I’ve got no excuse. I work in IT and I’ve been bitten by more than a few hard drive crashes. Yet, my home backup systems has always been a shambles. I occasionally burn of a DVD of important files or archive finished projects to free up disc space. But I’ve never, for very long at least, had an automated backup system going.
Well, why not fix that? Now that all my photos and music are digital, it only makes sense to protect that media from some future crash. Several months back, I moved all my image and audio files to a LaCie 250GB external USB2 hard drive. I’ve been very happy with that drive. It’s faster than my internal drive and provides plenty of room for the family photos, the iTunes library, and recording projects. So I ordered a 500GB version to use exclusively for backups.
LifeHacker turned me on to SyncBack, a great freeware backup utility. They also have a commercial version that I may end up buying, as it adds some features lacking in the free version. It’s only for Windows.
The drive arrived last night and I started setting up profiles. I knew the initial backup would take a while, especially since I enabled verification and zip compression. I created separate profiles for my image library, music library, music production files, and my entire “My Documents” folder. I did the photos and music production files first. I’ll hit My Docs and the iTunes library next (SyncBack might baulk on the copy-protected files. I’m not sure). Since it supports FTP, I’m going to set up an FTP server on my laptop, put a copy of SyncBack on my wife’s laptop, and set up a profile for her My Documents folder, too. I think her laptop is going to be the first to die. So I want to get a decent archive of her files before it gives up the ghost.
The next step will be to set up an off-site backup of all this stuff. I have enough room at Dreamhost. But the free version of SyncBack only supports FTP (not SFTP). So I can either pony up for the pay version, which supports FTP over SSL, or I can put on my thinking cap and figure out how to use rsync. Given Comcast’s upload limitations, the initial transfer will take forever, but subsequent backups should be manageable.
So, I feel a little better. I’ll feel a lot better once I have the initial backup finished and future backups scheduled.