As a little break from the series "A Programmer's Journey" (and because I can't push myself to do an audio recording), let me write about my backup plan for my computers. Actually, I was reminded to figure out such a plan for myself before considering upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" (which I did last weekend).
To figure out what should be your backup plan, you need to ask yourself a few questions. First, what files are really important, classified from "I can re-download" to "critical". Second, how often do you change the files you consider important. A few times a week? Several times per day? Third, security. Should you encrypt everything? Or just what you upload on the Internet?
Based on the answers to those questions, you should start getting an idea of the "value" of what you need to back up. From there, you have a few options that I would recommend even for non-technical users.
First, the local backup. This is some local USB hard drive that you use to make weekly full backups. This is mostly just in case your computer breaks, as this can simplify re-installing your entire computer, or to migrate your files to a new computer. Also, this is a "fail safe" in case that you forgot to add some important files to your more frequent backup mechanism. The question of if you need to encrypt your USB hard drive backup depends on if you expect your hard drive to be stolen (well, that depends on your neighborhood).
Second, an online backup. Because doing a backup online is much slower and expensive than a local hard drive, I suggest that you back up online only your "important" and "critical" files. I suggest to back up online no more than 200MiB. Selecting such files will help you ask yourself the question of what is important on your computer. The standard I use for this is: "What do I want to still have if the house burns down." Of course, you should encrypt everything you back up online, which is a given for most online backup services.
Third, only if you are a bit paranoid about your "critical" files, a backup on you, for example a small USB key that you will add to your keychain. For girls, when I say "on you", I don't mean the purse, I mean you get robbed and you still have it. This is for the "critical" files, the ones you would keep encrypted on you with important passwords and accounts. As such it's pretty small.
So, what tools I recommend? On the Mac, Time Machine is sufficient for full backups. For online backups and full backups on Windows, I highly recommend CrashPlan. It backs up compressed and encrypted, and for online it supports doing a backup securely to a friend's computer for free. For online backups you can also use the free Mozy service. For USB backups, I recommend you to simply copy the files to a USB key encrypted with TrueCrypt.
Published on October 5, 2009 at 16:38 EDT
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