Back Up Without Breaking The Bank
A couple of months ago, I ran into one of my friends sobbing her eyes out. Her computer hard drive had died and she’d lost three years of graphic design work. Of course, it wasn’t backed up — she’d thought about it but hadn’t gotten around to picking up an external hard drive.
I’ve heard this type of story hundreds of times. Every time I hear a new one, I think about how I’m going to do better at backing up my own work. I still don’t do a great job, but I do have all of my files backed up in one way or another. If I had a major data loss, I could replace most of my work pretty quickly.
Backing Up For Free
Personally, I’m a big fan of data storage solutions that don’t require me to pay out any of my hard-earned dollars. I routinely email copies of files to my Gmail account and I have my most important files on Dropbox. Even better, neither of these methods really requires much technical knowledge — all though there are plenty of impressive hacks to improve on both methods.
There are tons of other free online storage solutions: AOL runs Xdrive. IDrive is an encrypted option, with automatic backup. Humyo offers 10 gigs of space free.
But I don’t entirely trust either system entirely. My worst nightmare is losing access to my Google account suddenly — and it could happen overnight. There’s not any sort of guarantee that free back up solutions will still be around after the end of the day. Xdrive is a case in point: AOL has been trying to sell it for a while now. They haven’t had much luck and I wouldn’t be surprised if they just quietly shut their doors one day.
While I’ll continue to use my free options — they’re the easiest for getting files back off of, for one thing — I do have a few other backup methods in place. Consider it a belts-and-suspenders situation.
Backing Up For Minimal Expense
In college, I backed up my important documents through the power of drag-and-drop. I bought an external hard drive — cheaper now, but not especially expensive even several years ago if you waited for sales. I dragged my folders over to the appropriate drive and went off to do something else.
With the help of someone more adept at Linux than myself, that situation has improved. Sitting next to my main tower these days is a smaller box without any bells and whistles beyond a really big hard drive. Once a week, that puppy gets fired up and we run an rsync script which backs up everything on the computer I actually work on.
For those not familiar with rsync, it’s a free piece of software. It can be ran in three different ways
- From the command line
- As a script
- Scheduled through cron
The script runs just fine on Macs. I don’t have a Windows system at this point but rsync seems to work with Windows — though it seems to require just a little bit more work, especially if you want it to run automatically.
For those people less interest in mucking around with command lines and scripts, there are some fairly user-friendly computer applications available that handle automatically backing up your data to the location of your choice. Windows users: I’ve heard lots of good things about SyncBack (available in both paid and free versions). If you’re backing up to a remote location via FTP, SyncBack can handle that with ease. Mac users: It doesn’t get easier than Time Machine. Pretty much all you have to do is connect an external hard drive to your computer and open up the Time Machine application.
For all these options, your only real expense is a hard drive on which to back up your data. I generally believe that you should replace your hard drive every three to five years — but I haven’t shelled out for a RAID-quality or server-grade hard drive. Honestly, if you aren’t putting too much wear and tear on your back up hard drive, I don’t see the need for better quality, especially since big hard drives just keep getting cheaper.
I know plenty of people who rely on thumb drives to back up their files, as well — at least in between larger back ups. They’re definitely cheaper than an extra hard drive, but I’ve always thought of them as less reliable. It’s not so much that I think they’re prone to failure — I just think they’re easier to lose than a larger hard drive and I don’t want to worry about leaving my only back up of a file at school or work.
I Use Both
I find it worth my while to back up my files to one of the online options and to my own back up machine. While there are plenty of disasters that can happen to online storage, there are just as many that can occur at home. Insurance might cover replacing a back up hard drive if it’s stolen — but it won’t bring back all your data. Using both methods provides you with the necessary belt-and-suspenders protection.
Do you back up your files? Please let me know about any other great back up options I may have missed in the comments.
WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY
Thursday Bram
Thursday Bram blogs about a variety of topics, from personal finance to small business. She is the author of an upcoming book on the tools and tricks you need to build a career you can take with you during long-term travel. More information about Thursday and her book, Working Your Way Around the World, is available on her personal site, ThursdayBram.com.
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Comments
Britalian says on October 24th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Dropbox works nicely on the Mac. You designate a working folder on your mac and work from that, so any changed files are automatically backed up. Increments would be nice but it works well.
