Richard Leggett on New Media

Do you regularly back up your computer files, code etc? I used to do the usual, which involved sporadically dumping what I thought was important to DVD once a month maybe. Thankfully I've only encountered a real problem where I lost work that I hadn't backed up just once, SVN came to the rescue in this case, but I vowed never to lose work again because of poor backup procedures.

So a couple of months back I put together an external HD, from a 200gig internal 3.5" drive and a USB 2.0 fan assisted cradle from eBay. This seemed to be to be not only a low cost approach but also hot-swappable when it comes to backing up the backups onto more than 1 drive. So with the hardware sorted I shopped around for a software backup solution to replace my not-so-great xcopy batch file.

I found Allway Sync offered a free version, and when it comes to products you really need to test thoroughly before you buy, their free version had very few limits, just the amount you backup each month. So two months later I've decided it does a fantastic job of going through and synchronising (pc-drive, drive-pc, or both-ways) whichever folders I've specified with exclusion rules to match and gone ahead and purchased it for the measely sum of just under $20, which is $10 less than usual right now. So with a single click I now backup My Documents, Projects, Outlook PSTs and many more folders with just the one click. Definitely 8 or 9 out of 10 for this product.

Another product that recently came to my attention was the $5 a month, unlimited online backup solution provided by Carbonite. This looks like a perfect companion to my local backup procedure in order to give me that off-site peace of mind. Carbonite runs as a system process, constantly backing up your HD changes to the Carbonite servers whilst attempting to utilise the minimum processing power and bandwidth when you are using your computer.

What is your backup process, do you recommend any alternatives?