A friend of mine was looking for advice on how to backup their data and so here’s my quick version of things to do to protect your increasingly valuable digital archive:

1. Local Backup. Buy an external USB hard-drive to backup your data and then use your operating systems built-in backup software to backup. External drives – even conveniently small ones – have been getting more and more affordable for a long time. You’ll need a drive that is bigger than your laptop/desktops hard drive (or at least the capacity you use on this drive) to make it effective. Ideally aim for something that is 2-3x times larger. Both Windows (Windows 7 and Windows Vista) and modern variants of  the Mac OS (look for “Time Machine”) have built in software to manage this backup process for you. If you’re using an older version of Windows or Mac OS then you’re probably best to buy software to manage this for you. I don’t know about the Mac OS but for Windows a good choice is Acronis software.
2. Online/Cloud Backup. There are a growing number of companies who provide a easy to setup backup solution that is “in the cloud.” You install their software and pay an annual fee and in the background you’re data gets sent to a server on the internet where the company takes ownership for ensuring the safety of your files. This is good peace of mind and very easy to setup as long as your willing to pay a nominal annual charge. It also has the advantage over local backups of disasters like theft or fire where you could potentially not only lose your laptop but your backup too. The disadvantage is as fast as the internet is it’s still much slower than a direct connection and that means that the initial backup takes a long time to get fully backed up (after that incremental changes are much faster) and really requires that you leave your computer on and on the network at night (at least sometimes). For people who choose to use a local backup option it is often advisable to use cloud backups as an extra precaution. Local for convenient, fast backup. Cloud for a second line of defence and a precaution against physical disasters like theft and fire. Top options in this space are Carbonite and Mozy.
3. Cloud Synchronisation. This an interesting option because it can adequately provide backup to some of your important data for free (all of it at a price). Services like Microsoft’s LiveMesh and Dropbox are primarily meant to synchronize data across computers … either to make sure all your computers are in sync or that friends or co-workers can collaborate with documents. These services also offer synchronisation with the cloud which means that even if you synchronize with no other computers you can still get your data back from the cloud if disaster strikes.

Backup is surprisingly complex but the two key things that are key are:

1. Choose a strategy and get started or be ready to suffer the losses that will eventually come
2. Choose a solution that is easy to follow so that you actually follow the backup plan or else you’ll find yourself feeling secure up until you actually lose the data.

The good news is the options available today are pretty easy and getting easier but it’s still up to you to choose a strategy and get started living a more secure digital life.

Since my solid state drive died last week I’ve been rethinking my data strategy and now have a solution that should – knock on wood – give me substantial protection through a combination of backup, synchronization, and “cloud services.”

On my PC I put my data into four categories:

1. System and Programs (this includes the Operating System, installed software, and annoying details like the MBR, FAT tables, and the registry)
2. Business Content – documents and spreadsheets that you need/use for work.
3. Personal Content – this includes photos, MP3’s, documents, spreadsheets, etc.
4. Low value Content – there are some types of content where the overhead of backing up isn’t justified. For instance some watch video content becomes stale quickly; I’m sure you can come up with other examples.

This segmentation is important because it helps you map a bewildering array of solutions to these types which often do not require or even support the same solution. In order to take best advantage of these categories try and setup your file directories and partitions aligned to these content types. I generally consider the following best practice:

• Strong separation for “System and Programs”. You should keep the operating system and your program installs on a separate partition (either logical or physical) from all other data types. This allows you to image the system and snapshot different timeframes that you can return to later without getting this mixed up with the user content types (types 2,3,4)
• “My Documents” should host to all (or at least a majority) of user content. If you have a single root to all user content this can have a lot of advantages and often avoids the accidental miss of including a directory off to the side. There are cases – particularly if you are spanning user content over different physical disks – where you’ll need multiple roots of user content but always keep this to the smallest number of entry points as possible.
• Use “synchronization” as a compliment but not a replacement to your backup solution. More on this in a second.

In the solution space I recommend again thinking of four main categorical areas:

1. File Synchronization
2. Local File Backup
3. Local Disk Imaging
4. Cloud Services

I am using all four in some capacity and while I’m sure there can be some debate on the right mix of products I would say that unfortunately at this point I consider myself pretty well informed. If you use the solution outlined here you can’t go too wrong.