Jason Kratrz says on October 24th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Mozy (mozy.com) is $4.95 a month for unlimited backups. Works on Windows/Mac. It’s worth every penny. $60 a year certainly is worth the piece of mind of not only having backups but having them off-site as well.
fildawg says on October 24th, 2008 at 11:12 am
I use Dropbox to share amongst my machines. I use JungleDisk with Amazon’s S3 service for archival storage/backup. Worth every penny at $0.14/GB/mo.
Joe says on October 24th, 2008 at 11:36 am
No way I’m willing to lose all the songs I bought on iTunes, so I have two external hard drives. One sits on top of my tower and runs Memeo Auto-Backup (which came with the hard drive). The other one is kept in my safe deposit box. Once a month, I bring it home and do an incremental backup of the first drive using Cobian (freeware). Also, since I keep my documents on our home network, I back up my Documents folder weekly to the external hard drive (again using Cobian).
jonathan peterson says on October 24th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
I have an 8G flash drive and put microsoft’s synctoy 2.0 on my PC. It’s set up autorun and copy over any changes in My Documents, Application Settings, and Outlook PSD files. Takes about 5 minutes in the background – do it every couples days and keep the flash drive in my briefcase.
Jeff A says on October 24th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Foldershare is great for this. I have it installed on my home machines and on my work machine. I have my pictures and mp3s in sync across all my machines and an automatic offsite backup available.
Reinout van Rees says on October 24th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
With all the talk about external harddisks: make sure they’re external from your computer’s room, too. If that one burns down, it’ll fry the external harddisk just fine.
When a faculty building at Delft university burned down there were quite some cases of “yeah, my backup disks were in the same room…”
Cody Frisch says on October 24th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I use a multi-prong approach. I have an external HD which backs up “locally” and stays connected to my computer. This backup (using ChronoSync on my Mac) keeps archive versions as things change. One could use Time Machine and I may add that to the mix, however I am not sure about using a Time Machine disk for *other* storage at the same time.
I keep some data on the same drive, temporary work etc. so I do not know what Time Machine would do. Plus I do not leave this drive on at all times, only flip it on a couple times per week to get the latest backup – and for this ChronoSync works marvelously as it instantly triggers a backup when it mounts.
For my offsite storage I use a combination of JungleDisk and Amazon S3. I do not back up my music collection here (I keep a copy on DVD that I store off site.) But certain things get backed-up there on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Some of the backup sources only get hit once every few months. This option runs me a few dollars to maintain each month plus some transfer costs. But being a paid service with Amazon I am much more confident that it will not be closing down soon.
David says on October 24th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
If you have a Mac without Time Machine or just want to use a Flash drive instead, ArrSync works great.
It basically puts an interface (GUI) on rsync, which isn’t easy to use if you aren’t an advanced user.
http://arrsync.sourceforge.net/
mighty mouse says on October 25th, 2008 at 12:07 am
I use IDrive to backup my data. I like the standard price model of IDrive (4.95/month) vs the variable nature of jungledisk and S3. I also like carbonite, but I like a little more control over backups, so IDrive is my favorite.
Keiron says on October 25th, 2008 at 11:20 am
I’m really tempted on the Drobo actually. I’d much prefer to have something solid like that – which I can see and know that all my data is on there!
A few people I know use the online services, I have yet to be convinced by them!
Justin says on October 25th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
http://lifehacker.com/398229/f.....ckup-tools
papatek says on October 26th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Foldershare is great for this.
Laptop Accessories
laptop accessories says on October 26th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Very useful information, thanks for this
Jason says on October 27th, 2008 at 9:30 am
For data partitions, I do a straight burn to DVD. I don’t trust backup harddrives. They are mechanical and they can crash too.
I image my system partition with BootIt NG ($39). It has a learning curve to use, but is a sysadmin secret weapon for system recovery.
I know that many people rely on System Restore, but it isn’t complete. Meaning, it only recovers a few Windows files. It doesn’t recover any non-MS apps (at least with XP) whatsoever or protect from other Acts of Grandkids.
One can’t tell what files any particular restore point has in it. With a utility that comes free from the BootIt NG folks, you can dig into your image and pull out specific files.
If you have your system imaged, you can also easily load it into a virtual machine via VMWAre or VirtualBox for testing before you load a new app onto your PC.
