Back up your mom with Crashplan

I tried a few online backup services last year: Carbonite, Mozy, ProtectMyPhotos, and Titanize. I use Carbonite to back up my home system, but I have found the Achilles heel of online backup: it's really slow. My first backup of music, photo, and video files over my home broadband connection took, literally, months. Plus, online backup puts my files on someone else's servers. They're probably more secure than my home machine, but it still makes me a bit uncomfortable.

A new service, Crashplan, lets you back up your PCs and Macs to other PCs and Macs, either your own or those of your friends. For example, my wife can back up her laptop to my home desktop. The backup works at LAN speeds when she's home, so it's fast, and we're not sending our data to some unknown server farm. Crashplan backups are encrypted before they are sent out, so I can't read my wife's files.

Crashplan backs up your files to your friends' PCs.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

One of the cool things about Crashplan is you can use it as remote backup for off-site safety, but with the first backup happening locally, for speed. For example, I could have my dad come over to my house and run a backup of his laptop on my home's network. That would take a few hours. But from then on, from his home, Crashplan would perform incremental backups over the Internet. They're slow, but there's not much data to worry about--and we wouldn't have this long unprotected period in which the initial backup is still running. A future version of the product will allow users to perform an initial backup to a removable hard drive and then give that hard drive to a friend or family member for ongoing backups, according to Crashplan founder Matthew Dornquast.

The system can make redundant backups of one system to multiple locations, which is a good idea, since friends' and family computers aren't likely to be on all the time, as a data center's drives are.

Crashplan "buddies" can restrict the amount of storage friends' backups can use on their computers, but other than that the system is hands-off, and in my tests it didn't impact performance noticeably.

Another big plus for Crashplan: cost. Online backup plans charge by the month or by the gigabyte. Crashplan is just a one-time software purchase: $20 for the home version (which backs up files once a day), or $60 for "pro" (which features live backups and keeps older file versions). There's a free 30-day trial available on CNET Download.com for PC and Mac. Crashplan will host a backup for you, at 10 cents a gigabyte a month, but as Dornquast says, "We pretty much beg you not to use it."

I really like the idea of using a loose social network of computers for redundant, off-site backup. Note that if you want to have access to the same files from multiple machines, what you want is something different: synchronization. See coverage of Tubes, FolderShare, and BeInSync for that.

[tech_smart24]

Try IBackup for class and perfection

Take a look at IBackup (http://www.ibackup.com) as it has a large number of powerful features for easy backups and restores of your data. IBackup for Windows (http://www.ibackup.com/ibwin_new.htm) can do interactive backup and restore and also schedule regular online backups for Windows desktops, laptops and servers. IBackup accounts are compatible with most FTP clients on most platforms providing a powerful flexible tool to transfer files. IBackup supports backups for UNIX and Linux-based computers using rsync.

'IDrive' enables you to map the IBackup online storage account as a local drive on your computer. You can then drag-and-drop, edit and save files in your online backup account using IDrive. Backing up multimedia files is very easy with IBackup. I use their application called IDrive Multimedia for this purpose. All that is needed is to simply move the multimedia files to the IBackup account and then play them with IDrive Multimedia. You will get instant streaming and you can do fast forward also.

You can share files and folders by creating sharable links with ?Web-Manager? and emailing these links to others. You can also password protect your files and folders, so that they can only be viewed by people who are supposed to view them. You can even `privately share? data instantly with another IBackup user with Web-Manager. The private share feature can be disabled at any time.

You can also try other IBackup applications like IBackup Professional (http://www.ibackup.com/professional), in which data is encrypted with a user-defined key so that the data stored on IBackup Professional servers cannot be decrypted by anybody other than you.

[feduchin]

Simply buy an external hard drive!

For a cost of less than $100 why not buy an external drive?
All this "sexy" talk about backing up on line or over a lan seems to me the hard way, and usually slooow.
To back up complete systems why not use drive2drive for Win98 etc, or CasperXP (made by the same company) for XP systems?
I have backed up my accounting system file to the Internet; www.box.net; and it takes ages for just 5Mb!
One thing though, if you do use an external hard drive you MUST have at least two partitions. This is to obviate the risk of accidentally formatting your backup drive, as happened to me once! (I didn't recover for days.)
But it's far quicker than backing up to anywhere offsight, whether Internet or friendly lan.

[BunchOfFun]

External hard drive only part of the package

Why do we backup data? To retreive data for unforseen circumstances.

Relying on an external hard drive is not a safe way backup your data.

When you plug an external USB drive in your computer it shows up as a drive letter. A few years ago I got a virus that scanned my entire computer and others on the network and replaced every MS Office file (.XLS, .DOC., etc) with a zero byte file. I could replace the data because it was backed up on my website via automated FTP using Handy Backup.

Also, what happens when there's a fire in your house? Hurricane? Tornado? Theft? All those digital photos & videos of your family gone.

Offsite backup is inexpensive when you look at the potential cost of having to replace that data. Some things you can never get back, especially personal photos & videos. Is internet backup slow? Yup. But if you've got a high speed connection and you schedule the backup overnight who cares?

If you rarely create new data then you could probably get away with burning a DVD once a month and giving it to a friend for safe storage.

And if you're not backing up, do it right now! I've had relatives literally crying because they lost irreplaceable photos of their children.

Thanks CNet for bringing up this very important topic!