up.

First of all, you absolutely need to back up your most important data off-site.  I’ve been using a friend’s Subversion server, but there are now a number of free services.  Check out this pretty good roundup (from January) for some contenders.  I haven’t settled on a free provider, but I’ve selected iStorage for a client who needs more reliability and security (for a monthly fee).  If you’re backing up sensitive data, you might like the fact that it encrypts everything before sending it.  Also, make sure whoever you go with has software that’ll send success or failure e-mails: a non-running backup is just as bad as no backup!
Keep in mind that many personal offsite backup providers have clauses like this:

The Company may terminate the Agreement, or terminate or suspend your access to the Software at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice. Upon such termination or suspension, your right to use the Software will immediately cease. UPON SUCH TERMINATION OR SUSPENSION, ANY INFORMATION YOU HAVE STORED ON THE COMPANY’S HARDWARE AND/OR USING THE SOFTWARE MAY NOT BE RETRIEVED LATER, AT THE COMPANY’S SOLE DISCRETION.

If you’re relying on an offsite service as your sole backup, you’ll need to pay more for a place that will only terminate for cause, and will store copies of your data at multiple data centers.

Add that limitation to another: most of these services are only free or cheap for 5 gigs or so.  Clearly, you’ll need an additional solution.  Perhaps the easiest way to go is to get a fat external drive, and get an automated, incremental backup program that’ll do nightly diffs.  I use an entirely separate machine (as described in my previous post), but if you’re just backing up one computer, a Firewire/USB2.0 drive is easier.  For software, I use Backup4All because it’s really easy and has all the functionality I need.

Hard drive failure is not uncommon.  In recent years, backing up your data has become cheap and easy.  It won’t even take you an hour to set up.  Get to it!  If anyone has a favorite program or offsite service, let me know.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.