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The Toemeister! Makin' Copies! Toemaramaman!

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Jeremy Toeman

The more people I talk to, the more I am amazed at the lack of backups people do.  The most common method I’ve heard about is people burning CDs or DVDs on a very erratic/irregular basis.  If this is your personal method, let me take a moment to shout at you:

YOUR COMPUTER’S HARD DRIVE WILL DIE OVER TIME.

THE CDS AND DVDS YOU BURN WILL DIE OVER TIME.

YOU NEED MULTIPLE BACKUPS.

Sorry bout the yelling, but I felt an intervention was in order.  Why?  Well, first I like to think I’m looking out for my fellow man/woman.  Second, I know full well that all my non-techie friends and family, upon the moment where their 7-year-old computer finally kicks the bucket, are gonna call me and ask how they get their beloved pictures back.  Psst – you can’t.

Here’s my personal backup strategy, it’s easy to follow and doesn’t require a massive amount of effort:

  1. I own a portable HDD (Seagate Freeagent), a NAS (Maxtor Shared Storage plus – probably replacing soon), and a Drobo. I also have an Infrant ReadyNAS at my office.  This is, in a word, massively excessive.  But not by much.  I recommend TWO different external storage solutions, and I further recommend buying them several months apart.  Hard drives die over time, and if you get two drives simultaneously, you increase the risk that they will die in tandem.
  2. I have a monthly calendar appointment (first Sundays) to do a backup.  During this backup I copy everything from my Documents folder into the various drives.  Personally I do not worry about having numerous archives, so I can do all my work in a simple drag and drop.  If you do need multiple versions of things, I recommend picking up some backup software (no specific recommendations on that from me though).
  3. Photos are an exception.  I backup photos the moment I’m done downloading them from my digital camera.  I’d rather lose a month of documents than a month of photos.  I also am a Flickr “pro” user, which gives me unlimited online backup at full resolution, and I do a Flickr upload within a day of downloading photos also.

I hope this inspires a few of you to get your act together with a backup solution.  Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, as it seems to be one of those things that people ignore until it’s too late and they’ve lose data.

To put in other terms.  No backup == FAIL.

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Posted in General | 6 Comments
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6 thoughts on “The Toemeister! Makin' Copies! Toemaramaman!”

  1. Ron Feldman says:
    January 22, 2008 at 9:30 am

    I use Mozy (www.mozy.com) to back up my Macbook – pretty good deal – up to 10GB of space for free and unlimited storage for $4.95/month. I set it to backup in the middle of the night daily (you can set it however often you want) and it usually takes less than 1 hour. Have been debating whether or not to switch to Time Machine and my local drive since upgrading to Leopard. I think these totally automated solutions are best as I’ve found even calendar reminders don’t cut it sometimes…..

    Reply
  2. Gold says:
    January 22, 2008 at 11:02 am

    help…….?

    Reply
  3. Josh Shenkle says:
    January 22, 2008 at 11:04 am

    For offsite/online backup I use: carbonite: http://www.carbonite.com/ as well as Amazon’s S3: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

    Nice thing about carbonite, is every time a file is changed, added, ect… it automatically updates/uploads the backup online.

    For interfacing with S3 I use a free app called JungleDisk: http://jungledisk.com/ which btw if you are a windows home server user there is a jungledisk addon for WHS that allows you to do online backups of files stored on your WHS box. so basically you get redundancy of sorts with backups stored on your WHS box, then those backups are backed up online with Jungledisk/S3.

    For photo’s I use Picasa ontop of Carbonite and S3, just for the fact that I use the picasa app on my desktop and its just easy to upload your photo’s online for sharing as well as backup.

    for a somewhat easier manual process for backing up files, say your my documents folder, check out SyncToy, one of the many Microsoft PowerToys: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0FC1154-C975-4814-9649-CCE41AF06EB7&displaylang=en

    With SyncToy you can setup automatic backups of any folder, file, or even entire hard drive, and set it to backup to an external HDD, or even another networked PC. It is also great if you want to sync two folders, say your my documents folder between your desktop and your laptop. Using SyncToy helps prevent the multiple copies of a single file issue.

    hope this helps,
    – Josh

    Reply
  4. James says:
    January 22, 2008 at 11:05 am

    I use a combo of carbonite for my PC and mozy for my Mac. Works well for me.

    Reply
  5. Ben Hedrington says:
    January 22, 2008 at 11:31 am

    Don’t forget to take a look at the plethora of Amazon S3 products out there, I use S3sync (http://s3sync.net/wiki) on my Unbuntu box to backup my pictures and data nightly (rsync style) but for the non-techie there is always Jungle Disk (http://www.jungledisk.com/). At 15 cents a GB (plus a few cents of incidentals on top of that for upload bandwidth etc.) it’s a steal to have redundant off site backup and Amazon’s infrastructure team in your corner keeping your data safe.

    Reply
  6. Pingback: Backing up is hard to do « Media - what is it good for!

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About

Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.

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