Do you have a backup strategy for your computer, or, at least, for the files that really matter to you?

If I think for a moment about what it would mean to me to lose the papers I’ve written, the research I’ve accumulated, the photographs I’ve taken, the software I’ve bought and downloaded with no backup CD, and the personal or financial information I store on my computer … I can’t even imagine what it would be like to try and get that all back. And the worst thing about it would be the feeling of a whole lot of creative energy getting flushed down the drain, irreversible and unrecoverable.

Up until about two years ago, my backup strategy was to copy files that I cared about between my desktop and my laptop, using a software package called Laplink. I stopped using Laplink when Microsoft released SyncToy — a very decent (and cheap (as in FREE)) software utility that does a great job of synchronizing files between two drives, accurately recognizing changes on both drives and taking them into account.

This strategy worked well until I cranked up my photography hobby again, after buying my first DSLR. It didn’t take long before the pictures I was storing on my desktop were too big to synchronize to the laptop (which is about five years old and had a small hard drive to begin with). About eight months ago, I added a 500 gigabyte external drive to my desktop, planning to use it as a backup drive. As soon as I realized how fast the drive was, however, I decided to offload all the photos from the desktop’s hard drive (which was running low on space too) and work with them directly from the external drive. But that left me with no backup strategy for the photos, so I bought a second external drive of the same size, to use as a backup. I’ve been using SyncToy for about eighteen months to "mirror" all of my photographs, as well as my Word documents and other creations (along with MP3s and software I’ve purchased) to this second drive.

But of course this strategy has a big flaw: The backup drive is physically located right near the computer, so anything that damaged the computer might damage the drive also. At least when I was backing up to the laptop (over a wireless network), the two computers were located in different rooms in my house, mitigating, to some extent, the chance for physical damage affecting both machines. I have looked at online backup utilities off and on for several years, and tried and rejected all of them as dissatisfying to me for one reason or another.

Then yesterday I read this article by Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests:

BackBlaze: Why Do You Make It So Hard To Like You?

And also read some of the additional coverage here:

Backblaze’s One-Click Online Backup Opens To The Public

Backblaze is a recent entry into the online storage market, offering unlimited online backup space for $5.00 a month. I set up an account this morning and, as I write this, the easily-installed backup software is running in the background. It automatically selected about 50 gigabytes of data to back up; I reduced that to about 30 gigabytes by excluding the second external drive (which is a backup anyway) using the software’s configuration screens. The software tells me it will take about 10 days to complete the first full backup … which seems like a long time, I know, but keep in mind that upload speeds for DSL or cable connections are only a fraction of download speeds. (If you didn’t know this and want to see what I mean, your ISP may display that information on a modem or network configuration screen, or Backblaze provides a speed test you can use here: Bandwidth Speed Test to Backblaze).

Tony didn’t like Backblaze for one main reason: you can only specify folders to exclude from the backup, not folders to include. The CEO of Backblaze — Gleb Budman — responded in the comments on Tony’s article that they found that users didn’t want the include option, because they didn’t know what to include. I’m not surprised by that; working in IT, I see how often people seem to lose files and folders — and by "lose" I mean they just can’t figure out where they put them, mainly because (in my opinion) the save options in most Windows programs are so inconsistent that it’s easy to save something to an unexpected location and not even realize it.

I would, however, like to see Backblaze allow me to exclude multiple folders at a time. That is, it would be nice to be presented a list where I can checkbox a slew of folders at once. As it stands right now, Backblaze is going to back up dozens of folders that I wouldn’t think twice of excluding from a backup, because I wouldn’t use them to restore and wouldn’t need them if I had to replace my computer. As a comparison, Backblaze has selected about 10 gigabytes more data to backup than I currently backup myself. The ability to easily exclude multiple folders from the backup would be a nice compromise between Tony’s view of the software and Gleb Budman’s. It’s certainly not preventing me from using the product, of course; it just means that Backblaze is taking about a third longer for my initial backup than I would consider necessary.

One thing about Backblaze that I really like is that it does backup the contents of connected USB drives (not all online backup companies offer this capability), which is important to me since my photographs are housed on external drives only and will no longer fit on either of my desktop’s hard drive partitions. Earlier I was wondering how Backblaze would handle the external drive, and if it would just run continuously for hours, but I learned — from a response I got to a technical support question I sent to Backblaze support earlier today (fast response for a Sunday afternoon!) — that the software makes a copy of each file on the C: drive, then transmits it, then deletes the copy — which would give the USB drive the frequent rest periods it probably needs.

Backblaze doesn’t function as a network drive to your computer, and doesn’t claim to — so if that’s what you need, you’ll have to look elsewhere. It’s also not a drive image, in that you couldn’t boot from a Backblaze restore. But we’re talking being able to recover your creative work here, not building computers.

If you need to restore something, there’s a web interface to your account that shows your files in the same folder arrangement they were in on your local drives, where you can select files to restore and create a zip file to download. You can also purchase a DVD or USB drive containing the files you need to restore, but — since the DVD is $99 and the USB drive is $189 (I’m guessing you get to keep the drive) — you wouldn’t use those options if all you wanted was a lost file or two. I tried the download-zip option, and it worked fine.

