How I learned to love the cloud (at least for backups)

If you haven’t heard of “the cloud”, you probably haven’t been paying attention to all of the online services that are cropping up online.  If you’ve used Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, or any of the thousands of online tools available today, you’ve used the cloud.  It’s a way of saying that the things you put on those sites are stored “somewhere”, but you don’t know, or need to care, where it’s stored.  It’s just in the clouds.  I’ve always been a little hesitant of putting things “in the cloud”.  Living in a rural area, my world isn’t quite connected enough that I’m always assured of an internet connection and I don’t want that to keep me from being able to get my things.  But I’ve become more aware of the idea that relying solely on my local hardware for storing my backups of important things is risky to say the least.  Sure you can get a large external backup drive and copy your files to it every so often, or even automatically, but what happens when you your house burns down, or someone robs you and takes the computer and the backup?  Or any other number of catastrophes that could happen when your backup is so close to the source.  What’s that?!  You say you aren’t backing your digital stuff up?  If you don’t have any backup strategy, it’s only a matter of time before you get burned by it.  You need to have backups and this article should convince you that the only real way to do it is to keep those backups offsite.

For years I had been burning a DVD of our digital photos and putting it in the safe deposit box every 6 months, but that requires me to remember to burn it and make the trip, plus I’m not protected in the interim.  You may have heard of backup tools like Mozy or Carbonite that will keep your files off-site and backed up at a pretty reasonable rate of about $5 per month.  I’ve been using something similar called Jungle Disk for several years now and have been happy with it, but it charges by the gigabyte, and that can start to add up,  Now with more video to be backed up the unlimited storage space that Mozy and Carbonite offer has convinced me to switch.  I’m now running Mozy and I’m pretty happy with it, they start you out with 2GB of free space, so that lets you try it out, and may be all you need (Use the link above and you and I will both get an extra .5GB free).   The one drawback to these services is that they charge you per machine.  So if you have 3 machines and want to back them all up, you have to pay $15 a month instead of $5.  That can add up, but there’s a way around it.  I have one machine that we use as our “central server” machine.  It’s an older desktop that we keep upstairs, and we store all of our pictures and the things we want to keep backed up on the server.  Mozy runs on the server and backs up all of the files we store in certain places.  Problem solved!  Put your movies, photos, brilliant writings, and music into one of these services and you’re good.
So backups are taken care of. But what about the files that you work with everyday?  Maybe it’s a paper you’re writing, or a spreadsheet you’re trying to get finished.  You want it to be backed up, but you also want it to be available to you wherever you are.  If you’re like me, you have a couple of different computers that you might be working on from time to time.  Whether it’s a home and work computer, or a laptop and desktop, it can be a real pain to keep them all up-to-date.  So this is where I turn to Dropbox. Dropbox creates a folder on your machine that makes a real-time copy of your files into the cloud, and any other machine that you have tied to your Dropbox account will automatically download those changes.  So when I save the spreadsheet to my work computer, a copy is also made on my machine at home.  And when I go home and make a change to the spreadsheet, as soon as I save it the changes are copied back to my work machine.  You can add as many machines as you want, so link your central machine to Dropbox as well, and your working papers can be put into the off-site backup hopper for Mozy to send off-site as well.  Dropbox is free for the first 2GB, which goes a lot further than you might think if you use it right.  Use the link above and you’ll get an extra 250MB free (and so will I, so win/win!).
So, your precious memories are safe, the things you are working on from day to day are safe.  What about your financial information?  While I’ve become pretty trusting of these on line services, and the three I’ve mentioned take security very seriously, there’s just something that makes me nervous about storing backups of my tax documents on a cloud service.  So I have another tool to take care of that as well.  It’s a bit more geeky, but still fairly user friendly.   The tools is called TrueCrypt, and it’s a free piece of software that can create secured folders on your machine.  When it’s running, you basically get a new drive on your machine that you can store anything in.  When you turn it off (UnMount in TrueCrypt parlance) the drive goes away and your files are stored in a single TC file that you can then backup with your other important files.  I find that I put all kinds of things that I want to keep and want to keep secure into TrueCrypt, and now I have them backed up so that I can get them if something bad ever happens.  If our house burns down, I have all of the home owners insurance information available once I can get to another computer where I can install TrueCrypt, download my backed up TC file, and I’m set.  Luckily, we have enough friends online that getting to a connected computer shouldn’t be a big problem.

A few general tips:  Choose good passwords!  Let me say that again.  Choose good passwords!!  Don’t pick your dogs name, or your birthday, or your kids birthday.  Pick something random but memorable, and make it a decent length.  8 characters is a minimum, and 16 is even better, especially for the sensitive stuff.  You can find some tools to generate good, memorable passwords and check how good the passwords you currently use are.  If you don’t believe me about the importance of passwords, take a look at these stats for how quickly poor passwords can be broken.

In addition to your photos, movies, and music, here are some other things that you might want to store in your new cloud enabled backups:

• Appliance manuals – many companies offer a downloadable PDF version
• Receipts – you can scan in the physical ones if you want, but “printing” the ones you get electronically to a PDF using software like CutePDF for Windows or using the PDF option on your Mac print window is a great way to archive them.
• Scans of articles from magazines – again you may be able to get an electronic copy from their website.
• Keep an “important info” card on your family members – this is something you’ll want to make sure is secured in your TrueCrypt vault.
• Scans of kids artwork
• Archived tax records (again, use your TrueCrypt vault)