Nathaniel and Sheree back in Australia

I thought I had a good backup system but I still ended up losing 2 weeks worth of assignments.

So what went wrong? Well have a look at by backup solution and see if you can figure out what happened?

• Images backed up to PicasaWeb – 1 Gig free.
• My Documents backed up to JungleDisk ~ 50 cents a month.
• Manual backusp to USB stick.

Now before I tell you what happened lets have a look at my parent’s backup solution:

• Monthly backups to DVDs.

Their problem was that they stored the DVDs with the laptop so when their laptop was stolen last month so was the backup. This is an important lesson:

• Don’t store the backup with or on the same machine.

My problem was I started to edit files directly on the USB stick so when I lost it I lost the files that were on it because I didn’t manually copy them back to the computer. This teaches us another valuable lesson:

• Backups should not rely on manual processes.

and also

• One way backups often end up becoming two way backups.

So how did I solve my problem and what is my recommendation?

Well online backups are a good idea and also fairly cheap but often inconvinient. My Dad had too much data for online backups. JungleDisk also doesn’t work very well with external drives.

So after looking around I found Allways Sync which can automatically detect when USB drives are plugged in and then sync the files that have changed automatically. I’ve been using this solution for the last couple of weeks (in addition to my online backup) and it’s been work fantastically.

Recomended Backup Solution

So here is my recommended backup solution which costs less than $10.

• Allways Sync configured to automatically synconrise files when a USB drive is connected.
• A USB stick (currently 1G is less than $10). Put the USB stick on your keyring and then you’ll never be temped to leave it with your laptop/computer.

You could use an external harddrive (currently 1T is less than $200) BUT you will be tempted to leave it with the laptop/computer so I don’t recommend this solution if you can avoid it.

Anyway I hope this article prevents someone else from losing thier data.