Computers have been around for quite some time now, but one thing that never goes away is crashed hard drives, house fires, laptop theft, and other “disasters”.  If you are anything like us, your computer holds years of family digital photos, an extensive library of music, and important emails.  So the question surfaces, are you backed up?

CDs, DVDs, USB Drives

The most simplistic way to back up is by burning CDs/DVDs of your data or copying it to a USB drive.  This can definitely work as a primitive form of back up.  It’s quick and affordable, but unfortunately it doesn’t scale well at all. Even with the advent of DVD burners, you are limited to 8.5 GB (at best).  For some that may work, but if you have lots of digital music and thousands of photos…frankly, it probably won’t work for long.  Also, what about when you need to refresh your backups next month?  You’ll need a closet dedicated to expired DVD backups.

External Disk Drive

Another great way to back up your most important files is with an external disk drive.  This can be a great solution for three reasons:

1. Hard drives are big – You could hypothetical replicate your entire computer on to an external drive.  Or, just copy over the most precious files.
2. Hard drives are rewritable – No need to have multiple external drives, just write over your past backups next time.
3. Hard drives are independent from your computer -If your computer gets shocked and your internal drive bites the dust, your external drive is still alive and well.  Likewise, if your backup external drive burns out, you still have your functioning computer to create a new back up.

As great as this idea may seem, it’s not without it’s downfalls.

1. Copying an entire 250 GB hard drive is SLOW – While backing up, your computer is going to slow down significantly for several hours.
2. This doesn’t protect you from natural disasters – It’s not fun to think about, but if there was a fire in your home or place of business both your computer and your backup aren’t going to make it.

Remote Backup

As far as completeness goes, this is it.  Remote backup entails making copies of your files on a server at an entirely different location.  Your files are copied over the Internet and stored securely in a server facility.  By doing this, you have data redundancy, disaster recovery, and a simply and pain-free backup method.

Our Solution

At Blue Ember Design, we imploy a bit of a hybrid of these methods for a combination of the best data recovery and ease of use.

All development is done on Apple machines running OSX which allows us to use an amazing feature called Time Machine.  Time Machine does hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups of an entire system.  This data can be easily retrieved with a beautiful user interface and is great for pulling back mistakenly deleted files or restoring an entire system.  We highly recommend Time Machine if you are running a Mac.  But what about disaster prevention?

Blue Ember uses Mozy for automatic remote back up and disaster prevention.  They are a great (and affordable service) that offers reliable and secure data backup.  File transfer happens automatically in the background and only data that has changed since the last backup is sent to Mozy.  This helps to prevent big file uploads and a slow computer.  Data is transferred securely with encryption and stored in a secure server facility so your passwords, private documents, and sensitive information are safe.  Right now Mozy is offering a free 2GB backup account which is a great way to get started.

As our client, your website files are backed up on a daily basis so that in the case of a server crash we will be able to restore your website with little down time.  We also offer daily database backup so that your online store sales information, blog posts, or content management system don’t get lost either.

Regardless of what you choose to do, don’t risk losing your most important files, pictures, music, and more.  Get backed up!