When I first started working at Carbonite, I spent some time searching for website/blogs that talked about technology and undertook reviews etc. By chance I came across a site called techAU.tv I shouldn’t really say by chance because its a rather popular site in a what is probably a very crowded space.
However, almost 2 years ago, I created the @CarboniteAU twitter profile and that is when I began exchanging the occasional tweet with Jason @techAU. He was probably one of the first profiles I started following.
The other day when I was thinking about what this week’s blog was going to be about, I happened to tweet it and Jason responded. Why not interview Jason and find out what he does to protect his precious files. As you will see from his responses, he has plenty of data and much of it going back more than 8 years. He has also had his share of PC disasters and lost data as a result.
Now for the record, these answers have come direct from Jason, I haven’t edited them for our own purposes.
What do you do for a living? What is TechAU.tv about?
My 9-5 job is Learning Innovations developer, building solutions to help teachers improve their classes. Outside that I created techAU.tv an Australian technology website that focuses on explaining the interesting parts of technology in a visual way. This includes a blog, podcast and reviews covering a range of topics including – hardware, software, web, social, mobile, gaming, gadgets. Basically anything relating to tech.
How many PCs/Macs do you own?
1 main PC, 1 Macbook that is dual booting Win7/Snow Leopard, 1 HP Mininote netbook.
How much data would you say you have stored on these PC’s?
A couple of years ago I decided I needed a centralised, redundant storage solution for all my devices. When HP began shipping their MediaSmart Home Server in Australia I picked up the EX490. This contains 4 drives and 1 external drive, totaling around 4TB of space. Currently around 2.75 TB are used, but this grows every day.
What is the data mainly made up of?
- The biggest segment of data is video, a lot of which is HD.
- That’s followed up by thousands of digital photos dating back as far as 2002.
- There’s a bunch of music purchased through iTunes as well as some tracks ripped from my old CD’s.
- The last part is documents including resume, past work, development files and business ideas.
If you had to choose which you could save, what would they be?
Definitely Photos and documents.
How do you currently backup your files and how often?
File backups are scheduled nightly on all machines, but only happen if the device is on.
Do you use online backup? Have you tried any of the services out there?
No. I don’t currently backup data to the cloud, which makes me nervous. I need a solution. I had tried Live Mesh, but got stuck with the amount of data I have and the 50Mb file limit.
What are you looking for in online backup?
A lot of storage, low cost, easy to use (set and forget).
Have you had a PC crash before? Did you lose any data?
Of course, hasn’t everyone ? After this happens a couple of times, you learn pretty quickly. In the past I’ve also lost data when formatting a drive and forgetting to backup one part of it.
What type of mobile do you use?
I use an iPhone 4, love it. With WP7 and Android its becoming a very competitive space. I suspect iPhone 5 won’t be an automatic upgrade.
Do you backup the data on your phone?
Yes I sync both the iPhone and the iPad with my main PC. The iTunes Library is actually located on the Home Server. That music folder is also replicated across drives.
It’s great to see Jason considering online backup as backup to his network drive. Unfortunately however the challenge he will find with so much data is the time it will take to send it all to the cloud and the price. 2.5TB and growing is a bit of space. My recommendation would be to use something like Carbonite for the files that he holds directly on his PC, his most important files. This would enable him to get them online quickly.
Now for the rest of the data, if Jason wanted it all online, the quickest way to do this is to find a local hosting provider and to physically take the drives down there and upload them on to the servers. Once its all up in the cloud, he could then begin uploading any new material directly via the web. This should be “relatively” quick to do even with video files (assuming his uploads speeds are reasonable).
Jason is a great example of a digital life (although his large collection of HD videos is probably due to his work with techAU), lots of video, lots of digital photos and generally lots of data.
Also glad that he syncs his mobile tools to his PC ensuring that they are also backed up. Great to see.
Thanks for your time today Jason. If you haven’t already caught the links to his website, here is one you can’t miss.
Carbonite Australia has officially been tweeting for over a year now, closer to 18 months I would say. It has been an interesting journey. Obviously Carbonite is the US has been active for a lot longer and lot more successful given the number of followers it has managed to attract. However for us here is Australia, it is steady as she goes.
We have always looked at ways to better connect with the technology community and the everyday consumer who has a PC, has data and has a need to back it up. We trialled Live Chat for a while and I found it to be a great service, but it was purely support that we were able to provide.
Services such as Twitter are a little different. Over the past 18 months we have been able to grow our following, most followers being in small business and many of them with a liking to technology. What has however been interesting is that Twitter has allowed us to send out message directly to this community, tell our story, educate, but also provide support.
At the moment we get at least 1 question per week from someone wanting some form of clarification about how our services work on twitter. By being constantly on it we are able to provide this support pretty instantly.
These interactions are kept on twitter somewhere I suppose. I have never really thought about it. Over time however they may become quite critical, particularly if the conversations are support related as well as if they have something to do with a promotion. Ideally we should be keeping records of the somewhere. How long does Twitter keep them for? I have no idea.
