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 More and more people are wanting to backup their PCs. Maybe
PCs been around long enough that everyone has been burnt. More and
more products are out there to help you satisfy your need to perform
backups.
Mozy is an online backup product that has been pounding me
with advertisements on Pandora and Hulu and I'd probably buy Mozy if they
promised to go away and leave me alone. Carbonite is another one and its
from Google! $50 a year to backup as much data as you want. Its a
no-brainer right? Here's how it really works.
Carbonite will back up everything you keep in "My
Documents" to the Cloud. The Cloud being an internet Server Farm
somewhere far enough away that you won't both get hit by the same
lightning.
What's not in your My Documents is probably Windows and
Microsoft Office and other programs you have on CD anyway. What you
create and care about you can store in My Documents. So just herd your
Quickbooks and Microsoft Outlook files, Contacts, email and such, into
My Documents so they get backed up. If you don't know where
those files are or what they're called just read alittle more.
The first Carbonite backup will take about 12 hours per
gigabyte and may take up to a month. It says that right during the
installation. You can use your PC like normal and Carbonite
will backup as much as it can when it can. Once done you're
all good.
After the initial backup Carbonite will only backup the
files in My Documents that are new or changed. You will have the
latest version of whatever you have backed up in case something goes wrong,
and, it will be somewhere else in case the house burns down, but still at
your fingertips.
A few changes to little files won't take much time
to backup at all. Throw in a bunch of new files, upload your
camera, and it may take a day or two. Eventually you'll have a current
backup. If something does go wrong during that process you've still got
yesterday's version.
Change a big file and it may take days to backup. The
thing about big files is that when you change them they are changed.
One little change and the whole great big file is flagged for
backup. If something happens during that process you've got last week's
version.
Microsoft keeps all your Outlook stuff like Contacts and
Folders in a file called a PST. Quickbooks keeps your financials in a file
called a QBW. An average PST will be about 1 gigabyte, 12 hours to backup.
A business' Quickbooks may have several years of transactions, lets
say another 12 hours. One little change a day and
your backup may never be current.
The other side of backup and recovery is recovery. If your
files take a month to backup with Carbonite, how long will they take to
recover?
Here's an idea, get a little USB drive and backup your stuff
yourself. Cobian, GoodSync, even Windows will backup all your files, using
Windows Task Scheduler, while you sleep.
Cobian, which is free, will make readable, usable backups,
and keep as many versions as instructed. This way you can go back to a
previous date and get files you may have changed and wish you hadn't.
GoodSync, will copy from your PC to a USB drive keeping
both versions identical. Or, and this is what I like, copy files
one direction only. GoodSync will replacie existing files on the
USB with current ones from the PC without propugating deletes. Not
propugating deletes means your copies on the USB are intact even after you
delete the originals from the PC, giving you an archive of seldom used
files and letting you keep your PC free of clutter.
Online Backup, USB, Cobian, GoodSync, that's your
call, and that's Cocktail Talk.
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