My current remote backup solution is JungleDisk. Since it's one that I use and am familiar with, I figured it'd be the first review I do. There are other solutions out there, but I think JungleDisk will fit most people's needs the best.

Features

JungleDisk is a front end application to Amazon.com's S3 service. Amazon's S3 remote storage runs on Amazon's many servers and features redundant backups in multiple locations and a very cheap price. JungleDisk has two main uses; as an automatic incremental backup and as a remote hard drive.

JungleDisk's main feature is a automatic backup of the files on your computer. You can set up which directories and files get backed up and how often. You can also restrict certain file types from being backed up, like MPG files or files that end in .bak. During the backup run, JungleDisk will only upload files that have changed since the last backup. This saves on the time it takes to run the backup and helps you save money, since you have to pay for the amount of data transfered to and from S3.

JungleDisk also mounts the remote file system onto your computer, allowing you to use your JungleDisk bucket as if it was a local hard drive. With this, you can see all the backup files and recover them if needed. You can also use S3 as a remote storage unit of your own, dragging and dropping files into the S3 bucket, bypassing JungleDisk's scheduled backup features if you want.

To me, one of the killer features is that JungleDisk allows you to set an encryption key for your files. This means that the only person who can read your backup files is you. JungleDisk won't have access and Amazon won't have access. Only someone with the key that you set will be able to view the files. You'll have to protect your key in case your computer crashes and you have to recover your files, but no one who gets your files from Amazon will be able to see them.

Pricing

JungleDisk is a steal at only $20 with lifetime upgrades. I have never seen a computer program so useful yet so cheap in my life. You can also try it for 30 days to see if you like it. If you don't, just delete the S3 account from Amazon and uninstall JungleDisk. You'll only pay the Amazon S3 fees for that month.

There is also a Plus service that is designed to help you save money if you back up very large files. It costs $1 a month and is designed to help people that backup up very large files by caching parts of those backups on JungleDisk's servers. I don't backup very large files, so I haven't tried this service.

Even though I don't pay a monthly fee to JungleDisk, I do have to pay S3 for storing my files. I currently keep about 5GB of data on S3 between two computers with nightly backups. This has ended up running me about $1.20 a month, which is nothing compared to the piece of mind JungleDisk has given me. You can check the Amazon S3 Calculator for what your monthly price might be. Keep in mind that the Storage is the amount of data your saving, Data Transfer-in will be the amount of changed files in a month, Data Transfer-out will be the number of files you recover in a month (should be zero), PUT/LIST requests are done when checking the cached files against your current files. PUT/LIST requests are the hardest to estimate, but mine are at about 15,000 a month. From that, you should be able to estimate your usage and what your monthly fee might be. Remember that, for the first month, your Storage and Data Transfer-in numbers will be the same, but every month after that Data Transfer-in will just be the size of new/changed files.

Future Worries

My only real worry is that JungleDisk was recently bought by Rackspace. Rackspace recently announced a cloud storage of their own which competes with S3. I really like S3's pricing and service and would hate to have to switch, but there have been a couple of reassurances by JungleDisk's author that S3 will stick around as an option, which makes me feel better.

I have a cheatsheet in the works for JungleDisk and will be posting it soon. For now, I recommend installing it, getting an Amazon S3 account and setting up a quick backup of your most important files.

One of the best local backup devices today is the Drobo. The Drobo is a fast, expandable external hard drive. What makes it unique isn't that it's an external hard drive enclosure, but how it stores the data on the drives.

Redundant Redundancy

A Drobo has four hard drive bays that fit any size SATA drive you can buy. You'll need at least two drives for the Drobo to do it's magic.

No matter how many drives you have in the Drobo, the Drobo will show up on your Desktop as one external drive. Every file you put on the Drobo will actually get written to at least two of the drives. This protects your data from hard drive failure. If one of the drives dies, all hard drives will die eventually, your data is still safe on the other drives. Once you replace the faulty drive with a new one, the data will be recreated and will once again be protected.

You can actually mix and match drives in the Drobo, adding different size drives to different bays. The nice thing about that is, as drives get cheaper or if you see one on sale, you can just buy it and plug it into the Drobo without worrying about whether it will work with the other drives. You can see how different drives react to each other with the Drobolator.

If you ever run out of room, all you'll need to do it just buy another drive and plug it into the Drobo. The Drobo will automatically recognize that a new drive has been added and add it automatically into the system.

If a drive dies, the Drobo will alert you to the fact with flashing red lights. Just pop out the bad drive, pop in a new one and you're ready to go.

RAID!

This will sound familiar to any techie since the Drobo is basically just a RAID device. RAID has been around for years and is used by web servers and enterprise data centers to redundantly keep data on more than one drive. The big difference between the Drobo and a regular RAID system is maintenance. RAID systems can be a nightmare to set up and keep running. Also, most RAID systems require that you have all the same size drive installed, making it a pain if you ever want to upgrade to larger drives. I like to call the Drobo a consumer RAID device, since it handles all of the complicated RAID stuff behind the scenes and displays a simple interface for the user. If you know how to use a regular external drive, you know how to use a Drobo.

Problems

There have been many bad reviews on Amazon over the Drobo. The main complaint seems to be support but there is also talk of all four of the hard drives dying at the same time. This could be due to using all the same type of hard drive (namely, low quality drives) or running the Drobo for very long periods of time, which effectively cooked the hard drives. Either way, it is something to be aware of. I use my Drobo mainly for backups and rarely work straight off of it and I can say that I have had no problem with it at all.

I was also recently asked what I would do if the Drobo itself failed but the hard drives were fine. The only thing you can do in this situation is get a new Drobo since it what it writes to the disks is actually gibberish that only it understands. Some people are uncomfortable with that and if you're one of those people, you shouldn't get a Drobo. I'm okay with this since I see $350 a small price to pay to get my data back. It's much more troubling to me to have a hard drive crash and have everything gone than to have my Drobo crash and I just need to buy a new one to get everything back.

Also, the Drobo is pricey. I bought mine for $750, but you can get a full Drobo system for only $569. That still might be too much for some, but it really is the safest way to keep a local backup and, since it's expandable with more and larger drives, should last for many years to come.

Backup is a little like Taekwondo; it's hard to know whether you're really good at [it] until you're in the midst of getting your ass kicked.

-- Twitter Post by Merlin Mann

I realized today that, although I have a solid backup plan, I don't really have a solid recovery plan. I have all my files in a remote and local backup, but how do I get back at them with my computer hosed?

I'm trying to get everything in order with a solid recovery plan. That means:

1. I have to have a copy of my operating system ready to go. I use Ubuntu Desktop LTS, so I'm burning the disk for that now to have it available.
2. I'll need access to the applications I have installed. I don't backup my applications, just my preferences for them. I'll need to have a list of all the applications I currently have installed to install them again once the OS is in.
3. I need my decryption keys for JungleDisk easily available. I think I have them in my lockbox, but I'm scared enough about it that I'll need to check that.
4. I need to prove to myself that I'm really ready.

Getting My Ass Kicked

To cover the last point, I will be putting myself to the test and "losing all my data". I have a spare laptop hard drive sitting around and some day soon, I'm going to swap the hard drives in my laptop. This spare hard drive is empty. I'll be starting from scratch and my goal will be to get back up and running in as little time as possible with no data loss.

This is quite scary to me, but if I'm going to do this blog, I better be able to deliver solutions that actually work. I hope to live blog the experience in some way and perhaps twitter it all as well. Details on that will be coming soon. My plan is to do this on December 13th beginning at 9:00 AM EST. Afterwards, I'll have a postmortem entry with any lessons I learned in the process. I'll also have a post on what my set up is and my plan for recovery.

Wish me luck!

I haven't talked about the Drobo yet, but it's quite possibly the perfect local backup machine. It acts like an external drive, but uses logic to store all your files redundantly across multiple drives inside the Drobo. So if you have two 1TB drives, it will show as 1TB of storage and mirror across the two drive. If one dies, your files are still safe and you can just plug in another drive to get the Drobo back up and running again.

