May 05 2007
The backup before the storm
It’s interesting that Bill Clementson caught my backup post recently. For a while, I had a script that ran JetS3t as a backup. Now, I need to use that to recover my data from Amazon’s S3 service. I mostly used it to backup some documents and my photo archive. Fortunately, my photos are backed up, but I lost all of my music. C’est la vie; it can be restored.
However, I’ve taken a new tack on backups, actually. Like Bill, I’ve decided I don’t mind a little bit of a proprietary solution if it makes my life easy. I’ve signed up for mozy.com, which at $5/month is a steal. It backs up as much of my hard drive as I want, encrypts it on the way, and I don’t have to write any funny scripts or remember to do anything. Perhaps I’ll swap over to something S3 based in the future, but for now, it’s too easy at the right price.
In the meantime, I’ll use JungleDisk for archival—I keep my S3 space mounted as a dumping ground for things I want to keep for a long time. Or, at least, things that I want to last past my next HD crash or move from one university to the next. Through the combination of JungleDisk and Mozy, I’m pretty much good to go.
I think.
Today, I’ve spent my day watching the X-files (season 6) and copying data off of old CDs and DVDs. I’ve got data that goes back to 1997, and I figure it’s a good time to round up some things and get them backed up somewhere else. Big moves tend to make for good opportunities to back things up.
More on that later.
I have gone against the online trend and now use a product that resolves the search and physical media library issues with archiving to removable media. The main problem you have is searching them later and managing the physical media library. The same with my flash cards, you never know what’s on them.
I now use a product called Datacatch Librarian. It does what their marketing says; it catalogs or indexes your removable media and extends the Windows file management system so that you are seamlessly searching for files stored on removable media within Windows.
So you search for online and offline content in the same standard Windows search; you even browse the thumbnails of photos stored on your DVD’s.
They manage the physical media in exactly the same way your put a Word document in a newly created folder, you locate your discs in a storage container icon on your desktop AND it tells you what slot their in.
The best bit is because it looks and feels like Windows there’s nothing new to learn, it just the same as searching and organizing folders in Windows, very cool and worth a look.