I’ve been an IT professional for over 25 years and to this day I am still paranoid about backups. I have seen grown people cry and I’ve seen years of work go away.
It seems that almost everyone thinks that they need backups but they don’t do them. So lets talk about the choices:
For folks that are not power users, a backup that runs in the background and just does the job is a great choice. There are two really good options for this; Mozy and Carbonite. Both of these programs are easy to install and just backup your system without any work by you. They backup your computer over the internet, encrypted, to their site. Now it will take some time to have your computer fully backed-up since they work in the background, but once it is complete, it just sends the files that have changed.
The cost is about the same, $4.95 a month for Mozy and $54.95 a year for Carbonite. Carbonite has a 15 day free trial and Mozy will give you 2GB free to try it out. Both have unlimited storage. Both work on PCs and Macs although Mozy was doing Mac backup for about a year before Carbonite. If you have multiple PCs or Macs to backup, you will need to pay the fee for each computer.
Between the two, I do like Mozy better. The reason is who is behind the software; EMC, one of the largest disk drive manufactures in the world. They have been in business for almost 30 years and will not be going away any time soon. Carbonite is a start up company that has been around for 4 years. You have to be careful when you deal with the companies in the cloud (Internet based applications); you want to make sure that your time and investment is not wasted. I generally always look at that when I use cloud based services to see how much risk I will be taking on by using the application.
If you want to manage the backup of your computer on your own, you can look at getting an external hard drive and perform the backup yourself. Just make sure that you store the drive somewhere other than the physical place the computer resides. If you are burglarized or if you God forbid your house would burn down you backup and system can be lost. If you were using a cloud based backup, that would not be the case.
You can also look at just raw storage on the internet from companies such as Jungle Disk. They will rent you disk space for pennies per gigabyte per month and it just appears as another driver on your system once it is setup. Jungle Disk is actually Amazon and you are taking advantage of the same technology that they use for their own systems. And yes the data is encrypted there as well.
For either an external hard drive or for Jungle Disk, you should look at using Microsoft’s SyncToy if you are running Windows. It is a marvelous application that will do all of the heavy lifting of managing a backup as well as running much faster than a standard copy.
So how often should you backup? It depends on how often your data changes and how much risk you wish to take. For me I try to use an automatic backup and also do a manual backup every week.
Start today.
Later,
matt
