Digital piece of mind
Posted by Matthew Evans on 08 January 2008
I'm fairly into technology. I would say I'm a bit of an early adopter, paying more to have the gadgets that aren't quite ready for release yet. I remember having a mobile phone in 1994, it wouldn't fit in my pocket, it cost me the best part of £200 plus a hefty line rental but no-one would call me on it because of the rates. I remember having a digtal camera when they were the size of a house brick, it didn't have a screen on the back and it took pictures at 640x480 pixels. I also remember getting an early windows mobile that used to have about a 40% chance of successfully anserwing an incoming call, would open the web browser during text messaging and would pop up a reminder for a meeting and simultaneously take a photo of the inside of my pocket. Useful gadgets.
The upshot of being an early adopter is that I have a large amount of personal data thats getting larger by the day. I have around 60Gb of music, 20Gb of photos and videos and around 10Gb of personal files, data and other bits and pieces. Now that my son has been born, my photos are more important to me and I have started getting a bit more serious about backing up all this data. Previously I have been writing all this data to disk, then CD, then DVD. More recently I have been running multiple drives in a network and mirroring content until finally going for some internet based storage.
About 6 months ago I came across an interesting combination of tools that allows me to back up all my data automatically onto the net and never have to worry about crashing another drive again. I have subscribed to Amazon S3 (simple storage service). This is basically rental of data storage on Amazons servers. You sign up, and they charge you for uploading data, storing data and downloading data. The prices are actually very reasonable, I pay about $1.5 a month at the moment.
To use this service I have downloaded and installed a great little free app that maps this storage as a drive in windows. It's called jungle disk. Now I have a spare virtual hard disk drive with limitless storage.
Now to finish off I downloaded and installed a shareware automated backup application called syncback from 2BrightSparks. This program simply allows me to specify a bunch of folders and files to copy from one drive to another. You can set it to run whenever you want and it has all sorts of cool features like sync/copy, error reports and more.
So now I don't have to worry about my data being lost anymore, syncback runs nightly and my data is copied through jungle disk to Amazon S3, and I can get to my data from any PC with jungle disk installed. Digital piece of mind has been achieved.
On a similar subject in the office, we use a network access storage (nas) box to store all our valuable data. This neat little box of disks from Thecus can handle up to 2Tb of data over 5 disks in raid or a bunch of other configurations. the cool thing is it's all networked access to I can now get to all the office files from home or anywhere, even from my phone.