The Cibertek Blog

Here is the nightmare I found myself in: I had two 500GB external drives connected to my main media machine.  On one of the drives, I had temporary files and a couple of virtual machines host files.  On the other drive; 130GB of music and 75GB of videos and photo files.  The first drive completely stopped working. I couldn’t access any data on it, even after trying to “low-level” access the drive using Seagate tools.  The drive of course, was out-of-warranty.   I had the option to send it to Seagate Recovery but that would have been more than twice the drive original cost.  I realized then, that if this had happened to my 2^nd drive, I would have completely lost years of digital photographs and years of Itunes music downloads (Itunes warns you every time to backup your music because you wont get it back if you lose it without buying it again!).  I cant really put a price on how much all that would of cost me to replace in money and time.  So I made the decision to put an “insurance policy” on my data by using “Online Data Storage” to keep my data safe.

This decision had been a long time coming and until recently, wasn’t really even an option for me because of the cost.  My backup and archiving plan before this happened for my primary systems other data was to use yet another external drive, a Western Digital’s MyBook 500GB, every week.  I just kept running out of space to backup everything all the time.  So the simplest and less expensive choice was to either buy more external drives or bigger drives.   But that plan didn’t “protect” my data from the environment, human error, or other evil humans.   In the corporate IT world, we have backup systems that store gigabytes of data on magnetic or optical tapes.  Some companies have those tapes moved and stored to another secured location away from where the data originated to protect it.  If they don’t have their own facilities, then its outsourced to a third-party.   These third-party companies are trusted to pick-up, store, manage, and deliver this archive data as needed by the company.  The costs rise as more and more data is archived for longer and longer periods of time.  As you can imagine, this kind of service can cost thousands of dollars every month and was never meant to be used by home users.   But now I found a cost-effective way to store my data “off-line” and an even easier way to do it than ever before with these little known services.

I discovered these little gems the same day my hard drive crashed.  I was listening to TWIT with Leo Laport when they started talking about how cheap it was to store their data using “Jungle Disk”.  I had never heard of it until that day but I immediately realized this was the solution I was looking for.   So I did some research and found several companies that provide Online Data Backup or “Off-line” data storage.  The two services that stood out the most were Jungle Disk and Carbonite.  Both are subscription based services and require a tiny install that runs on your machine in the background.  You choose what you want to backup and the frequency.  All data is encrypted with a security password you assign.  In addition they both have similar features:

1. Unlimited data backup, no limits to how much you backup or store.
2. Install the client on as many machines as you like. (Laptop, kids computer, main computer, etc)
3. Works on Windows, Mac, and Linux (Jungle Disk Only )
4. You can access your data from any other machine and restore to any machine you like
5. Your data is your data, if you stop paying or let your subscription expire your data is deleted after 30 days.

There are some other feature differences and pricing between the services so check them out before you choose.

To recap, in my opinion Online Data Backup is the way to protect your vital personal data, pictures, videos, mp3 files, downloads, etc.  If you use your home computer (Laptop or Desktop) at all and never backup or don’t do it regularly, then its like driving your car without insurance.  Eventually something will happen and you will get burned.  According to a Harris Interactive survey :

“more than a third (35 percent) of U.S. adults who have personal/professional data and digital information stored on a PC or a laptop never back up their files, and a vast majority (76 percent) of those who do back up their files don’t do it often enough. At the same time, 44 percent of U.S. adult computer users overall indicated that they have lost important data or digital files stored on their computer or laptop, as a result of a computer virus, a hardware or software malfunction, or for some other reason.

I can’t stress it enough,  protect your important and replaceable data; Back it up.  You can now have it done automatically, online, and available whenever you need it for pennies a day.   To sign up now for either the service or to get more information, click on one of the links below to get started:

Jungle Disk
http://www.jungledisk.com

Carbonite
http://www.carbonite.com