What I have done however is look at how we can back these information up and the services that can do this for you. Below is a list of some of the more popular services and what they offer.
What’s at risk however isn’t just the tweets that you make, also at risk are the tweets you receive and the followers you have.
So it’s a good idea to backup your Twitter archive on a regular basis in case of a Twitter mishap. As we all know, there has been numerous times in the past where users have lost followers, tweets, and DMs. Therefore it might be worth considering one of the following methods to backup your Twitter archive.
- Tweetake is a web-based application lets you to back up all your Twitter details to your PC. You simply type in your Twitter username and password, select what you want to back up (Followers, Friends, Favourites, Your Tweets, Everything etc.). Your data is presented to you in a downloadable CSV file, which you can download to your PC.
- TweetBackup is an online Twitter backup tool that can auto-backup your tweets daily and store all your Twitter data online (ie in the cloud). To set up all you need is your Twitter ID and email address. Data can be exported RSS, Text or HTML format. Additionally there is no limit on the number of profiles you can backup with TweetBackup.
- Backupify provides daily automatic backups, archiving, and export for all your social media and SaaS data. This service allows you to backup your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, Basecamp and other online services.
So now there is no excuse not to find a way to backup your twitter and other social media accounts.
Thanks to Choice Magazine, Carbonite received another great review this week. We scored a whopping 90% and the prize for the best performer out of a field that included Mozy, SugarSync, Livedrive, Dropbox, SkyDrive and a few others.
The review was undertaken using a quite a few criteria including ease of use, upload speed, download speed, storage space, web browser access, encryption, automatic backup, versioning, file sharing, operating systems and mobile apps.
So it was an extensive review and even though they got a few things wrong like whether we offer Web Access, which we do and Mobile Access which we also do via an iPhone app that was only recently released, I thought we did really well and maybe deserved a slightly higher score than 90%, putting us even further ahead of our closest competition.
As a marketer, you often ask yourself how effective are these reviews? The answer is very important. Particularly if the review is an influential body like Choice Magazine. Just today I had an existing client call up about a question he had, and he mentioned that he had seen the Choice Review and it gave him further justification to purchase another subscription.
I also had another client call up today who said they purchased Carbonite without even bothering to trial it first because he had read a write-up in APC Magazine.
So thank you both Choice Magazine and APC for reviewing Carbonite and giving it the credit that its due.
Read this interesting article this morning. What is interesting about it is that its a story of a IT Journal Editor who had his Mac stolen just prior to doing any of his backing up. So he lost it all.
Great story for me, not so great for him unfortunately. Its such a common story however. We are all so much wiser after the fact.
Even though Brett mentions remote backup via the cloud, he paints a bit of a grim picture due to an issue experienced by Mozy. Don’t know much about this particular issue however, any recognised backup service including Carobnite and Mozy has significant investment in redundancy in place to ensure protection from such an incident. But it doesn’t mean its impossible to happen. However the number of factors that need to happen at the same time for it to occur are significant.
The moral of the story is to backup locally but to also backup remotely, particularly if the data is important to you. For $72 pa, Brett would have had a much better weekend than he actually did.
iTnews editor Brett Winterford laments lost data.
The timing couldn’t have been worse.
Late Saturday night my fiance and I came home to find that somebody had broken in to our home and stolen our two laptop computers.
On the same table as where the laptops had sat, unboxed but still wrapped in plastic, was a new home NAS storage unit I’d purchased last week, plus a spare hard drive.
(Obviously, whatever junkie broke in to our home must have been pretty stupid – the unopened new NAS, new router and hard drive would have netted him more money at the hock shop than two used Macs. But I digress.)
I was only a night’s sleep away from spending my Sunday morning backing up all the data from our laptops. One night too late.
If I’d have done it a day earlier – or nine months earlier if I had any sense at all – I’d still have all the photos, all the work documents, all the music, all the video we’d shot, all the apps we’d paid for.
It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again. Hardware you can replace with relative ease, but not so for the data.
I know I’m preaching to the converted when advising an iTnews reader to backup their data, but if I was lazy enough to miss the message for too long, maybe you’re falling a little behind too? My holiday tip to you before you go on leave – back it up.
Is this the part where I rave about the Cloud?
Which leads us to the next question – what if I had backed up my data already, but the thief was a little smarter and took the NAS too? Or what if a fire took out the laptops and every other device in the place?
It’s here that the cloud starts looking like a sensible place for backup. A disaster recovery strategy for the consumer, so to speak.
But as we have reported, the cloud isn’t always as available and reliable as one would hope. Mistakes and errors and glitches happen just as frequently in data centres.
The answer? How about both.
If your data is important enough to you, it is frighteningly cheap to buy a backup drive or NAS, and not much more again to have a secondary backup in the cloud.
I wish I’d realised that last week.
