Being a Giz reader, you’re sure to have at least one, and probably two backups of your important documents. But a story in The Canberra Times is a timely reminder that having all your backups next to eachother is no backup solution at all.
Woodfire potter Ian Jones and his his wife lost everything to a fire in their home and art gallery on Friday night. Despite having everything backed up on two computers, an external hard drive and a USB stick, all four sources of content were stored in the house when it went down in flames last week.
Among the documents lost forever were 40,000 words of Jones’ nearly completed PhD in Fine Arts, plus photos of the couple’s daughter growing up.
It’s a timely reminder that even when you are backing up, make sure you’re backing up offsite as well to ensure your important data is actually safe.
[The Canberra Times - Thanks Simon!]
The Gremlin
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:12 AMThat’s easier said than done. I have sent DVD’s to my family overseas on occasion to act as off-site backup. Keeping that current is next to impossible.
At this stage, cloud solutions are not something I really trust. This whole PSN mess has costed me far too much time and inconvenience.
matt
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:30 AMwhat about work?
Chris
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:34 AMWhats the problem with trusting the cloud for backups? If you keep a local backup and upload really important things to Dropbox or gmail then the likelyhood of your house being burnt down and Dropbox being offline at the same time is unlikely.
The Gremlin
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:35 AMMhh, I guess that could work for some people. Not my case since I’m an IT independent contractor. I have no office, work at the client site and move a lot.
Gazman
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:50 AMChris – its not so much uptime I’d be concerned with as security…
I like @The Gremlin do not trust the cloud offerings much either. Unless you can use your own Private Key.
crashplan.com looks to be the go…
PeterB
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:53 AMThere are lots of offsite backup options. I use Carbonite. Anything I really don’t want to lose is backed up there.
MDolley
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:53 AMIf you don’t trust the cloud at least invest in a fireproof safe or a safe deposit box
Mattp
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 12:40 PMEspecially if you’re a woodfire potter and your wife is writing a PHD and you don’t use cloud backup.
Andreas
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:55 AMI used Skydrive as a once-off backup of my photos. Nothing of value to anyone else but priceless to me.
At home I have a full backup of the data from my server and have the advantage that the server is housed in a free-standing games room with the USB drive in the house. If a fire starts in either one it is unlikely that both will go up in flames.
If you have to store something locally get a fire-proof safe which has a usb connection so you can leave the hard drive in there.
Greg
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 12:49 PMClearly having backups, even if stored together, is better than no backups at all.
However, I also consider offsite backups priceless. If you can afford a USB hard drive and have a friend with a broadband connection, setting up offsite backups for you and your friend is trivial and cheap.
Tim
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 2:24 PMDo the smart thing, get yoursef an IOSafe… A hard drive in a fireproof, watertight shock and crush resistant casing.
Steve
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 2:34 PMBackups are probably one of the more necessary evils with computers. End users have always never seen it as a necessity until its stolen, burnt or the hard drive has failed.
At the moment cloud services are cheap, a little too cheap which is causing people to see it as the primary option. But there are a lot of cons to cloud back up…
1. Location of Backup is held to the laws of that country. Ie, China?
2. You cannot call the company and they cannot physically gain access to your backup.
3. What happens when a link goes down.
4. What about clud security, this is still a huge grey area.
Unfortunately storage space in Australia is still costly unlike Japan, US, Korea or Europe. But the service I have used is:
http://www.cubetech.com.au
Local Australian company with physical access to their server in 3 capital cities.
Have a look, plans are cheap. Not as cheap as the cloud option. But you pay for peace of mind.
Hope this helps anyone looking for an actual non-cloud based backup solution.
Cheers,
Steve
Tim
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 3:03 PMI use my 160gb ipod classic to store all my backups – since I take it everywhere with me to listen to music, its also good for installing downloaded programs onto other computers.
Gabriel
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 4:17 PMAnd also a higher chance of it being lost or stolen. With all your personal information on it. And yes, anybody can read it unless you went to the trouble of encrypting it before hand
Ed
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 3:23 PMTwo Words, Google. Docs
Ken
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 4:08 PMIsn’t that one-and-a-half words?
Griz
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 4:42 PMIf you can convince a friend to sacrifice hard drive space (and you do the same for them if needed) Crashplan (www.crashplan.com) does this for free. And if you need to restore you have physical access to your backup by going to their house.
SpiderDan
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 9:33 PMI use two systems for backing up. The first is Dropbox which I use to backup and sync all my documents. Sensitive documents are encrypted within a TrueCrypt container using my own key BEFORE it is uploaded to Dropbox!
The second is two external HDDs which store backups of all my photos and other larger files. I keep them in sync using SyncToy for Windows. One HDD is stored onsite and I sync it with SyncToy about once a week, this provides me with backup incase of internal HDD failure (It has happened to me before :S). The second external drive is kept offsite with family and I sync it about twice a year. This backs up against fire/theft and in the event of a disaster I will never lose more than 6 months worth of photos. I don’t take many photos so this solution works well for me.