You don’t back up? The storage industry wants you.

So let me get this straight, I should buy a back up hard drive in case a lightning strike fries all my appliances except the back up, are these things lightning and Hurricane proof?

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This is a timely article, but I think it misses a key point. The big guys are certainly making moves into consumer storage, but I think that the list of players who have made partnerships or acquisitions would benefit a lot from some details…

EMC bought Iomega this year. They bought Mozy last year. They are still having a very difficult time integrating them into what has always been an enterprise focused sales organization.

Symantec bought Swapdrive which primarily provides white labeled services to other companies (including Symantec pre-acqusition). Unclear if they will continue to provide the white label services or expand that business line.

To say that HP “launched Upline” is a dramatic overstatement. They bought Opelin, made some pretty flash videos, and opened up a service that immediately crashed and burned. The initial users were shut out when the system became quickly non-responsive and new entrants were not allowed. Tough to recover from such a public failure to launch successfully.

Similarly, the partnership between Box and Dell is a lot smaller than the mention here indicates – they are bundling some free Box service onto Dell minis. They isn’t any real integration and it is only on the one product line. Maybe that is because Dell is already selling its own online backup (some think it is actually powered by the abovementioned Swapdrive).

All of this without mentioning any of the key standalone players (Carbonite, ElephantDrive, Ibackup, Xdrive, etc…) or the storage-as-a-service providers (Amazon S3 or, to a lesser extent, Nirvanix).

Sure, HP launched Upline, but anyone who has tried to use the service knows it is a failure. Sorry, but putting a cool looking interface on a program that doesn’t scale is a recipe for disaster which is why they had to turn to the service off repeatedly after launch.

Some posters oversimplify the process a bit in their comment. One of the annoyance is that nowadays the data is scattered all over the disk, not just in My Documents. For example, do you know where on the disk Quicken stores your financial files, where and in what order your iPod files are stored and in which folder your Outlook Express files are hidden? In order to have meaningful backup, you would need to enumerate all these locations and add them to back up schedule. Because of this, on-line back ups is even less viable alternative.

Backing up the entire application makes even less sense. If your drive is fried and you manage to reinstall the operating system, the backup of application would do nothing – it just wouldn’t work without appropriate registry entries, and if you are not a pro who knows what he is doing – good luck trying to back up and recover Windows registry piece by piece.

Finally, backing up an entire drive image isn’t going to do much either – you will need to use identical hardware to recover right. This is tool more appropriate for corporate setups where they have dozens of identically configured computers.

Your best bet for the Windows system would still be the old-fashioned way – know where each(!) application stores its data and ad it to your back up schedule. Don’t back up the application itself; instead, backup only once the original application CD or a download, remember to safe the serial number. Don’t worry about updates, once you recover the base, you’ll update the application on-line. Similarly, don’t bother to back up the OS daily – either back up once the install CDs that came with your PC or if you will have to buy a new PC, it will be preinstalled. Again, don’t worry about the updates. When the disaster happens, you’ll be recovering in the reverse order – first OS, than applications, than data, one piece at a time. The real key is to have a very good and metitious record of what applications are installed and where, and that’s where the real problem is.

As far as on a drive or on-line. I don’t necessarily see how this combersome process can be easily done on-line. Plus, being conservative in my approach (I’m an IT manager in a financial services firm), leaving my data in someone else’s possession does not make me feel comfortable. Besides, with the proliferation of portable hard drives, paying for a drive once is much cheaper than continous payments to on-line provider. And finally, there is no need to waste your broadband – no matter how broad it is, it is not that sufficient to make large backups seemless.

Funny this article comes out now. After years and years of being lazy about backing up, just this week I started backing up using the back up program on Windows Vista. I just hook up my Lacie external hard drive via USB and set up the automatic back up to occur daily (click on Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup) . It is seriously the easiest thing ever. I just can’t believe it took me this long to do it.

As far as what it backs up – you can check off all the file types you want backed up – example images, docs, etc. But I have the entire drive backed up. the only thing it doesn’t back up are programs so you’d have to reinstall. But all the data will be stored.

Two things need to be integrated for a seamless backup.
First the backup should include a disc image of the entire drive being backed up.
Second it needs to be able to make incremental backups of changes to the system on a daily basis, with as little user intervention as possible, running missed backups in the background when the pc is started.
I have been using an Iomega external hard drive for several years with Iomega’s Automatic backup for a daily b/up of things like the My Docs files, etc. I also use a program like Drive Image XML once a month to create an disc image.
Now if these two process could be integrated to run seamlessly in the background with as little user intervention as possible, just plug & play, then it would be a simple thing to get every body to back up. Perhaps just a simple scheduling wizard when you first plug in the drive.

Back-up is complicated, do you backup just your data or do you backup all the applications and system files too? Programs like Mcafee Virus protection downloads updates without user action. Backup could be the same way. Backup stored on site with the original data has risks as well. Personally, I would like to see all pc’s come with a dual partition. One just for system files and one just for data and yes that means favorites, yahoo archives, even have office applications setup to save data on the other drive and not the “C” Drive, etc. go on the data drive. This makes backing up easy, you just back up one drive full of data. Then ever now and then you can back up applications with all their changes. It reduces the backup time, makes it simple as you know what to back up and do not have to sit and back up directory after directory of data spread across many locations. Just set it up once, let it back up on its own with software thats been told what location(s) to back up and have the system look for unused computer time to back up. I know my big hold-up is having the universe having access to my data and who will look at it after the fact – not that I have anything to hide. It’s just the big brother thing so to speak. But, who knows what is being scraped off a drive now with DSL and Cable connections – there is stuff that can be moved off your drive now without you ever having a clue it was taken.

This is an incomprehensive article. The author seems to have missed Windows Home Server.. which makes backups as easy as.. .say breathing.

I agree about the article written and well said.
Infact using online storage (Pros and Cons) people are shifting there use of self storage as the cost of storage/Mbite has gone nery low because of the technology. STX WDC will benifit.

No mention of Amazon s3 service?

Seems to me with SaaS and the Cloud Computing, the backup functionality is automatic, built right in to the App, meaning no user action is required. It is done automatically for me with lots and lots of storage available. I really like that. So basically I have anytime, anywhere secure access to my information making the loss of my computer or local hard drive failure a non event.