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Backups -- we know we've got to do 'em, but we
just don't quite know how. I remember way back when I was writing my
dissertation, I backed up all my files on a floppy disk every night. About the
time I had filled the first floppy and reached the second, I knew had to be
about done -- there's only so much you can write for a dissertation, right?
Oh, how the times have changed! When Apple
released the first incarnation of the iMac without a floppy drive,
people scratched their heads and felt lost. Of course, it's standard now -- in
fact, I'm not sure that my kids would actually know what to do with a floppy
disk. And I would venture to say that with the newly released MacBook Air
without a CD-ROM drive, another era may also soon be over - we've long sensed
that CDs and even DVDs are sort of "yesteryear."
So what's hip, especially when it comes to
backing up your data? There's no doubt that it's got to be online backups. However,
the hippest thing does not always have to be the best, so I spent some time
last week looking at online backup services.
But before I report on my findings, here are
some thoughts on online services in general. It's hard to exactly put a finger
on the exact time when it became feasible to trust online services as much or
even more than your local computer, but the fact is that it finally happened sometime
in the last couple of years. Only three or four (or maybe five) years ago, most
people would have argued that the Internet as the primary medium to store data,
communicate by telephone and email, manipulate files, and, in our case, translate, edit, and proofread was just not
quite reliable enough. What if my connection fails? What if the server that
stores my data crashes? What if the Internet "goes down"? While all
of these things can still happen (probably in the same order of likelihood as mentioned
above), today there are plenty of workarounds (such as other means of wired or
wireless communication with the Internet) and security mechanisms (redundant
servers). More importantly, we have started to accept online solutions as the
new normal. Predecessors to many of today's products were already there during
the first dot-com boom, but they didn't quite make it because our minds and
attitudes were not quite ready for it.
Ben Rose sent me a link earlier today to Zamzar, a file conversion service that allows
you to upload documents, graphics, music, video, and compressed files in a
variety of formats and have them converted to a number of formats. It's good to
know that it's available, especially because it's free (in its basic form with
ugly ads to haunt you), but what struck me most about it was a reviewer's comment
that was displayed on the site: "It just makes so much sense to have a
product like this." Exactly. Why in the world do we all have to have our
own little tools and products if they can also be offered as a service?
So, let's backup (pun intended).
There is an interesting blog post
from about two years ago in which the author compares 13 different online
storage products. What's most interesting about it is not so much the results
of his comparison (as I said, it's two years old); instead, it's the barrage of
comments suggesting several dozen other products (often posted by the makers
themselves). There truly is a never-ending list of competing products that all
offer online backup with slightly different features. Some offer sharing of
files with other users, some even let you work on the files while they reside
at the remote location, and a few provide a peer-to-peer service where you don't
back up on a server but on a few "buddies'" computers (not
surprisingly, one of those products is called BuddyBackup).
Two of the most popular products at the moment
are Carbonite and Mozy. They offer a similar service: with Mozy
you have the option to get a free account if you only need to store 4 GB (you'll
need more), but otherwise they are each approximately $5 a month for
unlimited storage. Since several of you
had written to me about Carbonite in the past, I signed up for the 15-day
trial to check it out. I really like it, it does exactly what it promises, but
. . . I ended up uninstalling it again.
But first, let's start by explaining why it is
a cool little program. Little it really is -- just about 5 MB to download -- it's
extremely simple to set up, and I'm sure that the developers were sent to
several how-can-I-design-my-product-so-that-the- most-untechnical-person-ever-will-be-able-to-use-it
courses (phew, that was hard to type!). Once you have it installed it gives you
the option to either choose the default Documents and Settings folder
for backup (where your email files and My Documents typically reside) or
you can choose folders on your own. If you forget a folder or a file, it takes
only a right-click to add (or deselect) a folder for backup. The backup process
starts right away. You'll see a little notification that the first backup may
take several days -- and that's right (I
told you that they deliver what they promise). In my case it took about five days.
I disabled it while it was working during the day because it requires quite a
bit of processing power and continued the backup at night. It all works seamlessly,
and once the initial backup is complete each file that is modified is flagged
to be backed up either right away or at a time of your choosing. The restore
function also is super-easy: a new virtual drive is created that gives you
immediate access to all of your files.
The benefits of this are obvious. It's
dirt-cheap, you have access to your files from anywhere (provided that you
access them from the machine where they were backed up), and it's easy.
But here's why I decided to return to my
exterior hard drive backup: Depending on your TEnT (translation environment
tool) and whether you choose to work with client-specific translation memories
and/or a large all-encompassing translation memory, the size of those files can
be enormous. So large, in fact, that the nightly backup may just not be enough
to get everything that has been changed written back to the Carbonite
server. Add to that your email file(s) (I happen to use Outlook, which
stores everything in a large database-like file) and whatever actual documents
you have been working on, and you will have to have the backup run constantly,
which tends to steal from your processing power.
This may not be true for you. You may not deal
with very large files. In that case, Carbonite, Mozy, or some of their competitors may be
the right solution for you.
There is one more
thing, though. With the product that I use to run backups on my external hard
drive, Acronis True Image, I can
do incremental backups that not only keep the data from yesterday, but also
from the day before and before and . . . (you get the picture). Quite often I
realize that I need to dig much deeper than just a day or even a week to get
something that may have been changed many times since, and that's no problem.
Of course, there are limitations, too (at some point the largest external hard
drive is full), but these are things I can deal with.
(Of course, if my office burns to the ground
and wipes away both my computer and the external hard drive, I may regret what
I just wrote -- so I do use the good old CD drive to burn CDs with the most
important files that I store outside the house.)
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