CJRLC Blog

It’s time for TRY TEN THINGS - MONTH 3 (only slightly late)!

This month - BACK UPS!

We all know we should be backing up - but do we? The day you lose your stuff is the day you will be kicking yourself that you always “meant to” back up but never did.

Here are this month’s online backup options.

The first is JungleDisk - an Amazon.com product. THIS IS NOT FREE, but certainly is cheap. 15 cents per gigabyte. This offers you 20GB for $3.40. There is no minimum or maximum amount of storage to use.

Here are some examples of how much you can store (from their site):

1 gigabyte is a little over 1000 megabytes, and is enough for:

• 250 songs
• 500-1500 pictures
• 10,000 documents
• …or over an hour of high-quality video

How it works

1. You download a program (works for Windows, Mac, Linux)
2. You sign-up (you can use your existing Amazon.com account if you have one) - it’s free to sign-up and you pay only for the storage space you use
3. Use JungleDisk like a local hard drive

There is also an AUTOMATIC BACKUP feature, and some other features for a $1.00/month fee.
In case you are worried that Amazon will “own” your data - check out this part of their information:

Your data is YOUR data
Jungle Disk with Amazon S3 is the only online storage service where the application is de-coupled from the storage and you “own” your own data. When you use Jungle Disk, your files are stored on Amazon.com’s servers using S3, an open web-service based API. They never touch our servers, and we have no idea what (or how much) data you are storing. Access to your data on S3 is restricted at all times by your AWS Secret Key which is never sent to us or any other user. You can choose a custom encryption key so that all of your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, and stays encrypted while stored.
To further re-enforce the idea that you are in control of your data, we have made available open source code that can be used to browse and download your data without even using Jungle Disk.
This alone is something you won’t find from any other online backup provider. Jungle Disk’s unique model means that the software and service will keep functioning, even if Jungle Tools LLC (the company that develops Jungle Disk) were to go away.

The second one is Carbonite.
This one ONLY WORKS ON WINDOWS (Vista and XP) and works in the background to backup yours files when your computer is idle. (The site says a MAC version will be available mid-2008?!) There is a 15-day free trial (no credit card required) but otherwise is also NOT a free service.

This one also has no limit to how much you can backup, and it seems to backup your entire system. It does warn that “As a practical matter, however, the speed of today’s DSL and cable Internet services will make it very slow to back up more than, say, a few dozen GB of data.”

The cost is a flat fee of $49.95 per year. Or, buy two years for $89.95 ($3.75/month).

The third one is MOZY.
Mozy IS FREE! The free version works on Windows or Mac.
You can sign-up for MozyHome Free click here. This gives you 2GB of 100% free backup space.

However, it also has fee-based personal and business package options.
Personal Plan (MozyHome Unlimited) = unlimited backup for $4.95/month; and Business Plan (MozyPro - only for Windows) = I didn’t check into the prices for this.

Here is a write-up from Yahoo! Tech on Mozy that I happened to find.

I am sure there are others, but these are just three to get you started. You really have NO excuse not to back up now!

One personal tip: I use the huge amounts of free Google storage available to do quick, free and easy e-mail backups. I have my work email forwarded to a Gmail account (Google’s free email) that I set up just for this purpose.
A copy of all of the emails I receive and send goes automatically to the Gmail account and also remains on my work server and in my email.
Every once in awhile I go to this Gmail account and mark everything read and archive them. (And, by they way, if you’re not using Gmail, you should be!)

You should also probably be backing up your work email (and other important email) to another source as well, but this is just one I use. (I started doing this originally to make my work email compatible with my iPhone, but I realized it has this excellent side-effect!)

If you have used any of these (or another backup system) or try any, please share with us here on the blog! Thanks!

Good luck and happy backing-up!

Filed under: Amy, TRY TEN THINGS