I’ve used a bunch of these on line storage solutions. So
far my favorites are Zumodrive (1GB free), Dropbox (2GB free), and Skydrive
(25GB free). I also use livesync to synchronize files between multiple devices
(works great keeping all my WoW mods, pictures, music, movies, and etc updated
across my home computers).
Amazon probably has the most robust and affordable solution for
huge data backups, skydrive has the most storage for free (25GB), Zumodrive does
a great job with media, gdocs and live@edu let you actually work on the files
through the browser, but none of them will do it all. So, I use all of the
above (well, I don’t use Amazon… yet).
I’d like to see what everyone is doing or planning to do
with online data services as addition/replacement/fault tolerance to your
school’s storage options. Currently we back up about ½+ TB to disk and
then that goes to tape, as it takes too long to go straight to tape. Dropbox at
$240/year for 100GB would cover a fair amount of data, but would that solve
more problems than it would create? Amazon can host all of our backups for
about the cost of our tapes for 1 month… but can we even begin to push
that amount of data up to the cloud with a tiny 30MB handoff? How big a pipe
do we need to realistically use these solutions and will that cost be worth it?
Mike
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Michael Vining, SB IT Support South Burlington School District South Burlington, Vermont 05403 |
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Direct: (802) 652-7298 IT Help Desk: (802) 652-7050 |
From: School Information
Technology Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Adam
Provost
Sent: Sunday, November 01, 2009 10:56 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Backups and things that get dropped in the night
We've discussed institutional backups on this list many
times. How about personal backups? Here's a quick survey we've created to stir
up discussions on how we do or don't backup our personal data at home. We came
up with the idea of asking students and adults here on campus to chime in and
also you folks on the School-IT list.
Here's the link to they survey. We don't ask your name, but we do ask your age.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDhHRFVPOWV5T3FaaG1hWUtLTGxmb2c6MA
Many thanks for your time if you choose to fill it out! Adam
Here's the ditty I wrote up for the class to open discussions. Yes, my music HD
did croak this weekend!
I dropped an external hd yesterday and it has officially croaked from the
impact. The drive had my entire music library on it! BOOO! I have a backup
except for iTunes purchases I've made over the last year-ish though so that'
helps. I contacted Apple, explained the dilemma and I can download my purchases
again... a one shot deal. Full recovery. This... is a good thing.
The whole thing got me thinking about backups for the home... again. Without
this online data recovery from Apple I'd have lost a good bit of music
purchases. It's about time we get this conversation underway this year.
If you've been doing this media bit for awhile there's always the item of
converting things to new locations or new formats. Cave walls, stone tablets,
paper, reel to reel, technicolor, cassettes, VHS, Hi-8, even DAT tapes go the
way of the location or media player changes. One form phases out and you are
left to convert all your material to a new format. I still have a stack of
Hi-8 videos I'm converting to digital. So what's the next step for digital
music, photos and video?
Here are a few pitfalls with home based backups:
- Some folks don't backup at all or like me in the case above, forget to backup
a certain part of their material.
- They are not done frequently enough. You lose large chunks of data in between
backups.
- Backing up incrementally to dvds is cumbersome too with ever-changing
content. Music and photos are ever changing medium for me as an example. I'd
rather do many other things than backup data manually or sort it for backup and
archiving purposes.
- Backing up data to an external hard drive in your house is great... until
something happens to your house: Auto-Bot landing, black hole, fire, etc.
Catastrophes like this have always been a risk, especially for traditional
picture albums, record or cd collections and the like.
So, I looked around a bit for automated solutions to data backup and found this
one: mozy.com/home
Online backups can be slow though. So I'm thinking rather than slow down my
workstation, I automate backups to one external hard drive and then backup that
external hd to a web service like Mozy online. Photos, videos, music etc. No
sorting. No incremental goofing around. Easy off site data backup. Three
copies: Local, external drive and offsite. That means at least two workstations
though in a home and a broadband internet connection. Not a practical solution
for some. Hmm.
Mozy is just one of many services out there. Likely as time goes by there will
be more.
Then... I think along the lines of sacrificing resolution and just putting all
my photos and video online anyway. Is preserving resolution of photos and video
really that important for the future?
I went the way of the web for my documents years ago. As we move toward higher
internet bandwidth, is archiving things at home on our own drives even
practical anymore? Are we in a transition period... a mixture of home hard
drive and dvd tinkering and online services or would you pick one or the other?
Please fill out this online survey via the link below. I've asked some IT folk
in education to do the same. The survey will collect the data and we'll see
what folks have to say.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDhHRFVPOWV5T3FaaG1hWUtLTGxmb2c6MA
Thanks for tuning in, Adam