Yesterday was World Backup Day (really), which prompts me to ask: do you backup the photos, music, videos and documents on your home computer or laptop?
According to an October 2010 Online Safety Study conducted by Zogby in conjunction with the National Cyber Security Alliance and Symantec (the folks who make Norton PC safety products), 37 percent of you never back-up your digital valuables, but of those of you who do backup, only 12 percent do so daily. Good for you.
Not backing up isn't like not brushing your teeth or forgetting to lock your car. You can always get a new car. But losing all that irreplaceable stuff stored on your computer's hard drive is no April Fools joke.
Still not worried about not backing up? Consider two things:
First, Japan. Natural disasters happen. Fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, tornado – tsunami. What can take away your house and your life will wipe out your memories and work as well.
Second and more immediate, your computer's hard disk drive is a ticking time bomb. It is a mechanical contraption. Like any mechanical device, your hard drive will wear out – that's not an "if," it's a "when." And, when it wears out and fails (an event commonly referred to as "crashing" – I assume you've heard the term) –
Poof!
There go all your photos, videos, music and documents. Gone, baby, gone.
Have I scared you?
Good.
How to backup
There are three ways to backup: recordable DVD or Blu-ray, an external hard drive, and using an online storage service, referred to as "the cloud."
Each method has its pros and cons.
DVD/Blu-ray
Pros: The most permanent and safest method of storage. If you use a gold archival disc from companies such as Delkin Devices or Verbatim, your data will be safe for hundreds of years (those cheap silver discs could begin to deteriorate in as short as a decade) – as long as you'll be able to find a DVD or Blu-ray player to connect to a PC.
Cons: DVD or Blu-ray recordable discs are the most expensive storage-per-gigabyte (GB) of the three options, as high as $1 per GB for a gold Blu-ray disc). A DVD only offers 4.7 GB of space, although a Blu-ray blank can store as much as 50 GB.
My advice: As soon as I create a new photo album – the most irreplaceable of all my digital possessions, I burn the photos to a gold DVD which I then put in a safe, fire-proof place.
External Hard Drive
Pros: The cheapest form of back-up storage – you can buy a 1 terabyte (TB) drive (that's 1,000 gigabytes) for less than $100 – that's less than 10 cents a GB, if my math is right. It's also the easiest to backup to – many hard drive makers include automated backup software to take the brain work out of the backing-up chore (Apple includes its backup Time Machine software as part of its operating system). (For Windows users, Wikipedia has an excellent list of backup software programs here.)
Cons: We're still talking about a mechanical hard drive, even though it's unlikely both your main hard drive AND your PC hard drive will crash simultaneously. But in a natural disaster, you'll need the presence of mind to grab it as you escape or it'll be destroyed along with everything else.
My advice: Opt for "Network Attached Storage" – an external hard drive you connect to the internet (via your cable modem or WiFi router) instead of your computer. You will now be able to access all your files from the Web or wherever you happen to be.
I've been playing with the Buffalo CloudStor (available exclusively on Amazon at the moment), which includes software to do automatic back-ups (although it needs a more simplified process), which includes an iPhone app to access your files. But similar networked hard drives include the GoFlex Home Network Storage System fromSeagate and the MyBook Live from Western Digital. These drives usually come in 1, 2 and 3 TB capacities and are nearly identically priced from $150 to $270.
Cloud Storage
Pros: Your valuable digital doodads are safely tucked away – way away from anything that can go wrong in your home – somewhere in a giant climate-controlled warehouse filled with giant storage servers that include redundancies atop of redundancies. It's the safest place to stash your cyber life.
Cons: You're likely familiar with – and probably use – a photo site such as Picasa, Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, et al, even Facebook. These are fine for sharing photos, but all they store is photos, and many don't store photos at full resolution – when you download a copy, it's often at a much reduced resolution.
There are two types of cloud storage sites that store all your files, not just photos: "bucket" sites and "remote" sites.
"Bucket" sites such as Carbonite are essentially advanced digital shoeboxes shoved under the bed. "Remote" sites let you access your digital goodies via the Web and smart phone apps – you essentially have all your photos, videos, music and documents with you anywhere you have an internet connection.
Our remote cloud storage discounts
I've been a subscriber to Sugar Sync, a pioneer in the remote storage business. But a class of new remote cloud storage sites have cropped up in the last year or so, each with its own features and benefits, each with its own pricing scheme (some charge increasing dollars for larger amounts of storage, some offer unlimited storage, for instance).
I've been futzing with a number of these remote cloud services and hope to have a more extensive look at them in the near future. But two of them, MiMedia and CrashPlan are offering Life Goes Strong readers a discount.
If you go to the MiMedia site, enter the promo code WORLDBACKUPDAY between now and May 1, and get 25 percent off. Instead of taking DAYS to upload all your files to a cloud site via the internet from your home PC, MiMedia sends you an external "shuttle" disk drive. You connect the drive to your PC via USB and simply drag-and-drop your files on the drive – it's all automated. Transferring files via USB is hundreds of times faster than the internet – it took me around 90 minutes to load all my files on the disc. It's ridiculously easier than uploading.
CrashPlan is offering 10 percent off – if you go to the site, just click on the "Switch and Save" button to get the discount. Don't worry about what the "switch" refers to – the discount is available to everyone.
Most of these sites, which also include World Backup Day participants SpiderOak and BackBlaze, offer a couple of gigabytes of storage for free to give you an idea on how the service works. I strongly recommend taking advantage of these free trials to get a feel of how service each works.
Just make sure you find a service that offers automatic backup – the more you have to think about backing up, the less you'll do it.
As for me, I'm a belt/suspender/staple kind of guy – I use all three methods. There is no way I'm going to lose ANY of my digital valuables.