Backups should be way easier than they are.
First of all, I'm not a fan of backing up to CD. I might be more of a fan if I had a decently fast CD burner. But I don't. Even if I did, I have more content to back up than would comfortably fit on a CD. Or a DVD, even. But, even if that wasn't an issue, I'm not keen on the concept of keeping the backup onsite. Not after seeing the recent natural distasters. And, uh, I sort of live in one of those nifty earthquake zones, so this isn't a totally idle concern. (We'll ignore, for now, the thought that an earthquake bad enough to destroy my backups would like, well, destroy me, too.)
So, internet based backups seem to be a good solution. Services like .Mac don't come with quite enough storage space. Not, at least, when I'm trying to back up non-replaceable songs downloaded from Apple's iTunes store (a gripe for another day). I tried Xdrive, which offers online storage space and backup utility. The backup utility never seemed to work quite right, and it (and the website) seemed to make my computer fairly unstable (crashed it a number of times). So, scratch that off the list.
Along comes Strongspace. The price is decent, and, more importantly, it has a really, really slick web interface. This puppy (built on Ruby on Rails with a healty dose of AJAX, for those who care) makes it easy to navigate the files, and with nary a crash in site (I'm still not really sure how Xdrive's web interface managed to bring down my box...and I don't care to investigate further). Strongspace isn't a backup service, rather, they just provide secure access to storage space.
Anyway, I got a Strongspace account, and proceed to set up rsync on my machine (thanks to these helpful instructions). I then whipped up a quick script, set up a scheduled task, and everything was set.
Well, it would have been set if, you know, stuff actually worked right. Most of the directories I tried to back up worked fine. But a couple totally and completely choaked. After dealing with some really cryptic rsync error messages, I tried a bunch of things (renaming files with ampersands in the file names, etc). Still no luck. Google hasn't been terribly useful here either. So, now my nifty little system backs up most of my files.
(By the way, if anyone is an rsync guru and wants to help, drop me a line.)
A month or two ago I looked around for an app that would make this easy. I found a couple, but could never get things working with those either. I get the impression that this would Just Work on a Mac. Rsync would probably be much happier there, and the Apple-supplied Backup utility might even do the trick (not sure if it can backup to a third-party disk or not).
But, it shouldn't be this hard. Backing up to remote storage should be easy enough so my parents can do it. Data security seems really, really important, and it should be easy enough to do it without an IT department. At the very least, a time-challenged geek like myself should be able to set this up fairly quickly. (Seriously, I don't want to spend my time on this sort of junk; I have better things to do.)
Posted by Karl
October 30, 2005 07:22 PM