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Make Your Backup Plan Bulletproof

Brooks — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:44:19 +0000

We all know that we need to back up our computers, but for businesses it is arguably even more important.

Besides learning about the different types of backup, you want to put together a comprehensive plan.

Over at IT Business Edge, there is a great list of the top 8 ways that small and medium businesses can “bulletproof” their disaster recovery plans.

Chances are your company will have to deal some sort of crash, but a crash doesn’t need to include data loss. That’s why it is vital to have a solid recovery plan in place, and the time to do it is when everything is going smoothly. Then, when the inevitable happens, you might panic a little bit, but it won’t be devastating because the data will still be there for you.

It should be noted that the list was put together by the CEO of Code 42 software, which makes CrashPlan, but the list itself should apply to any online backup service. I especially like the “sync does not equal backup” section.

We’re about to head in to 2012 – do you have your backup and recovery plans sorted out?

(Photo by pcambraf)

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Online Backup – 12 Days of Paperless Gifts

Brooks — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:00:51 +0000

This is Day 8 in a 12 Day series: 12 Days Of Paperless Gifts. If you know someone who could use some help going paperless, or if you deserve to treat yourself, this is the place. If you don’t, feel free to ignore this series. Normal DocumentSnap posts will still be coming!

I think most of us know that having both local and offsite backup is a good thinng. Having your data offsite is (in my opinion) critical- what happens if you have theft, a fire, or a flood? If your external hard drive goes with it, there goes both your computer and your backup.

Online backup is a good option for having your files backed up to the cloud behind the scenes. Once you install it, you (theoretically) don’t need to worry about it.

Here are a few options for online backup:

Carbonite

Who is it for?: Mac and PC users who want unlimited online storage and an iOS App to be able to access their files remotely.
Where can I buy it?
Carbonite.com

Mozy

Who is it for?: Mac and PC users who want a monthly payment plan, don’t need unlimited online storage and the option to back up external hard drives.
Where can I buy it?
Mozy.com

Crashplan

Who is it for?: Mac, PC, and Linux users that want to be able to backup to their local computers and their friends’ computers for free, and online for an extra fee.
Where can I buy it?
Crashplan.com

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Video: Seed Your Initial CrashPlan Backup

Brooks — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:07:34 +0000

This video on Seeding CrashPlan Backups is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

If you are using CrashPlan to back up to a remote drive (either on your network or across the Internet), you can really speed up your initial backup by copying all the files to the drive while it is attached to your comput first.

This video shows you how to seed that initial backup, and then attach the seeded drive to the remote computer.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

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Adjust CrashPlan Backup Frequency

Brooks — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:44:26 +0000

This video on CrashPlan Backup Frequency is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

Online backup services are great because they run in the background and you don’t need to think about it.

However, sometimes you want to have some control over when and how often the backup runs. In this video, I run through the backup settings of CrashPlan, the service that I personally use.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

CrashPlan Goes Mobile

Brooks — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:11:58 +0000

I have been using CrashPlan for a few months, both as my online backup solution as well as an offsite backup at my friend’s house.

I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with it, but I have to admit that I’ve missed one feature: the ability to get at my backed up files from my mobile devices.

Let me be clear and say that I don’t necessarily feel that not having mobile access is a problem with an online backup provider. After all, the biggest priorities are:

Is my stuff backed up safely?
Can I restore my stuff reliably?

After that, anything else is gravy¹.

Having said that, when you need a file, you really need that file, and having mobile access is great when you need it.

With all that said, I was happy when in September, CrashPlan released their new mobile apps for iOS and Android. I finally have had a chance to play with the iOS ones. I assume the Android app is similar, but I don’t have personal experience with it.

CrashPlan For iPhone

When you fire it up and put in your CrashPlan username and password, you’re presented with a list of your computers that you have backed up to CrashPlan Central. One handy thing about this is that you can see on the go how long ago your backup(s) have completed.

You can also see the files that you have downloaded from your online backup to your device.

Once you select the computer’s files that you want to view, you navigate the file structure as if you were using Windows Explorer or Finder.

If you want to download a file, you tap it and it will download to your device. You’ll know it has downloaded because it has a green checkmark beside it.

For many common file types such as PDFs, images, movies, etc., you can view them right in the CrashPlan app.

If you wan tto actually do something with it or if it is a particularly large file, you can tap the “swoosh” and either email the file, or send it to another app.

CrashPlan For iPad

CrashPlan for iPad works more or less the same as the iPhone version. If you’ve ever used the Dropbox iPad app it will be familiar, as they have a very similar interface.

