Sadly it’s my personal family media that is at greatest risk. Photos not so much as a flickr or other account can take care of that. I’ve invested great effort of cataloging and tagging my music (off CD) and soon DVD’s (I’m sick of scratched disks failing). Losing all that due to a hard drive crash scares me.

I think I’ll implement a multiple backup strategy, although a nice RAID-5 box would be nice.

A report was delivered recently in Europe outlining Risk Assessment of Cloud Computing: http://www.elasticvapor.com/2009/11/cloud-computing-risk-assessment-report.html

Like the man said: there are many and varied alternatives for a backup strategy. So long as you have at least 1 backup strategy in place, you are further ahead than more than 60% of Australian Small Businesses, according to a study by Gartner Group last year. Frightening, but true.

Keeping your content at home or bringing back your small business’ server backup HDD will not help you. You don’t need to backup documents from your PC to the cloud in the hope that you will be able to download them or have them fedexed to you when your PC breaks down.

There are so many solutions hosted on the Internet that will render your computer hard disk obsolete. When you use these solutions such as hosted CRM, documents, office suite, etc. you don’t need to backup.

So the next time your PC crashes when you are using cloud based solutions, you get up, switch on your spare PC and continue working in 5 minutes. And if you do not have your spare PC, then repair/buy a new one and again, start working straight away.

I actually use cloud solutions only (except for my MS Office suit that I got with my PC) and I do not fear any hardware failure. If you want to know more, I would be glad to give you some examples.

Cheers

Arnaud

I’m pulling my hair out thinking a $900 WD Raid box may be the solutions because most of the data is digital content.

No David I don’t need all 250GB of data restored in one go. But 180GB of it is our family media. So I’m feeling the pain.

Cloud based backups wont work for that in Australia.

So your idea of multiple external hard drives is tempting with an off-site backup.

hmmm but how to backup the 2 laptops, 2 desktops, 2 ipods and 2 MP3 Players while synchronising our media.

I suspect I need a server AND a backup device.

Here in the Land of Fleecing Hapless Broadband customers, to that US$250/year you’ll also need to factor in the possible bandwidth cost you might incur. First you’ve got to upload your existing data to SugarSync. US$250 buys you 250Gb of cloud backup. At best, you’re going to hit your monthly data limit on day one and spend the rest of the month on a snail-pace shaped connection. But maybe you’ll get to find out what 245Gb of excess data costs the hard way.

How much additional data gets used by your incremental backups from then depends very much on the nature of the work you do but if you’re in visual design or media, you might easily be generating an additional 10Gb a month of data to be backed up to the cloud. Better upgrade from that $39.95/mth broadband plan to the $69.95 plan or you’ll get hit with extra charges or shaped every month.

And then, when your local computer dies and you need to restore from your most recent cloud backup, get out your credit card again. Now you’ve got to not just pay for the extra download data charges to download your entire backup and begin the restore, you’ve also got to wait. And wait. And wait. Because it makes good commercial sense for SugarSync (and, to be fair, its competitors) to control their operating costs by not over-investing in fat pipes to push the data back down to your new PC (which they pay data charges for too.)

If the RAID array in the corner has been working properly, your catastrophic computer failure might only interrupt your work for a day or less. If you’re downloading and then recovering from a cloud backup service, count on at least a day just to download the backup before you begin the restore.

Now imagine you’re in an office setting and you’ve lost three PCs, for which you’ve been paying SugarSync US$300 a year for a three user account. Not only is your team stopped dead until you’re able to suck those backups back down over your expensive, slow internet connection, but you’ll need to download something like 100GB of data before you can even begin the restore.

Here’s another alternative: Backblaze.com is a hybrid solution. The US based company allows you to download your backup for restoration, but if you choose they will instead FedEx you the backup on a set of DVDs, or on a USB drive. And when I asked them if they’d extend their free shipping offer to international customers, they said yes.