How is that false sense of security working for you?

You finally got your act together. You went out and bought a Time Capsule or an external hard drive for your computer backups. Now you have a sense of relief knowing that you have a system in place creating periodic backups of all your important data.

I’m here to give you a wake-up call. Right now you’re living in a sugar-coated fantasy world. How is your precious Time Capsule going to help you if your house burns to the ground? How are you planning on drying out that external drive if there is a flood?

If you want real peace of mind, you need an offsite backup. If you don’t have a large amount important data, you can probably get by with one of the online storage options we’ve mentioned in the past. Otherwise, your best option is keeping a physical hard drive in a safe-deposit box.

Rather than buying overpriced external hard drives for offsite backup, I prefer to buy comparatively less-expensive internal drives and use a USB to SATA adapter to connect them to my computer. This strategy saves money and leaves me with fewer cables and power adapters in my closet.

Internal drives are easy to organize when you store them in anti-static cases that are available from WiebeTech. They come with nice, large labels, and you can use the labels to indicate when you last swapped your onsite copy with the one in the safe-deposit box.

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Posted by PJ on Apr 10, 2008 | Comments |

20 comments posted

  1. Posted by Patrick - 04/10/2008

    Offsite backup’s are a must, no denying that.
    However external data enclosures are pretty inexpensive useally around ~30USD + Drive cost for a decent one, and you don’t need to worry about finding that place to put the drive while you are attaching the USB/Sata connector and using said drive with out a case.

    Getting two of them to rotate out is best, if you go weekly it’s not so bad =D

    I take mine to the office, I go nearly every day and it’s easy =D

  2. Posted by PJ Doland - 04/10/2008

    The external enclosures just take up a lot more space in safe-deposit boxes (which are usually priced by size).

  3. Posted by Kristi - 04/10/2008

    My offsite backup solution is to use FolderShare to sync my files between my home computer and my office computer. Whenever they are both online at the same time they will sync up. Super easy and free.

  4. Posted by MikeH - 04/10/2008

    This might be an alternative to the USB-to-SATA adapter solution–it resembles an iPod dock, but it’s for internal hard drives: http://www.oncomp.com/mar08-2.htm

  5. Posted by Chris Blackwell - 04/10/2008

    I have been using Mozy and Carbonite for over a year now and just love it. I wrote about backing up online a couple of months ago and I still think it’s the way to go. Also, I bought the “time capsule” as a SECONDARY BACKUP. If you don’t have at least two backups of something, it’s not really important.

  6. Posted by Dennis Newel - 04/10/2008

    I also think online backup is the way to go. With services like http://www.sugarsync.com/, http://crashplan.com/ or the hundreds of other services out there, it’s both easy and simple, and faster to get to than a safe deposit box :)
    I considered crashplan a great deal, and almost went with it, until I saw the synchronization available in sugarsync.
    So far I haven’t had time to buy and install, but I’m sure I’ll go with sugarsync.
    And no, I have no commercial interest in either…just think they look like cool products.

  7. Posted by Arf - 04/10/2008

    Mozy is fantastic. All files are encrypted and can be accessed anywhere, and you can store up to 2GB for free. It also lets you go back up to 30 days and retrieve old or deleted files.

    It’s much less cluttered than any kind of hard drive, too!

  8. Posted by spaceboyzoom - 04/10/2008

    The lower end external drive is significantly cheaper than the one linked in the original post.

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ.....ob_title_1

  9. Posted by Fazal Majid - 04/10/2008

    The problem with USB-SATA cables is that the drive does not get proper cooling, and will likely overheat and malfunction if you are backing up serious amounts of data.

    I would recommend instead the D-Link DNS-323 NAS, that can take up to 2 SATA drives. If you know a thing or two about Linux, you can download Fun-Plug and extend it to do incremental network backups to an offsite sibling using rsync while you are sleeping.

