You may not wish for it to happen but it will. Just like everything else mechanical, hard drives fail. If you’re toting around a laptop (like me) then your chances of damaging your hard drive are even higher.
Now, the biggest problem with this is that people (okay, people like me) are inherently lazy about backing up stuff. I devised a way to backup my important files automatically from my laptop onto a RAIDed network house server (if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry – it isn’t important for the stuff below).
But wait, what happens if server fries itself or something like that? All my data is lost. Okay, so I’ve started backing up onto a flash drive which gets dropped and periodically dropped into a safety deposit box. But that requires me to do the backup and go to the bank. Plus the backups aren’t continuous. And the drive is only a gig so I have to choose what is most important to backup. Better than nothing though. If you’re interested in doing this, you might want to look at Sony’s new Micro Vault Tiny USB drives which pack a lot of storage in very little space.
So during my month long blogging haitus, I decided to take a look at a bunch of online backup services to see if any was cost effective and secure enough for me to use. I’m happy to say I did find one (actually two) that works for me. Read on to see what I’ve chosen and see if my research can help you out.
Iron Mountain’s Connected Service
I started out with Iron Mountain’s Connected service. Full Disclosure: I’m an Iron Mountain shareholder (not that this will matter).
In a word, blah. The client side software is incredibly slow. Every time you want to configure folders for backups it’ll scan EVERY folder on your hard drive. Not only is this time consuming but it is uneccessarily annoying. The other services check directories on the fly which is way better in terms of usability. I suppose that once you set everything up, you won’t make changes that frequently but the annoyance factor of this on the front end was too much for me to deal with.
Now one of the things I want to do is backup files on my network storage drive. Because of the sheer size, we keep all of our digital photos on our server (again, on RAIDed hard drives). Right now, we’re up to about 40 gigs (yes, gigs) of photos (we have a 5 megapixel and 7 megapixel camera so each picture could be 2-5 megs a piece). It would be nice to have that backed up elsewhere. Well, Iron Mountain’s service won’t do network drives.
After taking a look at the cost ($75/month for 30 gigs down to $10/month for 500 megs) I decided that this was a non-starter.
Carbonite
Carbonite is a well built service. The software integrates very nicely into Windows and you get a visual indicator for each folder being backed up. The price is incredible too – essentially $5/month for an unlimited amount of space (discounts for pre-paying drops the cost further). On top of that, you can try it out without giving up your credit card information. Backups are continuous as long as you have access to the Internet.
Now the downside – the software encrypts all of your files before sending it to Carbonite for storage but you can’t choose your own encryption key. This means that they have the ability to look at ALL of your files. Sure, they probably won’t do that but I don’t think I want anyone looking at my financial papers or what not. Also, you can’t use their software to back up network files. So, I punted on this too.
Data Deposit Box
Data Deposit Box is the only service that I reviewed that allows you to backup network drives. This is one of the two services I’m now using but I’m actually not using it for my network drives. This service also has the problem of not allowing for user generated encryption keys. So they too could potentially look at your files. So, I’m using them to backup one very important file that I have. I use a PGP encrypted disk file to hold a document which contains my master list of passwords. This file is backed up onto the Data Deposit Box service and assuming PGP knows their stuff, my information is totally secure. I guess this is my leap of faith that they know what they’re doing.
Data Deposit Box has an interesting pricing schedule. You pay for what you use. You pay 1 cent per MB per month up to the first gigabyte (they are using the “correct” definition of 1,024 megs per gig in one place but their calculator doesn’t totally reflect this beyond the first gig). After that you pay $3 per gigabyte per month. No fees for bandwidth costs, just storage. You can also attach multiple machines to a single account for no additional costs (makes sense since you pay for storage, not anything else).
Since I’m only backing up one file (one meg in size) to them, my total bill should be a penny per month. I think I can handle that. That is if they want to deal with the transaction cost of charging me a penny per month.
Mozy
So my favorite system is the final full review – Mozy. Mozy let’s you use your own encryption key (they use a 448 bit Blowfish cipher) or you can use their corporate key. Using your own key is safer but if you forget it your files will become, as they say, “a worthless glob of 1′s and 0′s”.
The software for Mozy works pretty well. There is some kind of delay when you open up the configuration panel where the software seems like it is talking to the central servers for information about your account. Then again, Mozy might be indexing directories like Iron Mountain above but if they are it is a lot faster than Iron Mountain’s implementation. The delay isn’t very annoying but less would be better.
The nice thing about Mozy is the pricing schedule. They give everyone 2 gigs of free storage space. Actually if you use the link I provide to Mozy you’ll get an extra 256 megs of storage and so will I. Beyond that, if you need more storage the price is phenomenal. 5 gigs go for $2/month, 30 gigs for $5/month, and 60 gigs for $10/month. “How is this possible?” you say? Well, Mozy is a startup (their Series A was $2 million from Wasatch, Tim Draper, and Drew Major) and they’ve come up with some technology that apparently allows them to scale well, be extremely reliable, and manage the storage easily. By the way, if you opt for the 2 gig free offer only, then Mozy will email you weekly with some information and advertising. It really isn’t annoying and I think it is a pretty good tradeoff to 2 gigs of free space.
Oh by the way, Mozy is Windows only right now but I’ve been told that a Mac version is on the way. One of the founders and I had a discussion about a Linux version but it sounds like this is a no go for a while.
Other Solutions
I’ve actually run into some other solutions that are pretty interesting. One is Jungle Disk. They do allow you to use your own encryption key and all data is stored on Amazon’s S3 storage service. So you pay Amazon based on their pricing schedule which is $.15/gig per month for storage and $.20/gig of transfer per month. So to get a gigabyte stored on their service, it’ll cost you $.35 the first month and $.15 per month afterwards. If you need to get the data back or change it, you’ll incur the transfer costs. I’ve contemplated using this since 40 gigs of storage for our photos will only cost $6/month to store and $8 to upload. I haven’t yet but I probably will. Since I’m using Amazon.com’s Visa card, I think I’ll get a 3% rebate (in Amazon.com gift certificates) on this too (highly recommended if you use Amazon.com a lot – I use it so much they gave me three months of free “Amazon Prime” usage!).
Foldershare is another tool that could potentially be used for a backup system of sorts. I used Foldershare to actually share documents and project files while I was at school but I could see it being useful for backing up files between computers too. Foldershare was previously a stand alone company but they were acquired by Microsoft (see the funny thing that happened when they were acquired here and then here). File updates are sent from machine to machine on a peer to peer basis over an encrypted link. Your files are never sent to a central storage server so they are safe from prying eyes. Best of all is the cost – absolutely free. And in this case the software is available for Windows and Mac. Don’t even hold your breath for a Linux version though.
Conclusion
So I hope that was interesting and informative. If you don’t backup your stuff onto a local device, start doing that now. Doing backups to an online service is also good and probably easier to do without having to get up from where you are. Your hard drive is going to fail. Now the question is are you going to do something to mitigate the damage?
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