What’s your contingency plan?
Truman: Contingency plan?
Harry Stamper: Your backup plan. You gotta have some kind of backup plan, right?
Truman: No, we don’t have a back up plan. This is it.-scene from the movie, Armageddon
Have you ever turned on your computer and heard something you know was going to be unpleasant? How many of us have witnessed those “fatal error” messages? Ever see smoke coming from your hard drive? What happens when your Yahoo/Gmail/MSN mail service is locked out?
Experienced tech professionals know that it isn’t if your product fails, it is when it fails. Do you have insurance on your vehicle? Why? Because it insures you that if/when you have an accident, you will have the means to restore or replace what was damaged. OK, so most states require you to have auto insurance, but still, you need a backup strategy for your hardware and software.
When I ordered a desktop upgrade last year, I had a second internal hard drive installed that would backup data on the main drive (just in case). I also have two external hard drives that backup the internals. Yes, this is extreme, but it is also experience. I learned my lessons after losing too many hard drives and accidentally deleting files I shouldn’t have (Wonderwife’s recipes). After upgrading my notebook computer, I also purchased a portable external hard drive as well. Redundancy is my friend.
There are numerous ways to backup your precious data and I will only scratch the surface here. I’m explaining what works for me and hopefully for you as well. I’d love to hear alternatives, especially if it is faster/cheaper/easier.
Cloud Storage
Thanks to technology, it is become cheaper for you to store backups and even share files online. How cheap? Anywhere from $50 a month to free. I haven’t forked over any cash to a subscription service such as Carbonite yet because I want to test it out first. The two free file hosting sites I am using now is A Drive and Dropbox. A drive has the most free storage available at a whopping 50 GB. That is bigger than most hard drives installed in computers a few years ago, people! Dropbox offers 5GB of free storage and a utility you can download that will sync what you have in a folder on your computer with your online storage. These free services also offer paid subscriptions in case you need more space.
Data/Media Files
I’ve already mentioned how many internal & external hard drives I use for my computers, but it is a good idea to also use alternatives as well. Flash drives have dropped in price recently. Currently I have 5 portable drives ranging between 2 and 8 GB. These are easier and more portable than discs. Speaking of discs, the really important personal files are backed up to both CD and DVD.
As a photographer, I have terabytes of images and they all have to be organized and stored easily in various formats. Did you purchase music from an online retailer such as iTunes or Yahoo Music? Burn those files to a disc because those DRM-protected formats will be rendered useless when/if the companies decide not to support them anymore. Yep, they will take your money and run while you get stuck with a useless music file.
A lot of my images are on photo hosting sites such as Flickr. Incidentally, this is the only paid service I am using currently because for $25 annually and unlimited file storage it is fantastic. My video files are on Vimeo. They are both there for me as backup and can be downloaded easily (time-consuming, though).
After reading of users locked out, or unable to access their online email accounts, I decided to take action and get a back up plan as well. I have been using Gmail for about three years now and swear by it. There is not another service out there that can come close to it’s growing functionality. This includes backup and restoring. Google Mail allows users different mail servers to be configured such as POP or IMAP. IMAP allows me to access my Gmail accounts from an email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird and even from my Outlook mobile client. Gmail also has a forwarding feature that I take advantage of by sending every piece of mail to my backup, unlimited Yahoo mail account. Just in case Gmail is ever down, no problem, I can switch to Yahoo and read. It will not receive any new mail, but will help read current mail.
I don’t stop there, friends. There is a software utility simply called Gmail Backup that allows you to download your mail and store it to your computer. This is a sick compulsion people, but I have THIS folder sync’d to the previously mentioned Dropbox too.
Whew
As frustrating and inconvenient as hardware failure is, please don’t get caught without a plan to get your backup, back up. What are you using? Care to share in the comments for us? Remember, not if, but when!
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