To navigate your files, it uses a little side window thing. Here’s an example:

Like the iPhone app, you can view different file types inside the CrashPlan app, or send them off to another one.

Using Private Encryption

If you use a private encryption key for extra security, unfortunately you can’t use the CrashPlan mobile apps at this time. If you read this forum thread, you can see that they are working on it, but time will tell when and how they end up doing it.

Do you use mobile apps with your online backup? I’m curious how you use it, and if it has ever saved your bacon². Please let us know in the comments how you use it.

I need to come up with a better term, since everyone in my family are either vegetarian or vegan now. ↩
There I go with the meat reference again. ↩

Video: How To Backup Your Computer

Brooks — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:51:46 +0000

This video on How To Backup Your Computer is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

I need to apologize to my ex-girlfriend because the same day that I made this video, she had a catastrophic drive failure and lost everything. Guess I should have made it earlier!

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

Shawn Blanc Evaluates Online Backup

Brooks — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:57:32 +0000

One thing I have always appreciated about Shawn Blanc‘s writing is that when he decides to write on a topic, he goes extremely in-depth. This has been especially true since he went full-time writing for his site.

Recently he did a deep-dive into the topic of online backup. It is a great read, and he makes an excellent case for having an automated off-site backup.

If there ever were a situation where grabbing the external drive on the way out the door wasn’t an option, or if it were destroyed by a tornado, or if it were stolen, then we would lose years worth of photos and music as well as access to much of our livelihood, including the documents and passwords related to our business, finances, etc.

If what’s on your computer is important and irreplaceable, you should have an off-site backup.

This is so true:

My philosophy for backing up has always been this: keep it simple, keep it safe.

A backup system that requires very much personal attention will never make it in the long run. And a backup drive that isn’t safe is only slightly better than no backup at all.

Shawn looks at Backblaze, Arq, and my current favorite, CrashPlan.

If you’re looking into online backup solutions for Mac users, Shawn’s article is definitely worth a read.

How I Do Offsite Backup To A Friend’s Computer Using CrashPlan

Brooks — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:00:37 +0000

By now you know that if you are going to be going paperless, backing up your documents is critically important. At the very least I recommend having a local backup on an external hard drive, but ideally you should have at least two backups: one local, and one offsite.

For offsite backup, using an online backup provider is becoming more and more popular, but what do you do if you don’t want your data stored on some company’s server somewhere?

I have a friend in that situation, so we decided to use one of the free features of CrashPlan: it allows you to do encrypted backups to a friend or family member’s computer.

Here’s what we did: I gave him a hard drive to plug in to his computer, he gave me a hard drive to plug into my computer, and then we set Crashplan to backup to each other’s house.

Why Not Just Carry Over A Hard Drive?

A common method of doing offsite backups is to save your stuff to an external hard drive, and then give that hard drive to someone trusted. Then do this on some sort of regular basis. If you ever experience a data loss, you just go get the drive and you are good to go.

The problem with this method for me is that any time something involves manual steps, I know I probably won’t do it consistently. I need things (especially backup) to be automated.

Isn’t CrashPlan Online Backup?

Yes, CrashPlan does have an online backup service called CrashPlan+ (which I do use), but the features I am talking about here are part of the free CrashPlan client software. You can back up to an external hard drive, another computer on your network, or even a friend or family member online.

Seed The Backup

Anyone who has done online backup will be familiar with our first challenge: backing up gigs and gigs of data can take an extremely long time. Neither of us felt like waiting weeks for this to be done, but fortunately we were able to seed the backup first.

What does seed mean? We did the backup first locally. I plugged my drive into my Macbook Pro, created a new backup destination for the drive, selected what I wanted to back up, and then let CrashPlan go to town. Since the drive was connected to my computer, it was very fast. He did the same on his computer.

Exchange the Drives

Once we had both done the local backup, it was time to exchange the drives. Farmhand Ale may or may not have been involved in this, and I think it is safe to say that we were the only ones in the pub that day exchanging hard drives while watching the Top 10 Crazy Hockey Moments Of All Time on TV.

Attach The Archive

Once I had his drive back home, I installed the CrashPlan client software on my Mac Mini and plugged in his drive.

I then fired up the CrashPlan client, logged in with my CrashPlan ID, and then went to Inbound and then Attach an Archive.

It then brought up a dialog box where I could navigate to his drive and the CrashPlan folder:

After that, it added his drive’s backup folder as an Inbound backup source to my CrashPlan, and automatically connected over the Intertubes to his CrashPlan client. After a few minutes, everything was all synchronized up and he could back up to his drive at my house going forward.

