Internet backup - now I'm intrigued

Julie Worth

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I use Carbonite.com. I can't be bothered to back-up every single day, every single version of every single file. $50 a year. Saves me time, headaches, and eventually, when my computer crashes, a lot of tears and money.

I do as well. It's nice that you don't have to do anything, as it searches for files to back up and does it all without asking you.
 

tallus83

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I was unaware of that possibility, Chunky.

I'll have to create a separate Docs folder per your comment.
 

CrissyM

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There was something in a PC mag a bit ago about CD's having an expiration date... In other words after a while they failed to be readable. The information got corrupted.

I suppose if you regularly make backups then this won't effect you. But if you just expect it to be there years down the road... you might have issues.

Perhaps several formats would be the best option. Flash, second harddrive, CDs, and maybe some online.

I still wonder what to do with all my home movies on the computer.... Too much for any DVD.
 

CrissyM

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If a user's profile gets corrupted, you won't be able to log in and therefore your My Documents folder won't be accessible. It is possible to get at it when logged in as another user, but it takes some spelunking..

I had a similar problom. When the whole computer started having issues and the main hard drive crashed we took the hard drive out and put in a new one expecting to recover documents as an external hard drive.

He had put a password on his profile, then taken it off. But when we tried hooking the hard drive up as an external hard drive (which has always worked before) we were unable to get into his documents because they were still passworded.

My documents, and all the movies and such on the other hard drive were find, but my tax papers in his documents were lost and unrecoverable.
 

redcedar

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Like everybody else, I do multiple backups, but I've taken to using JungleDisk as my preferred offsite backup system for several reasons:
1. I'm paying for it, which means that it's much less likely to vanish unexpectedly.
2. I can do password encryption on it. Which is mostly important because I'm paranoid. But since I'm paying for backups, I might as well put my taxes in there as well, in which case I really do want password encryption.
3. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and up until the hard drive in my Windows machine died on me, I used all three.

It's $30 for the software, flat fee, and then $0.15 cents per *gigabyte* of data transferred per month. Since I do most of my writing in plaintext, you can imagine the size of my monthly bill. The Amazon S3 cloud was set up for businesses, really, but it's nice that they let normal users take advantage of it. And you can set it to back up automatically, in the background. (You can also throttle the connection so that your normal internet activities don't suffer too badly.)

So, if you're looking for something a little more secure, it's an option. (There's a lot of other options that back stuff up to the Amazon cloud, btw, I just find JungleDisk's user interface to be very simple.)
 

Matera the Mad

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A properly cared for CD can outlast the person who burned it. Heat and light are the main enemies.

Up until last month, online backup of anything but small stuff would have been impossible for me. I'm still not terribly interested in it, except for updating the secret WIP stash on my own website -- very small stuff.

Paying for something doesn't guarantee stability. Businesses change hands, go under, or just change. Multiple online backups might be halfway reliable.
 
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For the moment, I use Dropbox. 2GB is free and it automatically syncs to the cloud and across multiple computers.


That is great. I might try either this or Mozy within the next couple days...and I will continue to burn my files onto CD's, just in case the online-backup thing turns out not to work out like I expected.
 

Kateness

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Yeah. I use dropbox as well, and also GoogleDocs. And once a month, I burn a CD of everything I've written.

No complaints at all about Dropbox; if it's only documents you're saving, you're going to have to try fairly hard to get past that 2GB mark. Mine is only 224 MB and there's several thousand docs in there, as I recall.
 
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Yeah. I use dropbox as well, and also GoogleDocs. And once a month, I burn a CD of everything I've written.

No complaints at all about Dropbox; if it's only documents you're saving, you're going to have to try fairly hard to get past that 2GB mark. Mine is only 224 MB and there's several thousand docs in there, as I recall.


I just signed up for Mozy yesterday, and it's awesome. So far I've only used up about 19.5 MB because I have very few files on my computer created by me, like manuscripts. I have no music, pictures (except for the sample pictures) or videos. So far it's done three backups.
 
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dantefrizzoli

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I email and use flash drives for any important work that I don't want lost.
 

Dave Williams

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Thoughts on backups:

any backup is better than no backup

more backups are usually better

if you're using an "internet drive", putting your primary work there, and your backups on your local drive, means your work files are accessible from any networked device. So if you wind up separated from your main machine, you can still work

backups need to be in at least two places, and at least one of those needs to be off-site in case of fire, flood, wind, etc.

backups don't count. Only RESTORES count. Whatever system you're using, make sure you can recover the backed-up files.

"data security" doesn't just mean keeping other people out of your stuff, it's about you being able to get to it when you need it
 

Reziac

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backups don't count. Only RESTORES count. Whatever system you're using, make sure you can recover the backed-up files.

This, this, a thousand times this. If the backup won't restore, it's worse than useless (because it's both wasted your time and given you a false sense of security). If you count on a backup program, at least once do a test restore.

As to online backups, I've been following Backblaze as an inexpensive host focused on remote backups, and if I had upload speeds beyond a crawl I'd probably get an account, to use as a secondary backup (I already stash files on my webhosting, which has effectively unlimited space).

Someone above gripes of a soggy ZIP disk. ZIP disk is just a glorified floppy. They can be taken apart and cleaned, and if the disk itself hasn't degraded, the data will be fine.