Back up or lose it

Back-ups are the things you do after your computer crashes. No, seriously. It is only when you have suffered a catastrophic failure of your hard drive that you realise how important it is to back up your system on a regular basis.

Recordable DVDs have made it easier, but even the 4.7Gb of a DVD disk isn't big enough nowadays. Backing up to an external hard drive is better, and programs like Apple's Time Machine have made it an easy, but slow, operation.

But what if your external hard drive fails? Or what if a fire destroys your computer, the external hard drive and your DVD back-ups?

Large companies have planned for this for years and have always maintained off-site back-ups for when the unexpected happens. Well, now you can too.

Companies are starting to offer online back-up facilities that allow you to back your precious data up to their servers. The benefit is that you then take advantage of their own high-end back-up systems and you can access your data from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. The cost is tumbling too.

For example, Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service - see aws.amazon.com/s3) lets you pay for just the data you store and costs 18 Cents per Gigabyte per month, plus 10 Cents for every Gigabyte you transfer. That's dirt cheap and means that an average laptop-full of data (50Gb) would cost about £2.50 to transfer across and £4.50 per month to store. Amazon takes your data very seriously, ensuring it is safe from fire, computer crashes, and viruses.

It hardly seems worth buying an external hard drive (although I recommend that you do - see later).

To use the Amazon S3 service you need to set up an account and also buy some software.

I tested JungleDisk (www.jungledisk.com), which came recommended and costs just $20.

The reason I plumped for JungleDisk was simple. It is available for both Mac and PC, is very simple to use and works very well.

Once installed you can opt for a new drive on your desktop that you drag and drop your files onto. Or you can ask it to keep track of complete drives, folders or files. Either way, JungleDisk then makes a copy of your selected files and backs them up to Amazon S3.

You can automate this process or opt to back-up manually as you wish. The automated option is quite clever as JungleDisk tracks what you have changed and only backs up the changed files when it next connects.

This is where reality lags the promises, as backing up over an average ADSL connection has a distinct disadvantage - speed, or lack of it.

I opted to back-up my entire "Documents" folder, which amounted to about 8GB. Once running it soon became obvious that this wasn't going to be a five-minute job. In fact, it took a total of three days to complete the single back-up. Hmm!

My upload speed averaged around 250kbps - that's about 25k per second or 90Mb per hour. To be fair, subsequent back-ups have been much faster as the system is only handling new and changed files.

Be aware that your service provider might put a monthly limit on how much data you can transfer too.

So is online back-up the way to go? Yes, probably, but be aware of just how long it will take. Buying a £120 external hard drive is probably easier, but only if you store it away from your office. Best bet is to have both remote and local back-ups.

When (if?) we all get fibre-optic internet connections with Gigabit speeds online storage might be useable. For now, I would back up the most vital documents online and continue to use DVDs/external drives for everything else. A 500Gb external drive will cost you about £120-£150 and won't tie up your internet connection for the next three days. The simple fact is that any back-up is better than none. Just make sure you take it seriously.

Steve Nichols TechNotes blog is at http://infotechcomms.blogspot.com/ and is described as a regular ramble that tries to demystify technology and help people get to grips with new-fangled gizmos, such as the internet, streaming audio/video, DTP and digital imaging. You can get it via RSS at http://infotechcomms.blogspot.com/atom.xml