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How to Play Poker on a Mac

Backing Up, Part 2

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

(Marc continues his series on backup strategies.)

Offsite Backup
The primary flaw of a system like Time Machine is that it is a local backup. Time Machine could backup your system every minute or you could have a dozen Time Machine drives and it wouldn't help if your whole building burned down.

For a business, this could cause bankruptcy. Imagine if you lost all your accounting data, sales records, or customer data!

I used to work at a printshop doing graphic design and a key part of our business was repeat work: rerunning a form or letterhead or a brochure for a long-time customer with only a few minor changes to the artwork. Well, we had a hard drive die on us and I lost some work that was finished but hadn't been backed up to CD yet. For literally years afterward, we were still paying for that, having to recreate old projects from scratch because the original files were lost, and of course we couldn't charge the customer for that time. That taught us a good lesson about having current backups and having off-site backups: if the printshop had burned down, we'd have lost every customer job. It would have meant an insane amount of rework.

For the average user, this may not be quite so critical as with an on-going business, but sometimes it can be emotionally expensive: can you put a price on the pictures of your children or ancient email correspondence with a now-deceased relative? We do all kinds of things with our computers and a lot of it is deeply personal: losing such data could be disastrous.

The solution, of course, is some kind of offsite backup. The simplest solution is to make a periodic backup on some sort of media -- DVD, CD, tape, external hard drive -- and transport it to a different location. You can store it at work or at home (the opposite location of where the original data is located), or leave it at a friend's place. Some people, for example, will buy two external hard drives and swap them once a month, so one drive is local with current backups and the other is offsite with a slightly dated backup.

This can be a fine solution, if you keep up with it. It sounds simple enough to do, but can be a chore, and if you're not into routine, it could be the kind of thing you put off and regret when disaster happens (like me at the printshop, not backing up finished projects to CD soon enough).

Another disadvantage of offsite backups is that disasters can be widespread: flooding or an earthquake or tornado another disaster can knockout an entire community. That backup you left at your mom's place won't help if you both live in the same town and the whole area's wiped out. (Of course, in such a situation you probably have bigger concerns than computer data.) You could solve this by having more than one offsite backup location, but that can get expensive and complicated logistically, depending on your location.

Security is another potential problem with offsite backups. Your boss may not be comfortable with you taking confidential office data to store at your home, and if you're backing up sensitive accounting information, you need to make sure that backup isn't accessible by just anyone.

One offsite solution to these problems is online backup. There are many services available that will give you online data storage for a monthly or annual fee where you can backup your most important files. The costs and quality of these services varies, and how well they work for you depends on the type and amount of data you have, the speed of your Internet connection, and how often your data changes and needs to be backed up.

But online backups can be automated, which means they'll be much more likely to be done regularly (easier than remembering to burn a DVD every month), and they do distance the data from your location, minimizing the chances of a natural disaster wiping out both your original data and your backup. They also can be more secure.

Online backups can be expensive, however, and they are generally much slower, both for backing up (uploading) and restoring (downloading). They also don't work as well for a complete system backup but are better suited for data-only backup.

The online service might include software to help with the backing up, but the quality of the software can vary between services so you'll want to do research and find one that offers the capabilities you need in an interface that works for you. For example, some services are bare bones, just giving you bare data space. Others are more sophisticated, giving you tools to automatically upload only changed files or files that match certain criteria (like "all files which have the word 'tax' in them").

One alternative is to use your web server's disk for backups. You don't get much of an interface (just a bare drive to store files on), but that might be all you need. If you do something like that, though, you do need to make sure your data is in a password-protected directory so that not just anyone can access your files. I've sometimes used that kind of a setup for small but critical files (such as source code for programming projects).

The Bottom Line: An offsite backup system is more of a plan than any specific technology. Tailer the tech to your needs. An infrequent computer user might be fine with a once-a-year DVD backup stored at a different location; a business user might require monthly external hard drive backups and nightly online backups. If you have small amounts of very important data, an online backup system might be ideal. If you need to organize and sort your data before backing it up, an external system like DVDs or CDs might work. The main thing is everyone needs some kind of offsite backup plan for the most critical and irreplaceable data.

Next Time: Marc explores archiving.

macopinion@designwrite.com