Last week, I hit a scary snag when updating my MacBook. I got stuck in an endless loop of “Register with .Mac” requests, which made me worried I’d lost all my profile information. The solution was simple, boot into Safe Mode by holding the shift key down, then reboot. But my concern was raised.
So, I reviewed my backup and recovery plans for my MacBook and my G5 desktop. To be honest, the plans were better than nothing, but not as good and automated as I want. Up to then, my solution was to use Maxtor One-touch external firewire drives, and SuperDuper to make clones of most of my data.
I did this weekly, or pretty much weekly. Because these are powered drives, I feel that it is important to turn them off between backups. That way a lightning strike (I’ve had one before, ugly) wouldn’t destroy the backups. So, it is quite a manual process. I’ve always intended to get a couple more of these cheap drives, and then cycle the backups to some place offsite, or at least to my barn which is quite a ways from the main house.
After reading reviews of the various free online backup services, and the paid remote backup solutions as well, I narrowed my decision down to either Jungle Disk with Amazon S3 (unlinked because Amazon makes it tricky to link for some reason. Just google it.) or Mozy Online Backup.
Both seem quite nice and exactly what I want. Using them as my remote backup solution, I would basically just run a background program, select what I want backed up, and forget about it. The program will back up incrementally in the background.
At first, I was certain I should go with Jungle Disk, since the service is just so geekily great, and almost startlingly cheap. I estimate my full backup set to be about 20G from the laptop. Using Amazon s3, that is about $3 per month. During my test runs, I’m only backing up a couple gigs, so that would only be $0.30! Nice.
But, I decided to go with Mozy Online Backup, at least for now. They offer a free 2 gigs of online storage, which is just perfect for me to test the service and to back up at least the most critical data. So far, I am extremely impressed. The backups are encrypted, so my data isn’t being sent in the clear. Configuring my backup set was trivial, and so far it seems to really be what they claim, “set it and forget it.”
If the first month or two of tests work out, I’ll upgrade to the unlimited plan. $5 per month per computer. It’ll take a long while to get the first set done when I add some of my non-critical-but-I’d-hate-to-lose-it data.
[tags]online backup,backup[/tags]
Related posts:
- Weewar – a fun online game This morning, I started playing a great new online game,...
- A Django Killer App – Web Table Data Yet another great use for Django is to make trivial...
About Bruce Kroeze
I wanted to let you know about a cool backup program that offers FREE and UNLIMITED backup.
With Zoogmo you control where your files are backed up by building a backup network of your own or your friends’ computers. You can even backup to an external hard drive of your choice.
Zoogmo runs silently in the background and automatically backs up ALL of your data over the internet, using a combination of Triple-DES and AES 256 encryption to make sure that only you have access to your files.
Check out Zoogmo at http://www.zoogmo.com to download Zoogmo for free and begin turning your social network into your backup network.
Remember, with Zoogmo you have no annoying monthly fees – totally free unlimited backup you can trust!
Mozy is rad. I’ve used it for nearly a year, and have had no problems. And it’s serously saved my live, when I had to pull down 8Gb overnight before a trip. Worked well.