In the last few weeks, I’ve encountered a surprising number of data losses, or at least near-losses. People accidentally deleting stuff, losing their hard drives, or being locked out by their online providers.
That’s scary, considering that most of my life resides on some form of hard drive by now. So I decided to take a step back and look at what I want from my data.
I don’t want to physically lose it. That means it needs to be stored in at least two different locations. (Two different online services is fine - my blog lives at dreamhost and on Amazon’s S3) Currently, I’m using SuperDuper to back up to an external hard drive, but it is getting a bit unwieldy as more and more of my data starts to live online.
I don’t want to be at the mercy of a single proprietary format. I don’t want to be tied into any given application - I like testing out new things, and I’m not fond of what’s commonly called “The Microsoft Tax” - the need to constantly update your office applications. At the very least, any software I use should have the ability to bulk export into an open format.
I need a local backup of online data - I never want to be cut off just because I forgot to update my credit card information, or some provider goes out of business.
Data needs to be revisioned. I’m not only interested in the current state - if I accidentally modified something a few weeks ago, I want to be able to undo that change. Maybe Leopard and TimeMachine will solve this problem - we’ll see.
Some of my data I want synchronized across several locations. An online calendar is no good if it’s only online, and an offline one doesn’t help me if I’m not near my laptop.
Some data needs a bidirectional synchronization with other peoples data - calendar information most prominent among them. I do want to share my calendar with my wife, and she needs to be able to modify it independently of mine. For that problem, there’s BusySync - but there’s more data that wants to be shared.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be taking a look at a lot of my different data sources, re-evaluating them in accordance with those guidelines. As I find solutions, I will be sharing them in this space. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you what your data is doing when you don’t look.
Like you, I’ve got a clone of my machine sitting on my desk. I’d love to have another off-site clone, but I can’t see how to practicably create it. We’re probably talking 70 GB. I don’t think my ISP would like me if I tried to upload that all at once.
You might want to try it - a friend of mine is using Mozy, and she’s uploaded around 80GB in the first backup round.
Unless you constantly saturate their pipe anyway, they’ll usually treat it as a fluke
Right now, it’s sitting on an external drive that I put together with a hard drive and USB 2.0 case. Obviously, it’s not enough especially since I had a previous backup hard drive that failed on me. I definitely have my eye on Mozy, and would like to have a single physical solution for both my PC and Mac — but at the moment I’m just going to settle for my single backup drive until I find another special on a Seagate FreeAgent or WD MyBook to use exclusively with my MacBook. (Not to hijack this conversation, but anyone have any recommendations for an external HD backup?)
I shall be eagerly awaiting your future posts Mr. Blum.