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Backup those backups

The recent flooding in Canmore, Calgary, Manhattan and disasters elsewhere only serve to underline the importance of backing up your important digital files, and then backing up those backups. Fires happen. Floods happen. Power surges happen.
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The recent flooding in Canmore, Calgary, Manhattan and disasters elsewhere only serve to underline the importance of backing up your important digital files, and then backing up those backups. Fires happen. Floods happen. Power surges happen. Thefts most definitely happen.

There are so many ways to back up your data these days, and each method has its own pluses and minuses. The best approach would be to pick more than one system so you meet these three criteria: 1) all data is backed up at least twice; 2) at least one backup has to be stored somewhere else (e.g. your home if you're backing up an office computer, or your office if you're backing up your home computer; and 3) your files are backed up in a logical way (with some encryption applied as a whole, or to sensitive files) and on a regular basis.

First of all, I always recommend an external hard drive — or better yet an external hard-drive hooked up to a Pogoplug (www.pogoplug.com) so you can access the data remotely or use it as a home server for multiple computers.

Storage is incredibly cheap these days, and you can pick up a two terabyte (TB) external drive for about $80. At those prices it also wouldn't hurt to have a second external hard drive to periodically back up your backup — and to leave that second drive somewhere secure that's away from your house or business. One backup would be used daily/weekly, while the second drive would be used once a month.

The cloud is also a useful way to store your data off site, but it has limitations and the costs can be high.

For example, you can get 2GB of cloud space at Dropbox for free — but that's going to fill up fast if you start using it to save photos and video. The Dropbox Pro plan is $10 a month, which is considerably more expensive than an external drive after only eight months.

If you assume your external drive is going to last five years at minimum (most will last a lot longer than that) then the cost of 2TB works out to around $14 per year. A cloud service for the same amount of time would be $600 for just 100GB of storage space.

Another limitation of the cloud is your own bandwidth ceiling. Most plans in Canada are capped at 150GB to 250GB a month, and a lot of that is already in use if you stream movies and music, Skype relatives, play video games online, spend a lot of time on the web, and so on. If you're coming close to your cap, repeatedly backing up large files to the cloud could put you over your limit.

Plus, you're ultimately trusting your most important data to a third party service that may be the target of hackers, go out of business or start charging more for its services. Most services are located out-of-country where your rights might not be protected.

There is a cloud-like alternative for your most important files called CrashPlan (www.crashplan.com) that gives you the option to store files over the cloud or between computers. You could purchase a family plan that allows you to back up your important data on a friend, family member's or co-workers computer, with up to 10 computers sharing the same account. That's available for around $9 per month and includes unlimited cloud storage — well worth a couple of bucks a month if you can get enough people signed up.

Of course, your solution will depend a lot on your situation and storage needs. You can now buy a 128GB USB flash drive for about $60, which is a lot of storage — and USB drives can be encrypted, and even loaded with software that can help restore your computer if you've downloaded a virus or have a critical error. There is no shortage of online guides available for this, but some of the better advice is on Lifehacker.com and Cnet.com (look up 10 awesome ways to use a USB flash drive).

If you're using an external hard drive or flash solution, then you may want to invest in backup software, which will automate the process. Most operating systems come with some kind of backup scheduling ability, but software like Acronis Backup & Recover or Acronis TrueImage (www.acronis.com) or ShadowProtect (www.shadowprotect.com) do a better job at helping you select what files and folders to back up and how, and can help you recover data as well. Shop around.

But the easiest, and cheapest, way to recover your files is to keep your files organized in a single folder — probably Documents, with a shortcut on your desktop. Everything you care about — documents, photos, video, bookmarks, emails, etc. — can be saved into a subfolder, and backing up becomes a matter of dragging and dropping. It's time consuming, and backup software is smart enough to only update the files that have changed since the last update, but it's also something you can do before going to bed without worrying about efficiency — your drive will be backed up in the morning.

In the end, it doesn't really matter how you backup your files as long as you do it. And don't delay — nobody in Calgary expected to lose their data last week, but these things most definitely do happen.