Steve1776 says on October 27th, 2008 at 9:32 am
I use Carbonite to store my files off site. I learned to backup when my hard drive started going out. Didn’t loose anything, but it scared me. Four gigs of documents would be hard to replace.
Mads Nygaard Pederen says on October 27th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Dropbox – definitely. First 2 Gigs are free – up to 50 gigs for $10 per month.
The easiest way to sync and backup. By far!
All files are stored centrally online and files are avaliable through an excellent web interface.
Kicks the crap out of everything else I’ve tried.
Why?
Simply save you file to the local dropbox folders. Save locally – and dont worry about handling scheduled uploads.
Create folders and files loacally in the dropbox dir and dont’ worry that your work is lost.
Files are uploaded/synched quicker than any other service I’ve tried. And I’ve tried lots…
Extremely simple setup.
Cross platform (Win, Mac and Linux)
Free coffee for each successful upload … and so forth:-)
Chris says on October 27th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Check out Kadoo.com — 10 FREE GB for all your Photos, Files, Documents, Videos and more. Not just a box in the sky and it works just as well on a Mac as a PC. You can watch your videos, print your photos, and even FREELY FAX your documents anywhere in the US. It also includes a Portal and a full Email system.
Sign up for FREE today at http://www.kadoo.com!
app says on October 28th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
You might want to stay away from xdrive (and other AOL services), since AOL will be shutting that down soon. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the xdrive site, though, since they are still taking new signups.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....nd-xdrive/
Gabe says on October 30th, 2008 at 1:46 am
JungleDisk. Mac/Win/Linux, nice GUI, $20 one time purchase, stores data on your Amazon S3 account for 15cents/GB/mo.
James Green says on October 31st, 2008 at 7:54 pm
I use Angel Backup – it works out well for backing up business data, as you can back up multiple PCs and they have extra security features for multi-user environments. It has saved my bacon several times.
Tom Birkland says on November 1st, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I like syncplicity a lot, because I use multiple machines. Still beta (at least to me, I was an early-ish adopter) but will go to a $20/month paid model soon. It syncs with multiple machines, and will have a free 2-machine, 2GB variant. Downside: doesn’t back up the whole drive, really, unless you want to spend zillions for the extra space.
I tried xdrive and found it entirely unreliable–didn’t work with my sync software. I still sync to an external drive as a backup.
And, for those for whom all seems lost, check out the data recovery services in the PC geek mags. It can cost between USD 500 and USD 2500 to recover, but if it’s years worth of career/mission critical data, it might be worth it, and worth chalking it up to experience.
Alec Reynolds says on November 12th, 2008 at 6:58 am
I protect my files and emails with a very easy to use data backup software called Titan Backup, the destination is a 500gb WD harddisk, but the company stated that an online feature is under work also. Give it a free trial here.
I also got my hands on a 30% discount coupon from them, during the order process enter this coupon:NEOB-M5VL
Tom says on November 21st, 2008 at 6:18 am
I use altexa.com to backup my data. The site is not the best looking of the category, but the prices are low and the software is really good.
There is a free trial for those of you who are interested
Siddesh Attigar says on November 26th, 2008 at 8:26 am
There would be so many backup softwares available but no one matches Acronis True Image which works both in Windows and linux machine and both for Servers and Workstations. The biggest advantage of this solution being the shortest downtime and efficient backup and fast recovery. ACRONIS has thrown out major players in the market out of the competion box
contact +91-9900146675 for more info or mail me on siddesh@asiaadata.com
Gumnos says on January 7th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
is it just me who found Justin’s post amusingly truncated:
http://lifehacker.com/398229/f…..ckup-tools
I’m not sure I’d trust something described as “f…..ckup-tools” for my backups… [gdr]
-gumnos
Claudiu says on January 8th, 2009 at 5:33 am
FBackup (http://www.fbackup.com) is a simple backup program too (for windows).
r4i-dstti-itouch says on June 8th, 2009 at 6:06 am
good info, Thanks
Andy says on June 9th, 2009 at 4:00 am
I use CloudBerry S3 Backup to backup date to Amazon S3
laptop auto adapter says on September 8th, 2009 at 5:20 am
cool article , Maybe it will be helpfull for me.