aaron c beals

off-site data backup
for a serious computer nerd, i’m unbelievably bad at backing up my data. i help Laura manage the digital photos for her business, and we have a killer backup strategy there, but i can’t seem to apply that same level of rigor in backing up my own files. i’ve toyed with the idea of using a service like Mozy or Carbonite, which are reasonably priced (~$5/month for unlimited storage), but they don’t allow you to back up network drives, so they’re not really an option. there are other programs (like Jungle Disk) based on Amazon’s S3, but Amazon charges you $0.15/GB/month for storage. if you’re storing more than 35GB of data, S3 loses out to Mozy/Carbonite.

as an alternative form of off-site storage, i could also burn DVD’s (annoying, manual) or set up mirrored hard drives (coming way down in price) and ship them off to a friend or family member’s house. i’m seriously considering this path, though it’s still manual, and doesn’t really work well with incremental backups.

so what do i have to back up, anyhow? there are four main types of information:

1. documents — few GB (if that), high value (cannot replace), steady additions
2. music — many GB, low value (can replace, as I have the original CD’s. if those are destroyed, i can always re-purchase.), batch additions
3. digital photos — many GB, extremely high value (cannot replace), batch additions
4. emails — several GB, high value (cannot replace), steady additions

as you can see, there’s a struggle of requirements — storage size, value of data, and incremental additions differ from information type to information type. generally speaking, i care most about documents and photos; the emails would be nice, but most of my email is in GMail and i use my local disk only as a backup (just POP the mail off).

so in light of the different requirements, perhaps the best strategy is a mixed-mode off-site backup: Mozy Free (2GB free) or JungleDisk for documents and emails (since they’re continually added), do a hard drive swap for music (mainly for convenience since the CDs are a physical backup and can be replaced with insurance money), and use Smugmug for photo storage.