File Synchronization:

Let’s start with File Synchronization. For anyone who uses more than one computer at a time (for me is it is my home computer and two laptops) being able to ensure that the business documents (or personal too if it suits) on one computer are exactly the same as the others. In addition to documents I also make sure browser bookmarks and usernames/passwords are synchronized too. This is a huge benefit immediately. Unlike most of the other services which make you life better when things go wrong, File Synchronization has a noticeable and desirable effect for everyday operations. If this weren’t enough to get you all hot and bothered already let me say that this is a great program that does this for FREE! Microsoft’s “Live Sync” runs as a lightweight background process and let’s you sync between all your computers (both PC and Mac and PC based phones) with almost no setup time and zero administration costs. In addition, you can setup folder sync’s that you can share with other people. In this second scenario you have the ability to limit what different users can do (aka, they can only read content, they can add or modify content, they can invite others to the share, etc.). This has some really powerful potential which I won’t go into here (use your damn imagination for once will you). In the mean time stop wasting your time and get to the Live Sync website and download this great tool!

One could make an argument that this solution fits into the “cloud services” category and I won’t argue too much (unless you’re buying my pints) but the reason I’ve separated it is Live Sync uses P2P technology. The “cloud” only has references to files rather than actual files themselves. This means that the solution only works if two or more computers are on at the same time but it also means that security in the cloud doesn’t really matter and that these kind of offerings can be offered at no cost and have “unlimited storage.”

File Synchronization – as mentioned above – is useful in everyday life but by ensuring that your key documents are shared across multiple computers you effectively have a backup of these documents that works very effectively in most real life disasters (aka, a hard drive goes “boom” or a laptop is stolen, etc.). Get to it. You owe to yourself. And, no, I don’t get any royalty payments from Microsoft on this. :^)

Local File Backup:

Hanging a large capacity external drive off of your computer and having a scheduled backup of your hard drives is a traditional method of backup and a good one. I use a 1TB eSATA drive to backup all business and personal content (types 2 and 3) on a weekly basis. There are a number of programs you can buy in the market to do this but I prefer to use the quite simple but well integrated solution in Windows 7. Mac’s have time machine which i understand is even better but both allow intuitive and simple methods of providing backup. I use eSATA because of it’s fast transfer speeds which becomes more important the more you are backing up. If you don’t have a lot of content than USB or Firewire should be suffice.

Local Disk Imaging:

Not to be confused with a normal file backup such as above. This allows for a complete image of a drive to be copied and later restored to the same or new physical medium. This is particularly relevant for the Operating Systems boot drive as it contains the master boot record (MBR), registry settings, FAT tables, etc.). This is the part I didn’t have when my solid state drive broke and it meant that I had to reinstall everything but at least my file backup saved my user content. There might be a way to achieve this with Windows 7 backup solution but it is left a little unclear and so I thought it was worth buying a commercial program for this. After some investigation I ended up with Acronis True Image software. It is well designed and comes with reasonably good help (which is important because of the variety of options it provides). Acronis could double as my local file backup solution but I’m using it just to image my laptop and home PC’s boot drives. I backup this image to a portable USB drive for portability. USB works for me because boot image size is much smaller than content backup (43gb versus 200gb+).

Cloud Services:

There are starting to be a large varieties of solutions that can be employed here but for straight backup purposes the one I’ve been hearing really good things about is Carbonite. I have just started using and am so far impressed. Getting the system backed up initially can take several days (it uses your internet connection when you aren’t using it) but from that point forward it keeps changes constantly updated with a very reasonable latency. It costs ~ $50/yr for the solution but this is a small cost for piece of mind. You might ask why you could possibly need this in addition to the local file backup … to me there are two reasons:

1. The Carbonite backup is offsite. If – god forbid – your house burns down your data and your backup will go away in one fell swoop.
2. Redundancy in backup. This may sound like a circular argument but the reality is that you rarely ever really validate that your backup is working as it should. Nothing is worse in feeling confident that you have a backup only to find that it was missing directories you needed, wasn’t working due to some small configuration snafu, or other nuance. Sound paranoid? Well maybe but I promise you this kind of tragedy is a common story in the world of IT.

Hope this helps. Drop me a comment if you have anything you want to add.

Woke up this morning and sky was grey. Well actually it was a lovely blue but my hangover was toning it grey. Anyway, my shiny desktop computer apparently went out drinking last night too but with a rougher crowd and with more tragic results. This morning it refuses to boot. Somehow my cooler-than-cool solid state drive (SSD) is now reporting to be 8mb instead of 80gb! Holy mother of Jesus. No SSD, no operating system. No operating system no access to data. These are not happy days and I have no time to try and solve this problem. I guess I’ll just get used to working off my laptop for now and hope that google will help me solve this problem over the weekend.

