World Backup Day

In addition to being my wife's birthday today (Happy birthday, Sweets!), today is World Backup Day. Interestingly, it is the first World Backup Day according to Ars Technica. To celebrate, the folks over there decided to discuss their backup scenarios in order to inspire others to get their backup plan in order if they haven't already. This has in turn inspired me to post to this weblog after being dormant for nearly a year and discuss how I handle our backups.

Here at the Swindler household, we have over 1.5 Gigabytes of documents, nearly 70 Gigs of purchased music/TV Shows/Movies, more than 70 Gigs of pictures, and well over 370 Gigs of captured videos (from our camcorders and phones, many in High Definition).  Add to that over 250 Gigs contained in my Swindler Cave Studios projects (including web sites, slideshows, and wedding videos that I’ve created for other folks over the years) and other supporting files (including programs and such on my system drive) and I’m pushing a Terabyte (1,024 Gigabytes) of data.

I’ve got just over three Terabytes of storage locally on my primary computer, nearly half of which is dedicated for backup purposes.  230 Gigs is dedicated to a “scratch” drive where large files that don’t need backups go temporarily (I typically render slideshows/movies to this drive in uncompressed format for later encoding into their final formats—these can be re-created if lost so I don’t bother backing them up).  The rest contains stuff that ought to be backed up.  My system drive (which contains my operating system, programs, and such) and my projects drive are both backed up to a removable internal drive.  The former is replaceable if lost (I simply re-install the operating system and programs) but it is much quicker (and easier!) to restore from a backup if something goes wrong than to spend hours re-installing and configuring everything.  The latter is irreplaceable.  My data drive (which stores everything else—documents, music, pictures, videos, etc.) is backed up to a dedicated external drive.  In the event that I need to leave the house quickly (fire, for example), I can grab a removable and an external drive and have everything (assuming I can do so safely).

If the house burns down or floods or whatever while we are away, or the emergency makes it unsafe to get down to my office, I also have all of the files on my data drive backed up to an off-site location.  For this I use a service called Carbonite.  They encrypt my files, back them up to a secure server, and allow me to access them using any web-connected computer or any iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/Android phone/Blackberry.  Due to the nature of how high-speed connections work (you get fast downloads but slower uploads), this naturally takes time to begin with (your first backup can take days), but once the initial backup is done, subsequent backups are no problem.

You may wonder how easy all of this is.  I’ll level with you: most of it is a pain in the ass.  My local backups are managed using Norton Ghost.  It works most of the time, but occasionally I’ll have to go in and help it (say, if it runs out of space I’ll delete some older backups).  Additionally, every external drive I’ve ever used (including my current Terabyte drive) occasionally disconnects from Windows, necessitating a power cycle of the drive.  These all make having a reliable, up-to-date backup rather hit-or-miss.  Carbonite, on the other hand, has been rock-solid.  In addition to being very reasonably priced—I paid $130 for a three-year subscription—it is incredibly easy to use.  You just tell it which folder to back up and it does the rest.  Restores are a breeze, and the fact that they give you unlimited storage means you don’t have to worry about how much you back up.  Plus, any file you have backed up can be retrieved nearly anywhere there is an Internet connection.  I have on more than one occasion been able to find a years-old photo from my backup to show a friend or family member—from my iPhone.

For those of you who don’t back up anything presently, I urge you: get started as soon as possible.  Some good friends of mine lost all of their photos of the first few years of their daughter’s life (not to mention their relationship) when their hard drive crashed years ago.  They were willing to pay an egregious sum to have the data recovered by professionals, but unfortunately the drive was beyond even their ability to fix.  Don’t let that happen to you.  If you can spare a few dollars, try out Carbonite at the very least.  It is so easy to use I cannot think of anyone I would not recommend it to.  You can even try it free for 15 days to see if it’s right for you.  If you’re willing to give it a shot, I can even send you a refer-a-friend email that will qualify you for a free additional month’s worth of subscription if you sign up (call or email me if you have my info, or hit up my contact page if you don’t).  That goes up to two months if you sign up for two years!

If Carbonite doesn’t sound like you’re bag, you should at the very least make copies of your irreplaceable files somewhere.  Yes, they will be less secure than off-site storage, but something is better than nothing.  Happy World Backup Day!