    I documented my own scheme, which goes a few steps beyond because I am paranoid and can afford it:
    http://www.majid.info/mylos/we...../10-1.html

  10. Posted by dizawndra - 04/10/2008

    I dunno, in a fire, I might say that I have bigger worries than where my clients documents are. But yes, offsite storage seems like a good idea. How burying the external back ups in the backyard? (bubble wrapped of course)

  11. Posted by sue b - 04/11/2008

    Actually, the easiest (and cheapest) method is still burning all your data off to DVD’s and mailing or carrying them to a friend’s or relative’s home. Everytime I fly home to my mom and dad’s I make a DVD of all the data and take it with me. Mom knows where I keep it and with US post office express mail for $15 bucks I can have it back in my hands in 48 hours (this is the earthquake, tornado scenario.) I always end up needing some files or photos on the road anyway. Or you can swap disaster DVD kits with a local friend for the house fire, burglery concern. You are going to ask somebody to watch your place when you take a trip, ask them to watch your data. And return the favor.

  12. Posted by Sara - 04/11/2008

    Couldn’t you just put your back up in a fire/flood-proof box, like the one where you (well at least I) keep important stuff like family records and jewlery?

  13. Posted by Erin Doland - 04/11/2008

    @Sara — Fireproof boxes won’t protect your data storage unless they have a UL rating of 125 for digital media. Starting prices for small safes at this rating are usually in the thousands. Check out this post for more information on this subject:

    http://unclutterer.com/2007/08.....-part-two/

  14. Posted by Mary Anne - 04/11/2008

    I could not agree more with the importance of this … 11 months ago, an error made by a city employee resulted in several thousand gallons of water flooding every inch of my home. My computer and external USB hard drive didn’t get wet, but the water was high enough that the dangling power cords shorted out, and it was touch and go whether I’d be able to get anything off the devices. Even in the face of all the massive repairs I was facing, one of the most upsetting things was that every picture I’d taken over the previous year was on the external hard drive and was NOT backed up since I didn’t have a working CD burner. Fortunately, when I purchased new power cords, the computer and hard drive themselves were functional, but it was a real eye-opener. Carpet and furniture can be replaced, but pictures from my one-one-one trip with my 6-year old niece can’t.

  15. Posted by Michael - 04/11/2008

    I don’t really trust my bits to them thar online interwebs. Seems like an easy target for 1337 haX0rs or incompetent employees (like when you read about 1000’s of personal records get stolen because some company employee had their laptop stolen, etc.).

    Call me old fashioned, but I’ll be keeping my hard drive safe under my mattress.

  16. Posted by Fazal Majid - 04/12/2008

    @Sara: Sentry and Maxtor have come up with a fireproof safe with a built-in drive:
    http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/11.....rd-drives/

  17. Posted by Louisa - 04/12/2008

    I absolutely love Mozy for online backup service! Sooooo cheap (free in some cases, like mine!) and great customer service.

  18. Posted by Mark - Productivity501 - 04/13/2008

    JungleDisk is an online backup tool that runs on Amazon’s S3 service. It is a bit on the technical side to setup, but you can back up very large amounts of data without a lot of expense.

    I keep a copy of my really important files on a DVD in the bank lockbox. It only gets updated a couple times each year, but it gives me one other option if data is lost.

  19. Posted by Emma - 04/15/2008

    I take a huge amount of photos, these are stored on an external networked drive at home. I think there’s about 130GB of stuff on there at the moment.

    A few months ago we gave an old hard drive to my Mum and Dad with the condition they kept all my old pics safe. Reading this I get the feeling that data needs updating. Photos of my son couldn’t be replaced in case of a fire. I must get onto that.

  20. Posted by David - 04/18/2008

    I’d like to know more about fire ratings and digital media. The ratings I’m looking at are for 1800 degrees–for one or more hours, and with all six sides of the enclosure exposed. I don’t know about your house, but my house doesn’t have enough material to fuel a marshmallow roast for two hours, let alone sustain 1800 degrees for any length of time.
    I understand being paranoid, and better safe than sorry, but isn’t putting your USB drive in a waterproof case (Pelican, for example) in a 2 hour firesafe, bolted to the concrete slab in your basement reasonable protection? What kind of fire would be required to subject the floor of a basement to the kind of heat that would damage a drive inside a normal firesafe?

    From UL:
    http://www.ul.com/fire/safes.html
    The 125 rating is for ‘flexible computer disks’ which I read as floppies. 150 is the rating for magnetic tape. I’m guessing the UL hasn’t updated the spec in a while, if they’re still rating floppies–so they probably don’t have a rating for external drives?

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