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DEL.ICIO.USBacking up can be hard to do
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If hard disks hung out at tattoo parlors, all of them would have a tattoo that says: Born to die.
Your hard disk is going to fail if you use it long enough. It’s a mechanical device and like Toyotas, toy trains and coffee machines it will eventually stop working.
When that happens, your only hope is to retrieve all your data using the back-up copy you made earlier. You do back up your data, right?
Well, if you’re like most people you back up infrequently at best and never at worst. That means that you are likely to lose all the digital photos, tax records, e-mails and e-mail addresses … every bit of data stored on the hard disk.
Online backup services have been around for a long time. But they’ve either been too expensive or too clunky to use. But PC World magazine is giving rave revues to a new service called Carbonite.
It is affordable at $50 for one year, or $90 for two years. And while making a complete back-up can take many hours, the program works at that task in the background while you cruise the Web and perform your usual tasks.
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By Ken
October 16, 2006 10:00 PM | Link to this
I take exception to the statement that backing up a hard drives(s) is hard to do. With the advent of inexpensive external hard drives that use either a USB or a IEEE 1394 connection, it is relatively inexpensive and, once the initial backup has been made, recurring back ups are accomplished rather quickly if you use the differential option in Microsoft’s backup utility.
You can also schedule an automatic backup. I have 5 hard drives and schedule one for Monday at 2:01am, the second at 2:01am Tuesday night and so on. That way the drives are backed up while I am asleep.
The only problem with online backup services is cost and speed. The vast majority of broadband services only offer an upload speed of 256Kbs and a download speed of 1Mbs. At that speed backing up 100GB of data will take well over a day. Using Carbonite, the service you mentioned, would cost $60 per year to back up 5GB to 40GB per month.
Depending on the amount of data a user needs to back up, at a cost of approx. $50 a user can add a 40GB Pocket External Hard Drive and for a $100 a user can add a local external 160GB USB 2.0 drive that will back up 100GB of data in about an hour and a half. At least for me, I’ll buy my own and sleep easy at night.
Ken in Hendersonville
PS: I have lost 2 large hard drives (300GB each) in the last 3 months. My backups saved 2 years of video editing.
By Paul
October 17, 2006 06:55 AM | Link to this
Backing up material on a hard drive is a no brainer. How and when is personal choice, but the consequences of potential problems should be carefully evaluated.
I uses my computer for business. Even the lost time to reconstruct records would cause problems. I feel that I need to consider my office being destroyed by a fire, etc. As a result I (automatically) back up to a remote location each night. I choose not to back up software programs, which means I reinstall after a failure, which has happened several times. This actually becomes a plus in that a lot on unneeded files are not also reinstalled and it does not consume an unacceptable amount of time.
I have also elected to use 2 computers without networking them. Copying changed files from one computer to the other is quick and simple from the off-line backups and eliminates all problems that would occur, when a computer goes bad, [computer] problem is being diagnosed, repairs made, and programs are reinstalled.
As I write this, my 2nd computer is in the shop from a fatal error. I will not get it back for at least a week.
By Elane
October 17, 2006 08:12 AM | Link to this
My previous computer was increasingly prone to misbehavior, and I had to factory-restore it more than once. Most of the important software I had came with the PC, so the programs bounced right back after restoring. For the files, I simply e-mailed them to myself before shutting it all down. Most of those files are still out there in my Yahoo mail. I did pay for a storage-space upgrade, but it was not at all expensive. If they’re important enough, I’ll eventually upload files back into my PC, but Yahoo doesn’t care about them, so why take up my disk space? I periodically store files that way, on approximately the same schedule I use for disk cleanups and defrags.
By David Friend
October 17, 2006 02:45 PM | Link to this
Bill: I am the CEO of Carbonite and I just wanted to thank you for mentioning Carbonite in your recent column. The nice thing about an online backup, of course, is that it’s safely off-site. The nice thing about Carbonite in particular is that it is REALLY SIMPLE and gives you unlimited capacity for one price. I can’t imagine my Mom fussing with an external hard drive or burning CDs, for example. For the reader with two 300GB hard drives, he should stick with what he’s got because DSL and Cable Internet connections are way too slow to move that mountain of data. I’d say anything under 70 or 80GB is fine for online.
By Bill
October 18, 2006 07:42 AM | Link to this
David makes a good point - one that I should have made when I talked about online backups - they are stored off-site.
If your backup copies of data are stored at your house then a real disaster - a fire or tornado - will destroy both your computer and the backup data you have stored.
That’s why businesses almost universally have off-site backups.
By Steve
October 19, 2006 09:25 PM | Link to this
I have been using Carbonite since August. My PC is on an average of 8 hours a day. It has only backed up 10 out of 50 GB thus far over a 384 upstream link. It is way too slow for small businesses and digital photographers.