Backing up? who cares..

For the last two weeks i have be working on my final year project for uni. One of the clear messages that has come across is the unnecessary dangers of not backing work up. If I’m honest i have never bothered with backing up because the Windows backup utility takes around 2 years to perform a backup and I’ve been too lazy to look for alternative solutions however this time i have more to lose.

Where to start..

The first area I looked into was backing up my files. During my project I’m likely to be creating a number of Word documents and images so these will need to be backed up.

I first considered keeping all the files on a pen drive and then manually backing the pen drive every so often. This approach meant that I could take all my files with me if I were to go and work on the project at uni however if I lost the pen drive I would be screwed as I could guarantee that I would forget to backup regularly.

The second approach I considered was the geek-out method of creating some .BAT files that would make copies of the project files to a backup location. This approach however was risky because I rarely plug in an external drive and backing up the files on the same drive would be pointless if the whole drive failed, something which is likely to happen with how unstable the SSD hardrive I’m using is.

The third and final brainwave was to let someone else to the hard work by using some third party software to do all the backing up for me. This seam the safest approach as it does rely upon me to do anything however I would be putting faith in the software to do what its supposed to.

Enter MOZY. They are what you could call a cloud backup provider which offer software the runs on your computer and backs the files up in the background into their online storage. I have been using it for a few weeks now without issue.

The annoying MOZY status screen

The good points:

•  Simple to setup
•  Easy to select the files you want to backup, includes common file groups like emails or photos.
• generous level of free storage (2GB)
• Can select different versions of the file to backup, ideal if the document gets corrupted at some point and then backed up
• Can access backed up files from their software, website or app.

The bad points:

•  A screen pops up every time its finished backing up which seams pointless
•  Doesn’t allow you to backup any external hardrives or flash drives.
• Since i signed up with MOZY, every website i seam to visit is displaying ads for MOZY, Like I’m being stalked by them!

To backup files for the project i have selected MOZY. Later i will write a post on which method i used to backup the source code.