You know you need to back up your stuff. You just never find the time and motivation to do it. Usually that motivation comes right after you’ve just lost the vitally important file you were working on, or the irreplaceable photo. The day after your computer crashes, you’ll be more motivated to do regular backups than you ever will again. You’ll also be motivated to scream into the sky, punch walls, and kick small animals until your blood pressure drops back down into double digits. I hear.
And, for a while, you’ll do the right things. You’ll save your e-mail, your work files, maybe your photos. You’ll get that warm sense of security that only comes from minimally protecting yourself. And then you’ll let a few things slip, make some new folders and forget to add them to your routine, and then you’re one good lightning storm away from screaming all over again.
Last year I got paranoid. I had spent several months going through my hundreds of gigs of music, photos, comics, ebooks and documents (yes, I hoard inside my computer as well as out). Cleared out duplicates, standardized the names, got the album covers added, organized my 80 gigs of photos, the works. And because I didn’t want to do it all over again, I set up a few things to protect my stuff. I probably wouldn’t need to be that paranoid, but, you know, just in case…
Two weeks ago my wife called me and asked if she could turn on my computer. I told her I hadn’t turned it off. We found that my power supply inside had blown, taking out my motherboard, a DVD drive, and frying BOTH my hard drives into smoldering paperweights. I remained calm. Outwardly.
However, I was up and running again almost immediately on a new computer, and I think I lost maybe a few weeks of stuff in different places, nothing irreplaceable. Paranoia makes sense, with computers. Here’s what I did last year.
Step One: Onsite backup.
I bought an external hard drive and copied everything over to it. Simple as that. All my work files, all my music, all my pictures, everything. Didn’t even use backup software, just used the first decent file syncing software I found (FreeFileSync), told it what to put where, and went to bed. There are plenty of them out there, many of them free. Do this. Not only do you now have your data in another location, it’s in a portable location so you can take your whole library of whatever with you if you want. External hard drives are cheap now. Buy two, sync ’em both and take one to work or put in a fire safe or in a safe deposit box so you have an offsite backup (just remember to bring it back and resync it every now and then, to keep it current).
When I plugged my external drive into my new computer, I synced everything back. There was the bulk of my stuff, minus a few weeks. Even my iTunes library was intact. Of course, external drives can fail, too, so you’ll also want to use:
Step Two: Online storage.
There are a lot of places to store stuff online. Here are the ones I set up last year:
Dropbox: Love this program. You sign up, install it on your computer, and it creates a folder. Now anything you place in that folder is immediate and constantly synced to an online folder, which is instantly and constantly synced to anywhere else you have Dropbox installed, such as your work computer, your laptop, your iPhone, your iPod Touch, your iPad, your Android phone or your Blackberry. Change ’em or add more on any of those machines and your files get synced back to your home computer. Or you can log in to Dropbox through your browser from any computer and get to your files that way. Who needs flash drives?
When you sign up you get 2 gigs of storage for free. Which ain’t much if you want to save photos, music or video, but you can cram an awful lot of documents in 2 gigs. I’ve got a couple of decades worth of writing safely stored in mine, along with copies of the artwork Teres and I have made. It’s amazingly handy, and there are lots of ways to use it besides just storage. Sync your iTunes library across multiple computers, use it with KeePass or LastPass or other password managers so you can use them everywhere, share files or folders with others, stash portable apps in there and run them right from your Dropbox folder… Google “dropbox tips” and you’ll find a lot of ways Dropbox can make your life easier. One suggestion, to go with my paranoia theme: scan in copies of your mortgage, your insurance papers, your tax returns, any important documents that you would be hurting without, and save ’em in Dropbox. Not as good as the originals but you’ll have all that info saved, no matter what.
You can upgrade for more space for monthly or yearly rates, or you can refer your friends and get more for free (and yep, I’m doing that here). Click here to get started!
There are more online storage sites, like box.net (5 free gigs, more business applications, not as good for simple desktop syncing). Even Amazon’s in on it now, with their new Amazon Cloud system. 5 gigs free, and any MP3s you buy from Amazon and store there don’t count against your storage total. You can store music and videos there and play them from any browser anywhere. Also, right now if you you buy an MP3 album you get 20 gigs of additional storage for a year. They’ve got plenty of good five buck albums, it’d be worth it just to get the extra room.
Google: I’ve been using Google apps for awhile now. I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s e-mail programs so I set all my various e-mail accounts to redirect to my gmail account. Then I installed Thunderbird, imported all the e-mail on my hard drive into it, and set it up to sync with gmail. Bam! All my e-mail, 15 years worth, is now in my gmail account where it’s searchable and backed up. I fire up Thunderbird periodically to let it sync again so I have offline copies of everything, but otherwise it’s all online where I can get to it from any browser or my iPod Touch.
I also use Google Docs a lot. You can batch upload files so I uploaded, well, everything I’ve ever written, including notes. But you can also upload any kind of file there and you’ve got 1 gig of free space to work with. You can also buy more space at much cheaper rates than most other online storage (an extra 20 gigs is $20 in the Amazon Cloud, it’s just $5 in Google Docs), but it doesn’t have the built-in media players.
Then there’s actual offline backup, when you’re storing significant portions of your computer . Again, lots of methods out there, like Mozy, Corbomite, SugarSync, and more. I picked CrashPlan for several reasons. The price was good ($3/mo for unlimited storage) and their free software allows you to not only make encrypted backups at home, but you can allow other people to use your computer for backup space. So I can wirelessly backup my wife’s laptop to my computer. It takes a good long time to get everything backed up online — my photos folder took 2 months — but if you want you can send them DVDs with your files on them to “seed” the backup and speed things up.
When I synced from my external drive to my new computer, I hadn’t kept it as current as I should. But CrashPlan had been updating my backup files right up to the crash, so I restored what I was still missing from there with no hassle.
Basically, make sure that the files you can’t afford to lose are in at least one other place that won’t be affected by anything bad happening to the first place. Use multiple locations; my work files are in three different online services right now and I’ll probably put them in the Amazon Cloud, too, just to be on the safe side.
Because paranoia makes perfect sense when you’re talking about computers.
I use Dropbox for EVERYTHING related to my design work, from original artwork and stock photography to Photoshop brushes and invoices. My main file structure for my work files is all inside the main Dropbox folder on my mac, so I never have to worry about losing files to catastrophe, and I’ve always got quick access to everything, no matter what computer I’m on.
Hello,
I was hacked once..and lost all my files and stuff. Tell me how I can protect and save all my sites. I am a author..and have several..and don’t want to lose.
Facebook
personal site
http://www.wolfgirl99.com book site
Author’s Den
Thanks.
Ms Miller