Lazy Backup

I’m Lazy there's no two ways about.  I know I should go to the gym and don’t, I know I should call my Mum and don’t, I know I should backup my data and don’t.   I know that backing up my data is one of the best things I could do, but it’s a pain to do. I don’t care about my programs I can always get them again, I don’t even care about some of my documents.  However with the growth of digital cameras, I like most people have a collection of photos on my PC that would make me cry if I lost them.

“Backup up to DVD” I hear you shout, or maybe you even backup to an external USB hard drive. Well to quote Leo Laporte tech pundit from Twit.tv “if it doesn’t exist in three places it doesn’t exist.” Leo’s view might sound a bit extreme at first, but if the worst was to happen and a disaster occurred in my home or your home what happens to our backups?  The chances are our backups would disappear the same way our computers did just at the very time we need them. Technoratis like Leo have all types of options available to them but what are the options for the rest of us?

• Friends:  You could copy your most precious data to CD, DVD or a USB drive and then ask a friend to look after it for you. Obviously this is better then nothing but you had better be disciplined about doing this regularly.  In my experience just like the gym, it’s all too easy for months to go by without this happening.
• Online Storage: Sites like Dropbox, or Microsoft Sky Drive supply for free gigabytes of storage.  But often that doesn't go very far if you hope to backup up that music from iTunes as well.  As an aside Apple do not guarantee that they will allow you to download any purchased music again.  Cheers for that Steve.
• Online Backup: many of these services are beginning to spring up.  Not dissimilar to online storage but the key difference being that it should be simple to use and allow you to retrieve data from a previous time as well as the current version.  Most uses of backup are when some muppet like me has corrupted or altered a file by mistake and we need to go back to a previous version. 

And the winner for lazy backup of the year is… Online Backup.  Yes I know that there are other options that will synchronise the data, but trust me I’ve tested them and none of them are simple, and as I am about technology for the rest of us keeping it simple works. So if Online Backup is the winner which one?

My lazy backup service of choice is Carbonite.  For the price of a cup of coffee a month Carbonite provide you with all the space you need and a simple to install utility to backup all you data.  Those precious photos will now be safe along with the rest of our data.  I have been using Carbonite for the last year and have backed up terabytes of data so it is more then capable of doing backups for the rest of us. No need to remember to do my backup it’s simply updates any files I edit over an encrypted link via the broadband without any intervention by me.  That’s lazy and simple just how I like it, now what's my Mums number.