At a client job last week, I was discussing their current backup regimen — backing up their data three times each week to an external hard drive. This isn't uncommon in a business environment, but finding a similar setup at home is rare.
Backup is a lot like flossing: You know you're supposed to do it, but few people do it consistently. I can't blame them. Backing up a computer has always been difficult for novice users.
Both Apple and Microsoft have tried to ease the burden with their latest operating systems. All you need to get started is an external USB2 or Firewire hard drive.
Windows Vista includes the Backup and Restore Center, which has the ability to back up documents and photos to either an external drive or writable CD on a schedule the user defines. If the machine is running Windows Vista Ultimate and Business Edition, it also has the ability to do a complete backup of the system, which can get it back up and running quickly if the entire drive were to fail.
Apple's latest OS, Mac OS X Leopard, introduced Time Machine, a completely hands-off backup solution. I like Time Machine more than Vista's Backup and Restore Center because it's much easier to set up. Once you plug an external drive into your Mac, OS X will ask if you want to use that drive for Time Machine. Leopard will then take care of scheduling and backing up data automatically.
Time Machine and Vista's Backup and Restore Center can provide peace of mind against hard drive death and accidental file deletion, but it does little to protect against fire or other disasters.
Until recently, off-site backup was too expensive for the consumer market. As the price of hard drives and bandwidth drops, so has the cost of off-site data storage.
Amazon offers a cheap online storage service, S3, that costs pennies to transfer gigabytes of data. S3 was designed with developers in mind, but a company called JungleDisk offers a backup service for both Mac and Windows using S3.
JungleDisk allows users to schedule backups much as you can using Vista's Backup and Restore Center. It will then transfer files over your high-speed connection to Amazon's S3 servers. Depending on how much data is being transferred, the initial upload can take a few days, but subsequent backups will transfer only files that have changed since the last backup.
I may be more paranoid than most when it comes to losing data, but that's only because I have been the victim of it before. Once you lose something important, you want to ensure that it never happens again. A good backup regimen is the best way to do that.
Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.
Originally published in The Evansville Courier & Press
