Kenny Hemphill
The advent of online storage services means there’s no longer any excuse not to keep a backup of important data off-site. And it won’t cost the earth.
Have you heard the one about the guy who thought his data was safe because he used Time Machine to run an incremental backup schedule, only to realise when it was too late that storing the backed up data on a local hard drive is no protection at all when the office is flooded? What about the hugely successful blogger who quit her job to run her blog full-time, only to see her income destroyed when the MySQL database housing her online business was accidentally deleted by her web host?
You know what’s coming next? A long lecture on the importance of backing up? Not quite. You see, there’s backup and there’s backup. There’s the fully inflated, deep-treaded spare wheel in the boot, and there’s the almost bald, not-quite-legal tyre that you swore you’d swap for a new one when you got the chance. One will save your bacon if you’re unfortunate enough to have a blowout on the motorway. The other will either get you arrested or put you at risk of losing control of your car in difficult conditions.
You know all about the importance of backing up your data and you may already have a regular automated routine, perhaps using Time Machine to back up to a Time Capsule or a hard drive. You may even back up to a portable hard drive and unplug it every night, putting it ‘safely’ away in a cupboard. As the two people in the examples above will attest, however, that’s not enough.
In the same way as the bald spare tyre is as good as useless, that hard drive on your desk to which you entrust your most valuable data will be just as dead as the disk whose data it’s preserving if you have a fire, flood or lightning strike. In the old days, the answer was to keep a backup off-site, whether by storing tape or optical discs in a separate location, or by unplugging a hard drive at the end of each day and taking it away with you.
You could be forgiven then, when it was something of a pain in the rear end to keep off-site backups, for limiting your strategy to local backups. Not anymore, though. The advent of cheap online storage and the multitude of online backup services that use that storage, whether through a service like Amazon’s S3, or on their own servers, means that setting up and maintaining a regular, off-site back-up regime is ridiculously simple.
This is how it works: you download the application from your chosen service and install it. You then set up the schedule by choosing which files and folders you want to back up and how often you want the backup to run. Sure, if you’re backing up more than a few gigabytes, the first run will take a while – a few days in some cases. But most of these services are sophisticated enough to minimise the strain on CPU cycles and to limit the extent to which they hog bandwidth on your broadband connection. So you can watch Mad Men in HD on the iPlayer, while your back up routine is in progress and it will sit patiently and wait until you’re finished before ramping up the upload.
Once the first backup is done, you won’t even notice the incremental runs in the future. Recovering lost files is a little more complicated, but a lot less so than trying to coax a water-damaged hard disk back into action.
Price? How does free sound? If you have a MobileMe subscription, you can use Automator to duplicate files from specific folders to your iDisk every time they change. And if you don’t, Mozy offers a free service which allows you to store up to 2GB. Unlimited services from the likes of Mozy, Carbonite, and CrashPlan cost around $50 (about £32) to $60 (about £39) per year. Peanuts, when you consider the alternative.
Once you’ve sorted out an off-site backup for your local data, do the same for your blog. The databases on which blogs depend do sometimes become corrupted, are susceptible to being hacked, and on occasion have been known to be deleted by careless web hosts. Backing up a database is more complicated than backing up files on a hard drive, but for WordPress bloggers, there’s now a simple solution. Although still in beta testing, VaultPress promises piece of mind and an easy way to back up WP databases.
It’s been built by Automattic, the company that created WordPress and takes the form of a plug-in that’s installed in the same way as other WP plug-ins. It protects all the content of the blog, including comments, as well as plug-ins, themes and the Dashboard. And you can protect as many blogs as you like. Pricing has yet to be announced, but if the price of VideoPress, another WordPress premium service, is a guide it will be very reasonable.
A dependable backup strategy needs to include protection for all your work online and offline, and insurance against every possible eventuality.
