Backup Your Files
I have from time to time mentioned backups and recently some topics have come up in the news as well as talking amongst friends in which it is evidenced just how easily digital data can be lost. Not surprisingly it is becoming clear to me that many folks view Facebook, Flickr and the like to be viable backup options that are always going to be there. While some of these services might be used to keep a copy of a file you should also have a copy somewhere where you can retrieve the file if you wake up tomorrow morning and find you are no longer able to log into Facebook, Flickr or any online resource. Recently there was a six year old blogging service, JournalSpace, which lost its users’ posts due to relying on RAID as a backup solution.
The idea that with today's economy and relatively young Internet technologies that it is far fetched to believe that a service like Facebook will not always be there is not unthinkable. If you are relying on an online source as a backup, what is your solution to get your data back in the event you needed to? I am both a Flickr user and a Facebook user, but that is not the only location I keep my photos. I also keep multiple copies at home on multiple drives, which leads to my next point.
A lot of folks keep all their digital photos and video on one computer drive, this being their only or primary computer. Just a few weeks ago I had a friend come to me who wanted to retrieve some music from an iPod and they brought a USB drive with them along with the iPod. As they dropped off the 30 gig iPod and the USB drive they warned me that the drive had all their family photos on it. I asked them if that was the only place they kept them and they said yes. I then asked what if the drive failed and I received a blank stare. I handed them back the drive and told them to at least buy another drive, keep multiple copies and I was not about to take responsibility of a hard drive that contained all their family pictures when they had no backups. The next day they bought a new USB drive and gave that to me to put their music files on. All of this comes a couple months after another friend rang my phone and asked if I had a solution for getting years worth of files off his crashed hard drive. Again, he never thought about backing up his computer, now all his files were lost.
I am not against online services, I am using SpiderOak as an offsite backup source. SpiderOak offers 2 GB free and 100 GB for $10 a month with the option of incrementally adding additional 100 GB for $10 and this works with Windows, Mac and Linux. But I am still very much planning to continue to keep a copy of all my files at home as well. Services like SpiderOak are awesome and well worth their minimal price when it comes having another source for your files. I strongly feel this should not be your only backup solution, but it sure beats the solution a lot of folks use.
The point I am trying to make is that you should always look to use these services intelligently in addition to your own backups. I love Gmail, but I download a copy of my emails while leaving a copy on the server. So my email is getting backed up in the event that my emails were lost on the server. You are the one that is responsible for your files, whatever those files may be. Relying solely on a service or worse yet the health of your computers current hard drive is a huge gamble. Rumor has it that Google is soon going to release a backup solution in the cloud (the Internet), probably called Gdrive, and they will want you to believe that keeping all your files on such a service is the way to go. It may well be the way to go, but your first plan and long term plan if you want to pass photos on to your children and children's children is to have a home backup solution first and foremost.
Use backup options that your operating system provides, use TimeMachine, and plan to use a service like SpiderOak to keep an offsite copy of your files in the event of a fire. Purchase at lease one external USB drive and routinely make copies of important files to the drive. You should always have multiple copies and I am not talking RAID. RAID is protection from hardware failure; it is not protection from deleting a file. Even the best services make mistakes, even Google.
