Data Backups at Home

Apparently today is World Backup Day.

It's not traditionally considered a home maintenance issue, but I find that along with my "honey-do" responsibilities such as caulking, clogged toilets, and leaky hoses, I'm also expected to keep the family photos, finances and all other aspects of our digital life safe from disaster. I see it as part of home up-keep. 

I thought this World Backup Day 2011 web site was very approachable and made it seem easy for any average homeowner to learn how to do proper backups. It simply asks and answers two simple questions "Why should I back up?" and "How do I back up?" and provides three simple solutions.

Check it out. 

Geek alert. If you're interested in what I do for my home backups as an example, read on.

They say that "if there are not three copies, it doesn't exist." Backing up your hard drive to another media, DVD for example, is important. But when your hard drive fails and you go to recover your data you could find that it was scratched or warped and doesn't work properly. More importantly, hard drive failure is one threat, but if you have a total disaster that destroys the house, you'll want to be able to recover your data from an off-site backup, otherwise those family photos you've been taking on your digital camera since 2003 will be lost forever. Here's how we implement the "three copies" system at our house.  

At our house I work on a MacBook Pro for my work at U.S. Inspect. (I work remotely in a headquarters position.) I use Apple's elegant Time Machine feature to save to an external hard drive, which automatically runs and backs up the latest changes every hour. But, guarding against total home disaster, I regularly copy my work files to a server back at the U.S. Inspect data center in Virginia. 

Backing up work files are often easier, because if you don't remember on your own, chances our the company IT experts are reminding you and helping you with the process. But what about the home computers?

We have a desktop PC in a central location that the three kids use, and my wife works on a laptop. Additionally I save our pictures and other family files to a hardrive attached to our network. (OK, that's more advanced, but if you use Apple's wireless router or something similar you can plug in any external USB hard drive and, voila, you have network storage, just like in a big corporate office. They also have an all in one solution called "Timecapsule" but that's pricy.) So how do we get three copies of our files? Let's start with the off-site. 

Storage in the cloud (on the internet) is clearly the easiest way to go for off-site backups. Being the cheapskate that I am, at first I would copy all the files to a separate hard drive and then tell myself I'd drop it off at the in-laws a few blocks away. Never happened, and remembering to proactively copy files every week is a pain. So, on the advice of one of my Internet heroes, Leo Laporte, I installed Carbonite on my home computer -- some of the best money I ever spent, both from a peace of mind perspective and a convenience perspective. For $55 a year, Carbonite slowly copies all your files up to the internet, and keeps it up to date as files change. If your computer fails you can download everything. If you accidentally delete a file you can go to your backup for 30 days and download a previous version. You can even get at your files anywhere via their mobile app. For the flat fee there's no limit to how big your hard drive is.  

I think Carbonite reliability is so impressive that you almost only need two copies of your data. But the one downside of cloud storage is that if you do have a hard drive failure, it takes a long time to download all your files back to your new hard drive or new computer. So your third copy should be local. 

For my local backup, I copy my network hard drive with all the pictures and family files, to the central family computer once a week, which is the one that has Carbonite running. So now the pictures are on the network drive, backed up on the family computer, and then backed up on Carbonite. Similarly I regularly back up my wife's laptop files to the family computer and those in turn get backed up on Carbonite. Cool, huh?

Perhaps all this is all a little complicated for the average home user. If you're going to do nothing else, or if you only have one computer, I recommend just installing Carbonite. They even have a free trial. Once  set it up you forget about it ... at least until you need it, and then it's ready for you.