I know this isn’t one of those exciting topics. Listening to people talk about backing up your data is about exciting as listening to your mom tell you to eat your vegetables, but recently I was reminded about how important it is.
My wife had planned a night out to go scrap-booking with one of her friends, and really wanted to work on our sons baby book (he’s 4 now, so we are a little behind here). It was my job show her where I keep the pictures on the computer so she could upload them to Costco to get printed. Problem, the folder with the pictures from the month my son was born had disappeared. No problem I thought, just go to my backup. Now where are those back-up disks I made so long. Not in my desk…not in our fire-safe…not in the box of random disks I cleaned out of my desk because I didn’t have room. My heart sank, I couldn’t believe that I lost those pictures. This really made me evaluate my backup strategy.
So what did I come up with to make sure this didn’t happen again?
- Time Machine – I’m a Mac user, so luckily I have this as an option. I picked up a cheap external drive plugged it in and told it what I wanted to back-up. It does it automatically, and I don’t have to worry about it. Recently I’ve heard of some people saying their time machine backups hadn’t ran in a while, so if you’re using Time Machine just watch the date of your last backup from time to time to make sure it’s running. PC users, don’t have this built in, but many of the external drives now come with backup software that work similarly. So that may be a good solution.
- Mozy – Time Machine works great, until your house burns down or your external drive dies (this happens more often that you think) so it’s always good to have a backup that not at the same place as your computer. Think of it as a backup for your backup. I’ve chosen to use Mozy for this. It’s a great solution in the “cloud” (meaning you backup across the Internet to Mozy’s servers). Their software works great, and you set it up and it runs automatically. They have a PC and a Mac version so they have you covered. Super Easy and secure. Unlimited backup is only $4.95 a month, or they have a free version that gives you 2 GBs of space. I would recommend the free version just to try it out and backup your ultra critical data, and it’s free. Try it HERE.
Bottom-line, is that really protecting your data is going to cost you, but it’s better than loosing it. And I did find my backup disk by the way and recovered the pictures, but I feel a lot better now that I have a better plan in place.
How do you backup your data?
Time machine is great. For anything that is mission-critical for me (not pictures, mp3s, etc.) I e-mail it to myself at my gmail account. Right now they have allotted me 7.1 gigs of storage, and I figure if google’s servers go down, the world is probably ending anyway so I won’t need the data for much longer after that. It’s not great for huge files, but for most everything else it works fine and is cheap as free.