My hard disk is dying. A few days ago my computer had an unpleasent encounter with the wall. Running chkdsk revealed a few bad sectors, and it’s been getting worse ever since. Today it started skipping when I play music with iTunes. New hard disk is on the way, just hope this one will hold to Thursday.
If all else fails, there’s always backup.
I’m religious about my backup routine. Losing a computer means losing days of work as you have to recreate everything you did in the days since the last backup. So I backup every single day. Stuff that doesn’t change often, like music and pictures, gets backed to DVD every so often. But e-mails, documents, calendar, etc get backed up every single morning.
For a while I used [iBackup](http://www.ibackup.com). $14/month for 4GB of storage. Besides the price/space ratio, iBackup’s selling point seem to be the software they offer for free. There’s a tool for managing backups profiles and schedules, another for remote disk access to their server, a Web-based interface, and a few other goodies.
I think their software is their weakest point. It’s just … really really bad. I’ve been wanting to switch just because I hated using their software, until I discovered [SyncBack](http://www.syncback.com/). Right now I’m using the free version, it has all the options I care for, and the best log viewer ever … Firefox. I’m thinking of upgrading to the commercial version for the faster FTP engine, except …
I use [TextDrive](http://www.textdrive.com) as my host of choice, I love how this company gets hosting and gets customer service. The other day I noticed a link to [Strongspace](http://www.strongspace.com/), a company they started to do online storage. $8/GB is cheaper than iBackup, no contracts means I can try it out, so I took the bait.
Logon. Strongspace has a sweet, sweet UI. If you’ve used Basecamp or Backpackit, you know what I mean. Simple, elegant, useable. Great use of AJAX.
Tooling. Oops. Strongspace uses SFTP, SyncBack uses FTPS. No SyncBack. And manually copying files is not an option if I want to keep the daily backup regime.
Blog. Strongspace [has a blog](http://www.strongspace.com/weblog), and a damn good one. Because right there, second post from the top there’s [a tutorial on how to use rsync with Windows](http://www.antidis.com/articles/2005/08/windows-rsync/). Hmm … rsync. Sounds interesting. Few hours later …
Turns out cwRsync 2.0.2/3 is buggy and hangs on XP. I spent a while figuring it out, but the fix is easy. Just downgrade to 2.0.1, it works like a charm.
Scripts. Rsync is all about scripting. This is where most people switch back to iBackup. Too bad, because five minutes later I get a backup script that’s better than my SyncBack backup profiles.
Somehow, writing command lines is easier than using the UI to pick and choose directories, so I end up with more precise profiles that backup more stuff I need, and none of the stuff I don’t care for (like cache and temp). And I don’t have to space the schedules throughout the night, I can just run them all back to back. Even several times a day (at least until the hard disk gets replaced).
There’s only one backup log, because I wrote the script that way. Less clutter. And it seems to run way faster.
Moral of the story … if you can stomach simple batch scripting, or find an rsync UI, here’s one switch that will get you more and cost you less.
link: http://www.strongspace.com/