Overall, I like what I see so far, quite a lot. And I like that it was easy to install, didn’t require two hours of technical diddling to get it running, and is just doing it’s job without bothering me. (I think there might be a few user-interface tweaks in order, but I’ll hold on those observations until I’ve spent more time with the software and the web site.) I’m definitely impressed that it’s been running in the background all this time — while I’ve been writing this post, tabbing around the net with Firefox, checking e-mail, and playing a few tunes — and it has still managed to safely tuck away about 400 decent-sized files, in synch with the 4 gigabyte per day upload volume that the speed test utility predicted, and without interrupting me or slowing me down one bit. If you’ve been thinking about putting together your backup strategy, then Backblaze is definitely worth a look.

More later; I’m sure I’ll keep an eye on this and let you know how it goes. Maybe we’ll have a party when the initial backup finishes….

Thanks for reading!

If you follow my delicious bookmarks at all, you will have noticed that I’ve developed a bit of a macabre fascination with articles about the events that have come to be known as America’s Current Financial Crisis. Here’s the full list of those that I’ve considered significant for one reason or another over the past few days. They’re in no order, at this point, as I’m in a bit of an “information gathering” phase, reading through all these articles repeatedly to try and tease out the unifying threads.

I’ve quoted what I thought was a critical or key point in each article, though I change my mind as all this churns around in my head. As a teaser, you might pay particular attention to the articles from Open Secrets — that is, The Center for Responsive Politics — which will figure prominently in what I have to say. Open Secrets provides a look at the intersection of economics and politics that, as far as I know, is unlike any you’ll find anywhere else on the web.

• Bloomberg.com: Worldwide - “The market storm that brought down Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., American International Group Inc. and other pillars of U.S. finance may have also blown holes in the portfolios of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator John Kerry and more than 50 other members of Congress…. Altogether, 56 senators and representatives had stakes in AIG, Lehman, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns Cos. or IndyMac Bancorp Inc. — some of the biggest casualties of the market bloodbath — according to the Center for Responsive Politics….”
• Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Free Market Detour - NYTimes.com - “Is the United States no longer the global beacon of unfettered, free-market capitalism? In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to American International Group, the troubled insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, but it has also probably undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad…. ‘I fear the government has passed the point of no return,’ said Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian. ‘We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in it’s wildest dreams.’”
• Organic Market - Forbes.com - “The consensus is that Something Must Be Done to rein in financial markets. This consensus is part of a general theme among some pundits and economists that it’s time to give up the naïve faith that markets can solve every problem. We are told that markets have failed…. Yet much of the current chaos is the result of attempts to steer or control markets rather than let them be. Much of the chaos is the result of political failure.”
• Free Market To The Rescue - Forbes.com - “Although market ideas are today taking something of a beating, nothing like the 1930s fervor for central planning is in the air. For this reason alone, I am optimistic that we are not on the verge of a second Great Depression….. But in this optimistic account there’s a warning. If our confidence in free markets does come to be overwhelmed by a renewed, if utterly baseless, confidence in the central direction of the economy, then our economic prospects will once again truly be in a great depression.”
• Optimism Quickly Fading - “To ban short-selling of stocks is to short-circuit an important mechanism through which people share their knowledge and expectations with others. Banning a mechanism that better allows share prices to reflect the expectation that the underlying assets are not worth as much as current market prices suggest does nothing to change the underlying reality. Such a ban merely distorts knowledge of this reality.”
• SEC bans short-selling - Yahoo! News - “The Securities and Exchange Commission took the dramatic step early Friday of temporarily banning the routine practice of betting against company stocks…. The move, announced on the agency’s Web site, may well be unprecedented and a reflection of regulators’ concern about the widening scope of the financial crisis as entreaties come from all quarters to stem a swarm of short-selling.”
• Vast Bailout by U.S. Proposed in Bid to Stem Financial Crisis - NYTimes.com - “The head of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve began discussions on Thursday with Congressional leaders on what could become the biggest bailout in United States history….”
• Regulating away improvement - “The bailouts are getting bigger. The rescue of US mortgage giants Freddie-Mac and Fannie-Mae is hailed as the largest bailout in history. On our side of the Atlantic we saw the similar, but smaller, rescue of Northern Rock. All of these have common features. The companies concerned were nationalized, and their losses are now underwritten by taxpayers. Between them their rescues have engendered a culture of bailout,which says that the public has to be protected at all costs from the consequences of failure. It is almost as if there has been a collective loss of faith in capitalism and in its ability to take failures in its stride.”
• The Austrian Economists: Who Can Fix This? - “Government is NOT a corrective. More often than not, it is the source (as in this case) of our economic difficulties. No bailouts, eliminate regulations, certainly no nationalizations, no priming of the pump with easy money, just allow firms to be weeded out that made imprudent decisions, allow capital to be reallocated, and permit prices to adjust to the new market realities.”
• Economic View - Too Few Regulations? No, Just Ineffective Ones - NYTimes.com - “There is a misconception that President Bush’s years in office have been characterized by a hands-off approach to regulation. In large part, this myth stems from the rhetoric of the president and his appointees, who have emphasized the costly burdens that regulation places on business…. But the reality has been very different: continuing heavy regulation, with a growing loss of accountability and effectiveness. That’s dysfunctional governance, not laissez-faire…. In the meantime, if you hear a call for more regulation, without a clear explanation of why regulation failed in the past, beware. The odds are that we’ll get additional regulation but with even less accountability and even less focus on solving our very real economic problems.”
• OpenSecrets | Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Bailed Out After Buying In - Capital Eye - “As economists and analysts try to sort out how giant mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ended up needing to be bailed out by the federal government this past weekend, here at CRP we can see part of the picture of why that solution won out over others. Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are prolific political players, pouring millions of dollars into campaign contributions and lobbying, efforts that have resulted in keeping the two companies afloat as more Americans have defaulted on their mortgages.”
• Commentary: How to prevent the next Wall Street crisis - CNN.com - The author writes about several causes of the current U.S. financial crisis, concluding with: “The coup d’grace was the Iraq War, which contributed to soaring oil prices. Money that used to be spent on American goods now got diverted abroad. The Fed took seriously its responsibility to keep the economy going…. It did this by replacing the tech bubble with a new bubble, a housing bubble. Household savings plummeted to zero, to the lowest level since the Great Depression. It managed to sustain the economy, but the way it did it was shortsighted: America was living on borrowed money and borrowed time.”
• How Paulson Would Save Fannie Mae - WSJ.com - “Recent statements by Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), a powerful member of the Senate Banking Committee, make clear that Congress will never let them be privatized, broken up, slimmed down, nationalized or any of the other options hopeful reformers are putting forth today. Fannie and Freddie in their current form are just what Congress wants: an inexhaustible source of campaign contributions and funds for favored groups.”
• OpenSecrets | Wall Street Shake-up Connects to Washington Through Contributions, Personal Investments - Capital Eye - “Wall Street’s grim news has plenty of people worried about their pocketbooks. Lawmakers are among them, not only concerned with how to boost the economy but with their own personal finances tied to companies that are struggling. The richest members of Congress seem to be the most invested in the companies at the center of the Wall Street shake-up…. Of all of the companies facing major transitions, lawmakers owned the most stock in American International Group (AIG), the nation’s largest insurer, which has asked the Federal Reserve for emergency funding as it faces financial hardships. Twenty-seven lawmakers owned stock in AIG last year, worth between $6.4 million and $20 million…..”

