My Backup Story – Jason Cartwright techAU.tv

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.