Here's a great video about the Drobo, if you're not convinced.

The exciting part is that there's a great way to save a lot of money on a first generation Drobo. B&H currently has a first generation Drobo for only $349 with free shipping. I have the first gen Drobo and the only difference between that and the new Drobo is the new one has FireWire 800, not very useful if you mainly use PCs and not Macs.

A Drobo isn't much good without at least two drives. But Amazon is selling Seagate 1TB Hard Drives for only $109 with free shipping! UPDATE:They also have Western Digital Caviar 1TB Hard Drives on sale at the same price. This means you could have a full Drobo RAID-like external hard drive system for only $569.00!

That still may sound like a lot for an external hard drive, but being able to have one device that you can put files on and it will automatically back itself up on multiple drives is the holy grail of local backup. Plus, if you ever need more storage, you can just buy another cheap hard drive, plug it into the Drobo, and instantly have more space to store your stuff. With four hard drive bays on the device, there's plenty of room to grow.

I will be talking more about how the Drobo works in a future post. You can do fine with just regular external hard drives, but I've found that once you out grow a drive like that, you have to get another and they just start stacking up everywhere. Plus, if the drive dies, you've lost the whole thing and have to start over with a new one. If that's the only place you keep that data, the data is just gone. With the Drobo, I can just buy another drive, plug it in and go. I would recommend getting one if you can, and would really recommend getting one now with these prices the way they are.

So, I talked about Dropbox in general, now I'll get to specifics on what I think is one of it's most useful features; versioning.

I'll be mainly talking about text, but you could easily adapt this to Photoshop files or Word files or whatever you work in. These techniques will work with any file on your computer, but just be aware of the 2GB limit.

• Working
  

  Synced Document in Dropbox

  You'll be working the way you always do, except you'll be working within the Dropbox folder in your computer's home folder. When you're connected to the Internet, every time you save the file, it will upload the change to the Dropbox site as an immediate remote backup. Feel free to create folders to organize your work. Dropbox will keep that file structure on the getdropbox.com site as well.

  When you see the green checkbox next to your file, you know that your file has been successfully saved to your online Dropbox.

• Revisions

  Dropbox will create a new revision each time you save your file. You will have access to all past revisions and can see when they were saved and how big the files are. If you right click on a file in your Dropbox folder, you'll get a Dropbox submenu that will take you to the revision list in your browser. From there you can save any past versions to your computer and, if you want to roll back to a previous version, just copy and paste it over the existing file in your Dropbox folder.

  

  Revision Menu

  One note to be aware of. If you rename or move a file, you will lose the revisions that related to it because Dropbox will think you deleted it. You can get to the old file by going into the getdropbox.com interface and selecting the Show Deleted Files button.

  

  Deleted Files

• Sharing

  If you right click on a folder, you can view it's sharing options. This will allow you to share your Dropbox folder and all of it's contents with another Dropbox user, provided you know their email address. If they aren't already signed up with Dropbox, this will also send them an invitation to join. It's a great way to keep a group of people in sync with important documents.

  More to the point, all versions of a document are tagged with the person's name who made it, so you'll know exactly who changed what within a file. And since every version is saved, you won't need to worry about overwriting someone else's changes. In fact, if two people edit the same file at the same time, Dropbox will actually notify you that it happened and allow you to fix it by giving you both files.

  

  Folder Sharing

  You can also drop things in the Public folder within Dropbox. This allows anyone to download the file through a simple web link. They won't be able to edit and upload the file back to your Dropbox, but it's a quick way to distribute files to users over email or IM to a group of people.

I think Dropbox is what I call an active file backup, meaning it backs up your work as you work on it. In fact, Dropbox is probably the best way of doing this I've seen, mainly because it's also a remote backup. If your computer dies in the middle of what you're doing, you haven't lost all of your changes and you'll be able to hop on another computer, install Dropbox and be back up and running.

You can find more about all of these features over at the Dropbox FAQ.