I’ll have more on all this shortly, with a longish-post (more like a small book) where I try to make some sense out of what I’ve read in these articles. Until then, as a thought for today, listen to the lyrics of this 1986 performance of “Is This the World We Created,” by Freddie Mercury and Queen.

• Is this the world we created?
  We made it on or own.
  Is this the world we devastated
  Right to the bone.
  If there’s a god up in the sky
  Looking down
  What must he think of what we’ve done
  To all that he created….

I have to admit that even after reading several articles about it, I still don’t understand enough about the Large Hadron Collider to write an intelligent-sounding post. Physics, chemistry, astronomy — and anything that smacks of having even a distant relationship to math or calculus — don’t get past the internal censors in my head. I have enormous respect for people who do understand this stuff … I’m in awe of them, really … and this colossal experiment apparently has significance to these sciences that will be felt for many, many years.

So, here are a few related articles and sites that I came across yesterday:

From Computerworld:

Collider test called a ‘great milestone of mankind’ - "Today’s successful test run of a massive particle collider is being called ‘one of the great engineering milestones of mankind.’ On Wednesday morning, just outside of Geneva, scientists shot a particle beam fully around a 17-mile loop in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Twenty years after development of the collider began, a particle beam made the full journey around the accelerator for the first time. It’s a forebear to the time when scientists will accelerate two particle beams toward each other at 99.9% of the speed of light…."

Linked from Popular Science, here’s an amazing set of virtual reality photographs:

Peter McCready VR Photography of the Large Hadron Collider

The photos in the gallery may take a little while to load, but once loaded you can mouse in all directions and see left, right, up, down, forward, backward, and zoom in and out.

Also from Popular Science:

It’s Christmas for Physicists! - "If you somehow managed to avoid seeing the comic, listening to the rap or reading anything in the all out media blitz, then let me be the first to tell you that earlier today the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most power particle accelerator, began operation. Scientists hope that the experiments conducted in the $9 billion dollar accelerator will help them discover the mysterious Higgs boson. The Higgs boson, colloquially referred to as the ‘God particle,’ is the hypothetical particle that imbues matter with mass, and finding it (or not finding it) will have profound implications on the world of physics…."

And from the Boston Globe’s consistently excellent photography blog, The Big Picture, a series of images of the collider inside and out, here:

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready.