Back up your data, for the love of god…
September 15th, 2006Sure, just making backups is fine…but what happens when 'something' occurs to both your computer and your backups? What, you don't move your backups to a remote and secure location regularly? Yea, that has been bothering me as well…at least, since I started at least semi-annually backing up my data…
The free subscription has 25GB of storage space and a 25MB single file size limit, with 1GB of downloads a month. I keep about 600MB of file on my laptop that I really ought to sort and put on our server so they are backed up daily, but…
The beta software allows automatic off-site backups to be made. I'd suggest it for anyone who can't seem to ever get down to actually backing up their information…the interface is pretty laggy (sloppy coding I'd guess, it won't restart its service automatically if you kill it for whatever reason, simply fails without message…perfect…)…basically, I'd run it at night after everything else is done…and, there apparently isn't any way to cancel the upload in progress…and the website app is buggy…ok, it pretty much sucks ass, but its free and it has potential…
If the 25MB limit is hurting your…collections…grab 7Zip from 7zip.org and archive those puppies, making sure to hit the Split to volumes - 3.5"…
UPDATE: I continued looking, since it had been a while since I looked into online backup solutions…Mozy and Carbonite apparently are two or the better solutions as well. I am thinking about trying Mozy myself as I am only dealing with about 1.5GB of material that I'd like regularly synced offsite. Mozy doesn't have those problems with file sizes, and seems to have a lot of other very good features. Carbonite has a great feature set (looks a lot like the Maxtor OneTouch external drive I got for backups here at work), $5 a month too…which isn't bad at all considering what you get.
FURTHER UPDATE : Mozy is a heck of a deal for being free. Forget that Sloppy AMD crap…get Mozy…except I can't get the software to connect to their servers atm…I really like their interface, very streamlined and simple. Carbonite works fine, but the interface is a little overwrought…the entire execution is rather overwrought…I definitely prefer the minimalistic 'just works' route taken by the Mozy team. Mozy finally connected to the servers and is now backing up my laptop data.
Mozy FTW UPDATE: When you go to configure Mozy, I'd recommend that you just skip the 'Backup Sets' tab and go right to the 'File System' tab and check off the items you want to back-up. Don't worry about going over quota, as you check items it dynamically updates the total size along the bottom. For the 'Schedule', I'd recommend Automatic if your computer doesn't do decentrailzed computing AND you leave it on all of the time, and Scheduled if you only have your computer on at very specific times (like 9-5, and you're using it the entire time). Enjoy your new 2GB automatic off-site backups!
