Thursday, June 19, 2008

Backing up at Home

I'm pretty particular about my backups at work. In fact, we have a setup where if a nightly backup fails, we get a page in the middle of the night so we can address the problem.

At home, it's a different story. I've got a Windows 2000 PC that I haul out the CD-R's a couple times a year and backup what I think are the important files. At first it wasn't so bad, a couple CD's and I was done. But pictures from a digital camera tend to eat up space at a pretty decent rate. The last backup I did was 18 CD-R's.

About the same time, I got the opportunity to help someone with their own backup issues. They were getting ready to retire a computer and wanted a way to move about 60G of data from one machine to another. So I investigated some options and found a nice 320G SimpleTech USB drive at Costco. We setup the drive and the ArcSoft TotalMedia Backup in about 20 minutes and completed a test backup in another hour or so.

I was so impressed, that I bought one myself. For $89, I just couldn't go wrong.

So far, my impression is TotalMedia can get the basics done. However, as a backup professional I need the ability to tweak things. I'm still doing a backup every day, but looking at other options. Stay tuned for updates.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

mozy.com

Unknown said...
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kaneda said...

I was using GoodSync a while back on my Windows laptop and found that rather reasonable for synchronising from my laptop to a USB drive (and then later on from laptop to a server via SSH).

Only downside is that it costs money.

Upside is I think it's $40 still.

Also supports running on a schedule so you can set it to run every 24 hours, or less if need be.