3G is yesterday’s news. So is 4G if one is to believe this article in Science Daily which reports that European researchers are testing a 12.5Gb/s wireless standard that is supposed to be well past the “paper project” phase.

Breakthrough For Post-4G Communications | Science Daily

When you get older you’re supposed to get more conservative. That’s what I thought I was doing but with my behaviour yesterday and today may indicate I’m no wiser than a little child (and just as happy as one too). Yes all this verbal nonsense to say that I’ve joined the Windows 7 crowd. For those of you who don’t know, Windows released a public beta of their next generation operating system yesterday. Admittedly I’ve only been playing with this new OS for 1 day but man does it feel stable. Faster? Yes faster too but that may be misleading because I’m now booting off of a solid state hard drive. Between the two changes it is a bit shocking how quickly things load up. I’ve still got a dual boot so I can run under Vista if required but after my experience of the past 36 hours I think I’ll rarely take that option. Here’s to being young, taking chances, and running Windows 7.

My ultra-compact and ultra-sexy Sony TZ laptop has shit the bed. During my flight to Houston it did some soul searching and decided it wasn’t worth continuing. Selfish if you ask me. Anyway, I brought it to the laptop hospital in Houston and the staff doctor said – due to new emergency procedures – he could bring my little laptop back to life. Only problem was the warranty had run out two months ago and I’d have to pay $500 and wait 2.5 weeks. Well I was on the road so I deferred the operation until my return to London. Potentially due to the huge expenditures on the NHS (that’s the national health service in the UK if you were wondering) my little laptops operation will now cost £500-600 and the process of pickup and delivery will be made painstakingly more complicated. Which just goes to prove there is no such thing as free health care. It also proves that people in the UK get regularly fucked by macro-economics and apparently it’s my turn to pickup the proverbial soap. Damn!

Since it is the Christmas season I’d hate to finish on a sad note. For that reason let me tell you about my contingency plan while in the US. First let me set the scene … I’ve just come out of the Houston emergency room, dragging my sick little laptop with me. It’s no longer making any sound at all; it’s last ounce of battery died hours ago. My despair has given way to practical panic … what the fuck am I going to do about a laptop? I’m on the road for two weeks and need a laptop even more than usual. Bad juju!

Through the tears in my eyes – hey, i’m telling a story, work with me – I can see the blurred signage of Circuit City. Didn’t they go out of business? Well apparently not yet. I walk in and ask for the cheapest laptop they sell. Rather than being walked to back of the store to the poorly lit section and shown some dingy, cheap-shit, never-in-fashion, pile-of-crap, lipstick-on-a-pig laptop I am instead whisked to the cool and hip section and introduced to my future work companion … the Lenovo S10. It’s ultra small, with a smart, cool look, and weighs next to nothing. This is more than a laptop. It’s a heart-throb. Just as I am thinking about how cool I’m going to look writing emails with this little baby by my side it occurs that I still have to pay cold, hard cash to purchase this gem. Would it be out of reach? Would this very short lived dream be over before it had started? Oh course not! I promised you a happy ending and happy ending I’m going to give you. All this laptop and all for only $400! Wow. I rushed my new bride back to the hotel and after installing Office (which I’d luckily packed with my old laptop) I was reading emails within an hour. Sweet bliss.

I just bought an Intel Solid State Drive (SSD) for my home computer. Planning on installing the beta of Windows 7 on it. Should fly. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the chart below; the Intel SSD has more than 16x more IO on a workstation versus one of the fastest 7200rpm drives in the market! To top it off, it uses less than half of the power compared to the traditional hard drive. Can’t wait!

I remember in 2004 when I first saw a really nice wide-screen flat panel. My jaw dropped and I knew I needed one. After lots of research I found that the HP 2335 was top shelf. It outperformed the much celebrated Apple Cinema Series in all the important characteristics (speed of refresh, contrast ratio, and features). In the nearly four years since purchasing it I have never had any regrets. What a great monitor. I truly get more work done in less time because of the increased desktop space.

Recently I’ve noticed that a number of my friends are now considering getting large widescreen monitors and out of interest I took a look to see what was on show. I was amazed, the prices for 23/24″ monitors (e.g., those that will display 1920 x 1200 resolutions) has dropped dramatically. I did what any sensible consumer faced with so many attractive choices would do. I bought another monitor. Now I have two large widescreen monitors. :^)

The new monitor — an HP w2408h — is a nice looking unit that clearly out-performs my old monitor. It’s almost to the point that my old monitor looks kinda shabby next to the new one. The enhance contrast ratio is immediately noticeable and the extra inch of screen real estate (24″ versus 23″) is subtle but also discernable.