Over the last 15 years, I experienced complete hard drive failure 4 or 5 times (which is probably about the average) and three times I ended up losing significant amount of important data. I lost years of photographs, I lost some source code and tons of documents. Some of them were OK to lose, some (like those photos) I still regret. And yet all this time, my backup strategy was extremely chaotic and sporadic. Mostly I relied on the fact that for last 6 years or so, I have multiple computers between my home and the office and since some data copying occurs almost naturally in many cases I had some backup copies of important data even though some were still lost and the rest required tedious copying from multiple sources. In fact, my home desktop still has a “Backup” folder which contains file dumps from like 9 different periods and totals over half of the terabyte of unsorted files. Do I understand the importance, no, scratch it, uber-importance of the backup. Su-u-u-ure! Do I know how to setup a pretty good backup strategy. I think so. However in reality as I mentioned above I continued to stay in the limbo of indecision. Until today. Well, at least I hope so.

So, what is the right backup strategy? There’s a popular meme – 3-2-1 Backup.

• Have 3 copies of each important file
• On 2 different devices or storage medias
• 1 offsite storage

If you have single computer it’s actually pretty easy to implement. Use some local backup app to copy files to external HDD or DVDs (which is not a great option, but will still work) and use something like Mozy or Carbonite (or even personal Amazon S3 storage) for offsite backup (both cost about $55 a year for unlimited amount of data from a single computer).

Now it gets much more complicated when you have multiple computers and if you want also to synchronize (at least some) files between those machines.

Those complications arise from few underlying reasons:

• Synchronization software (like Dropbox or SugarSync) also works as offsite backup, but they usually more expensive ($120-$180 a year for 60-100Gb of space) and they limit the size of your data to the forementioned 60-100Gb.
• While typical work machine will contain maybe a 100Gb of data, home computers usually have huge media libraries which can easily take a terabyte of space
• You need to find a way to do some sort of centralized and automatic backup, since running backup manually on several computers (especially if some of them are mostly used by your family members, including minors) is a quite tedious task.

All these reasons are quite actual for me. I have 2 home computers, where one is solely used by my daughter and one is my ex-development machine, now mostly used by my wife, but I still keep quite a lot of data there. Now I also have my workhorse laptop which I use 95% of time for both business and leisure and where I store most of my “precious” data. And probably I will buy an HTPC (home theater PC) at some point and maybe an extra laptop (either Macbook Air for myself or laptop for wife). Now my media library is almost a terabyte and while majority of it are movies and TV series that I can technically lose and not kill myself, I’d still like to keep them in a safe place.

So ideal solution for me, would probably include having a central home server with huge disk array (maybe something like network-accessible Drobo), so all computers backup their data over local network to that home server, which in turn backed up to Carbonite and I would also continue to use SugarSync for syncing and backing up smaller subset of really important data. And that’s what I had in mind for more than a year. No shit, this would be a great setup – very reliable, fully automated, covering all the bases. The caveat is that it will probably cost me something like two grand, between the cost of Drobo, hard drives and a home server. And I would probably want to put most of my computers on Gigabit Ethernet instead of WiFi (right now all of my computers, even stationery, are on WiFi). Setting up home Ethernet network was in my list of projects for almost two years at this point. I have cable, sockets, special tools – all nine yards. In practice, I doubt that I’ll ever do it (other than maybe if I buy my own house (which probably also won’t happen in next two years)).

So, I decided that while I really like my ideal setup it will remain entirely in my dreams and meanwhile I’ll get myself another data crash and once again lose lots of valuable data. It’s better to have something imperfect, but working.

For now, I bought a 2Tb external HDD (Iomega eGo for $118) which I will use solely for backing up my ‘workhorse’ laptop. I have 320Gb HDD there, so 2Tb should give me plenty of space for backups. And I will probably expand my current SugarSync subscription to 100Gb, which will cover my most important data. So, I will have at least my laptop fully covered. Meanwhile, I’ll probably also buy Carbonite subscription for home desktop, which I will use as a central hub (it has almost 3Tb in hard drives) for other machines (except my laptop). It means that files on that home PC will be only backed up to offsite storage, but I think it’s OK.

This is not an ideal solution, but it’s something that I can implement over next few days and it’s light years better than what I had previously.

P.S.   I was not very pleased with Apple’s Time Machine service. It seemed to be pretty straightforward, but after copying few gigabytes it just stopped working, telling me that “backup has failed” and not providing any clues on why it has happened. So it took me like 40 minutes of Googling and at the end I just repartioned the drive and restarted the whole process and so far, so good it’s working. However, casual user at this point will be stopped dead on their tracks, with no other option than going to Genius Bar. Tsk Tsk, Apple!