The year is rapidly drawing to a close, prompting the usual rush to get those last tax deductions in order, clean out the closets and, of course, update my off-site back up. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a thing about backups after having experienced hefty data losses several times, including the time when my Sony Vaio laptop was stolen in D.C., once when I dropped my iBook on a concrete train platform in Boston (CRUNCH!) and another instance when an aging desktop hard drive died without warning. Just this year, the hard drive in an ancient Compaq PC that my wife used sporadically died taking an unknown variety of items down the drain.
As a general practice for my main Powerbook (which carries the primary copies of all my photos, music, video and document files), I back up to a portable hard drive as frequently as I can manage, typically three or four times a week. I have a quick little end-of-day routine, which helps. Bring the laptop up to the home office, plug in for recharging, plug in my LaCie’s 160 GB d2 through the Firewire 800 port, crank up LaCie’s excellent (and free here) back up program SilverKeeper, press “go” and go back downstairs for the night.
I also try to save copies of very important documents and photos by emailing them to my gmail account and saving them on my iDisk. But that doesn’t cover much material and I don’t do it nearly frequently enough.
I’ve also messed around with using Amazon’s super-cheap S3 online storage service in conjunction with JungleDisk (it’s discussed a bit on my messing around with page) but it took literally weeks of overnight uploads to make even a small dent in backing up just my iTunes library. And, to add insult to injury, JungleDisk was insanely slow on my Mac. It could take 10 or 20 minutes for the program just to show me a listing of the files in a folder. As an aside, the Windows version was much snappier, but since I don’t use my Windows computer much and all the files I want to back up are on my Powerbook, that’s not much help. A lot of this is no doubt the fault of Comcast and their slaggy upload rates — a recent test showed that I could download at over 6,000 kilobits per second but upload at only 342 kbps. Bah humbug.
In any event, even if all the other methods were working to perfection, I’d still like to have a full backup of everything that’s more or less under my control (not on someone else’s servers) but not located at my house. So once a year I make a backup on DVDs and mail them to my brother in Connecticut. I decided this year to give Apple’s Backup (version 3.1) a shot. It worked well, if slowly, and in less than 24 hours I had burned a complete 44 Gigabyte backup onto 11 discs. It only took that long because I didn’t sit by the computer the whole time feeding blank DVDs as quickly as it needed them. Now it’s off to FedEx…safe for another year.
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