There are many solutions to offsite storage, but most of them requires you to burn a CD&DVD every so often and give to a friend or store at work. The trouble is that things requiring an actual action to be taken are likely to be forgotten or put off.

The solution I set up for my father when he asked for it for some things he’s doing that is as important to him as our photos are to us, I found a solution called Jungle Disk. Corny name, but a decent solution. The provide software that lets you define what folders to back up and it then stores it in Amazon’s diskfarm (S3). I trust Amazon to backup their stuff well.

I intend to start using the same for my own stuff. If that kind of solution sounds interesting, you can find them at http://jungledisk.com.

There is a monthly fee, but it doesn’t sound too bad for the service. It also takes a LONG time when you first sync your files. But it handles the computer being on and off very well and just keeps sending data when it is online. It actually worked so well that my father informed me that he thought it didn’t work at all. Turns out it worked it’s magic in the background and he got concerned because it never bothered him with pop up windows asking for permission or to inform him about something.

A couple of thoughts.

Tempting fate I know but … in about 13 years of computer ownership I have only had 2 hard drive failures and even then the drives did not (have not) failed – just something happened to the boot sector in each case (one old mainframe (huge 4Gb drive!) and a later laptop (huge 6Gb drive!) and meant that they would not boot to Windows. In the end, after a lot of help from a hugely knowledgeable friend in the case of the desktop, we simply installed a larger disk that I had already bought to extend the capacity and made it the primary boot drive with windows loaded and used the original drive as the secondary data drive. I had to re-install a few applications but no data was lost. It ran like that for several years mostly acting as a print server and archive machine on the network. Realising it was under used in those roles I switched it off a year or so since. It’s still there and, presumably, still working should I ever need anything from it.

The laptop disk had a similar failure but in that case the thing was right at the end of its useful life anyway. Again the disk would not boot but can be accessed readily if installed in an external USB/Firewire caddy. However that seemed like a waste of a caddy so I simply copied the whole disk to a folder on a much larger external disk and have the original disk gathering dust somewhere.

As for an off-site solution …

My knowledgeable friend these days runs a web solutions company and for some of his smaller clients and the in house needs backs up his servers across the net to a hosting company site every night. (His main clients take backup services from their hosting companies.)

He also has, for his more personal requirements, a multi-disk mass storage device with hot swappable drives set up as a RAID array in such a away that he can remove a ‘backup’ drive and store it elsewhere replacing it with a another drive (possibly on scheduled a backup cycle basis if one was to do it properly) that will then re-synchronise itself in the RAID system.

Since he does not work from home his ‘offsite’ is simply the other location. is home system backups go to the office and his office backups go to his home. Where that is not feasible one could make alternative arrangements, perhaps with family or through commercial services – banks or self storage companies for example.

One interesting aspect of the digital world is that ‘permanent archiving’ may not be so permanent. For example if one places film or prints in a specialist archive for 20 or 30 years one might expect them to be instantly usable when retrieved. This may not be the case with digital media which might have become technically obsolete in that time to the point where the ability to read the media was lost or nearly lost. Or the media may have deteriorated as, for example, CD’s, DVDs or tapes can and do.

In the final analysis I think the most important thing is setting up some sort of system that you will actually work with and take advantage from. This may not be a 100% full proof recovery procedure but if it is easy to use you are more likely to use it.

The problem with photos (and even more so with Videos) compared to the rest of ones important documents, is that they tend to require a lot of ever increasing storage capacity with little or no potential for compression.

Hopefully ever increasing media storage capacities will keep us ahead of the ever increasing volume of data that we think needs to be kept!

Grant

In the meantime, I’ve got to hope that my flat never gets broken in to or burnt down!

Owen: Glad to hear you managed to salvage your photos from your last hard drive failure.

It sounds as if you know quite a bit more about this me – there’s a few things you mention that I’ve heard about but don’t quite understand. I’ve clearly got a lot more reading to do on the subject!

It only takes one hard drive failure to teach you the lesson of backing up and BOY! you never forget it! Happened to me a couple of years back when my Powerbook internal drive failed, taking EVERYTHING with it. Like you I floundered around looking for ways to get back on my feet without losing all my memories and work, and it had me in tears at one point.

However, I ended up going with an application called Data Rescue II which is a Mac product but I believe there’s a PC version. $99 later it had accessed my unmountable hard drive after starting up from the system discs and mounting an external drive to save to, and it got back 99% of my stuff.

As I’m a Mac user, though, my backup plan has been slightly different. I was backing up my 750GB iMac to a 1TB WD Mybook Studio with Apple’s Time Machine software but there were problems, both with the software and the hardware and especially after a couple of recent power outages. I do think the hardware itself was particularly ropey, on reflection.

I now use a 750GB Lacie Quadra and SuperDuper! software to create a bootable clone at least once a day. That way if my iMac gets fried I can boot off the Lacie (can’t boot from a Time Machine drive, see). However, I still haven’t solved the burglary/fire problem. If I experience either of those disasters I’m going to lose everything as the backup sits right next to my iMac and I don’t have any off-site location to store another backup drive.

I’ve also been looking at Drobo as a sort of easy RAID-like solution but again it needs to sit next to the computer, and I’ve heard mixed reports of how fast it runs and also how easy it is to restore or boot from it if you experience any problems with the Drobo hardware itself (as the drives it uses are formatted specifically for Drobo when you insert them).

Decisions decisions!

Now, not that I intend to worry you again but … what are you doing about offsite backups in the event that someone separates you from your disks, there is a fire, the house is damaged by an Earthquake, Edinburgh is hit by a meteorite, Scotland is stuck by an Asteroid or a hole opens in a tectonic plate and swallows the UK?

Ok, maybe the just first two and their like are really worth being concerned about over and above HD failure.

No, I don’t have a solution in place for those problems either. Still, there is a better chance of having some security than there was with negatives, some of mine seemingly vanishing over the years, though I still have many of my fathers!

Life can be strange. It is possible to become very paranoid about these things. There is probably no really good answer at the moment.

Best,

Grant