He did the same with my drive, and now I can see my drive at his house as a CrashPlan destination:

I Don’t Want My Friend Snooping Through My Stuff!

To be honest, I was really looking forward to poking through my friend’s bank and credit card statements. Unfortunately for me, CrashPlan encrypts everything before upload, which means when I go to look at his drive (and I have), I just see a bunch of nonsense. I can’t actually see his files.

Timing

The only downside to doing an automatic online backup to a friend or family’s computer is that the receiving computer needs to be on for this to work. For us that is not a problem because we both have Mac Minis hooked up to our TVs (all hail Plex), but if you don’t have an always-on computer situation, you can go into the CrashPlan settings and control which times you allow backups to be performed and received.

This is one way to do offsite backups to a friend’s place and it is working great for us so far. How about you? I’d love to hear the ways that you do offsite in the comments.

(Photo by heydrienne)

Dropbox Security And Going Paperless

Brooks — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:50:09 +0000

Three weeks ago, I wrote a tip in the DocumentSnap newsletter recommending that if you are going to be using cloud backup or syncing services, it is worth being aware of any security implications this might have and what your options are with respect to encryption.

It turns out that my timing was impeccable, because over the past week there has been a brouhaha about some changes that Dropbox made to their terms of services and the security implications this may have.

The Issue

Business Insider noted that Dropbox recently changed their terms of service to say that if the United States government requests it, they will comply with US law and decrypt a user’s files.

This is fairly standard stuff, and most (but not all, I am coming to that soon) cloud services have a similar provision in their TOS. After all, they do have to comply with their country’s laws.

The reason that many people are upset is because, as Miguel de Icaza noted, the wording in a previous Dropbox Help Center article gave the impression that no one at Dropbox had the ability to decrypt user files. Based on the new TOS changes, that clearly is not the case.

Dropbox’s Response

Dropbox quickly responded to the Business Insider piece and Miguel’s post (see the comment by Arash). They also wrote a blog post explaining the situation. I recommend that you give their post a read if you are a Dropbox user.

My Thoughts

Reactions to this seem to be split between the two extremes of “Dropbox lied to us!!! I can’t trust them with my data!!!” and “Duh, of course they can access my files on their own servers. You’re crazy if you think they couldn’t”.

Myself, I have previously worked in a SaaS environment with sensitive financial data, and I tend to lean towards the latter of the two views. It is fairly common from my experience that at least some operational employees have the ability to access data on the servers, which is where technical and policy limitations (with audits) come into play.

That doesn’t excuse their sloppy Help Center article (my guess: the writer of the article thought an engineer meant something that they didn’t), but it seems pretty unlikely to me that it was a deliberate intent to mislead by Dropbox. They’d have too much to lose.

Having said that, when you are going paperless, you by definition will have some sensitive documentation (think bank statements). If you have something that you absolutely positively do not want anyone to ever be able to see, you probably should not be putting it on the Internet.

Things You Can Do

Back in 2009 I wrote a post about SpiderOak’s zero knowledge approach to privacy. As that post and my newsletter article from a few weeks ago outlines, one option if you are concerned about security is to use a provider that encrypts your files before they are sent to to the server. SpiderOak and Wuala are two services that do this.

If your documents are encrypted before uploading, that means no one on the provider’s end can access them. This also means that if the government comes knocking, they can honestly say that they can’t access the files.

If you want to keep using Dropbox but want to make your documents more secure, Dropbox themselves have recommend using something like TrueCrypt to encrypt your documents. There are step-by-step instructions (with videos) for how to do this in the Paperless Document Organization Guide, but otherwise what you do is create the Truecrypt volume in your Dropbox folder, put your documents in that, and then Dropbox will sync it.

Your Thoughts?

What do you think about all this? Has this changed your opinion of using Dropbox? What do you do to keep your documents secure in the cloud?I’ve love to hear in the comments.

(Photo by CarbonNYC)

Happy World Backup Day 2011

Brooks — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:42:49 +0000

You may or may not know it, but today has been declared World Backup Day 2011.

Declared by who, you ask? A small group from the website Reddit, which is good enough for me.

On the World Backup Day site, they go through why you should backup and how to do it. It’s all really good advice, and if you have someone who you know should be backing up but isn’t, today is a good day to send the link to this site to them.

Not surprisingly, a number of online backup companies have taken up the cause and are offering contests today. At the time of writing, SpiderOak, BackBlaze, MiMedia, and CrashPlan are all offering special prizes.

You can also follow #WorldBackupDay on Twitter to see other tips and specials.

So, happy World Backup Day. When’s the last time you backed up your documents?