Quest Personal Backup Strategy - Part 1

March 29, 2010

backuptechcloud

Shows different SD cards scattered on a surface

Let me start by saying that I am continuously trying to improve my backup strategy. From my experience I believe that a backup strategy will evolve as your needs change and a one size fits all doesn’t really work. So for this reason I am always asking people how they backup their important data and reading blog posts on people’s backup strategies. All this helps me to refine my backup strategy.

In this post I plan to describe how my backup strategy has evolved over the years. Now I want to use one of the cloud based storage services to backup my data and will try to give you reasons why I am going choose one of these services over the others. The services I plan to look at are Jungle Disk (Amazon S3), Dropbox, Mozy, Backblaze and Carbonite.

History

While at university, I used to backup my data to floppy disks & CD-R and then to flash drives. After finishing university I found I didn’t have a lot to backup and could get away with backing up a few times a year to DVD-R. This all changed after Apple introduced their iTunes store. I started to buy music from them and was backing up to DVD-R. Now I have started to buy music from the iTunes store and Amazon. This makes it difficult to backup the music and basically I have to put more effort to backup the data. Before I didn’t have a lot of documents and pictures to backup and so a limited backup was fine, but over the years the number of my documents and pictures have increased dramatically.

Now I need to backup more regularly and I have been using external hard drives and DVD-R. One problem with this method is I can’t automate the backup since I use more than one external hard drive. Also I don’t have an offsite backup and if the external hard drive fails I’ll lose my data.

Cloud based Backup Solutions

Recently I have been interested in cloud based storage. I have looked at reviews of the different services and I couldn’t really make up my mind. Since most of these services have a trial offer, I decided to try them out myself and decide which one would suit me.

Dropbox

I have been using the free Dropbox account for some time now and I really like the service. I like the simplicity of the service. I like the simplicity of dropping files into the dropbox folder and your data is backed up. For the amount of data I need to backup, the dropbox paid accounts are too expensive for me. I will continue to use the free account since I find it a quick and easy way of sharing files between my desktop and laptop computers.

Carbonite

Overall I could find nothing wrong with Carbonite. The only feature it seemed to lack was the ability to browse your files online. I couldn’t find a way of viewing the backed up files from another machine without installing the Carbonite software. Since the Mozy and Backblaze offers this feature, it would have been nice for Carbonite to provide it too.

Backblaze

I was very interested in Backblaze after seeing the video and blog post about the storage pods they have designed. I think their service is really good and will suit most people. It takes away the hassle of deciding what needs to be backed up and I can see this being really useful. However for me I want a little more control. The initial backup took quite some time. I tried to find a way to customize what is being backed up, but didn’t have much luck. I only found a way of adding files or folders to a ignore list. It would have been nice to tell the software what I wanted to add to the backup set instead of adding what I didn’t want backed up. This is a drawback for me, but I think I may need to investigate it further.

Mozy

Mozy seems to meet all my requirements; you can customize the backup set and change the schedules of your backup. You have a nice web interface to access your files. I think for me Mozy is the best solution for now.

Conclusion

So far Mozy seems to be the backup solutions that would be ideal for me. I will be using my Dropbox account to share files between my laptop and desktop computers. I think I am going to give Backblaze another look and check if I can back up what I want by using the ignore list. I have to admit I think their storage pods are really cool. I am also going to try to look at Amazon S3, but the pay for what you use model may be too expensive for me. I will try out the Jungle Disk service and investigate Backblaze further in my next post.

rubot