Hack This: Back Your Digital Junk Up Already

A couple of fairly recent things have got me thinking about backing my computer junk up, like to a place actually off of my desktop. Maybe even to a place beyond my “C” drive. One of those things was learning that Google keeps its backup files on tapes, and I’m pretty happy about that because I have a lot of important shit stored with Google just between docs and email.

But I also have a whole lot of important things just on my computer—stuff like old Word docs, photos, photoshops, once-used budget spreadsheets, and probably some more than that. None of it is backed up anywhere. If I threw my computer three stories down onto the street right now, I’d be screwed.

And you never know, that could happen: the walls are closing in, OK? The other thing is my friend Josh, who’s a professional music photographer you should hire, was telling me about his own backup scheme. Every year, he buys two identical hard drives, backing up his photo files onto each. When they fill up, one goes in his closet or something. The other, meanwhile, waits until Christmas when Josh flies out to his folk’s place, which is in a perfect non-place in North Dakota right along the Canadian border. That’s great. I bet if I knew that everything I was writing was gonna be archived in some apocalypse-proof farmhouse on the tundra, I would never half-ass anything ever.

Right now, I have things stored on four different hard drives: my current working laptop, my old half-working laptop, a portable hard drive, and this really old laptop with a busted screen. Some things are on Google docs, uploaded to Flickr or Facebook, or hosted on a work server (work things, of course) and those things are almost certainly just in that place. Which is bad. I need a backup system and just maybe so do you. This is what I came up with.

DIY-style portable hard drive

Even I have one of these. The cost of physical storage is like nothing nowadays. I think I got my 100 GB drive for around $100 a few years ago. In 2011, you can get two terrabytes for not much more than that—which might be good if you’re backing up raw data files or .tiffs and lots of them, e.g. you’re a photographer. Or you can get a little pocket-size thing with 500 GB for less than $70. And then it’s just plugging it in and dragging and dropping.

Then, ideally, you’d put that hard drive somewhere safe in case your places catches fire or you get robbed. Or, like Josh, have a second one that you keep somewhere not in your house. Memory’s cheap enough to make this practical.

Automate it

Maybe you are so important that you need to back your stuff up like all of the time, every day maybe. There’s a bunch of software that can handle this, everything from Time Machine’s automatic wireless backup to Rsync’s bare bones command line interface. Lifehacker has a good roundup here.

Stick it all in the cloud

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m fairly agnostic about this everything-cloud future being touted by some. I mean, I live in the guts of the East Coast metropolis and being connected to the internet outside of my house or job-job is still a matter of finger-crossing and searching. The cloud’s spotty and I don’t like the idea of trusting something with all of my digital stuff that isn’t always there. So keep in the mind with this cloud stuff, it should probably be in addition to a local backup and not instead of.

Cloud services seem to range around $10 a month with enough storage to handle a reasonable person’s backup data (GBs and not TBs, meaning). Dropbox seems pretty neat: you just drag to a specified folder on your desktop and it uploads it automatically; Mozy’s a bit more intensive—you can tell it which files to backup and when. Meanwhile Carbonite lets you at your files via a web-interface, so you don’t have to be at your own computer to access them. Seems like there’s a lot of these services around, so do some searching yourself.

Network-attached storage

I guess this is sort of in between the cloud and local storage. I’d never heard of it until researching this. Basically, you have a network of computers—usually like the net you might have at an office but it could also be an online network—and they’re all linked together. And all of those computers share that network drive, which should run a couple hundred bucks.

Or you can even super-DIY things and use an old computer and a program called FreeNAS. But that’s pretty advanced stuff and you don’t really want me telling you how to do it. Try this Gizmodo rundown and please remember to have adult supervision.

All told, if you’re really serious about having a dedicated backup, NAS is probably the best way. But not the easiest in the short-term. Should I assume that you’re super-lazy? If you are super-lazy, I bet you have a friend that can do it for you for beer. I don’t think anybody these days is more than one step removed socially from an IT guy or web admin or something.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.