I have written several times about backing up (Tech Bits 1 and 39)). If you aren’t backing up your data and/or whole computer regularly, shame on you. You are a disaster waiting to happen.
Even if you are backing up regularly, make sure your backups are working. A good friend was surprised to find when her Mac notebook crashed the automatic backups on her Timeline system had mysteriously stopped a couple of months earlier—without any warning or notice!
She now backs up onto her Timeline, but also does a second backup into the cloud using a cloud backup service. I wrote about backing up to the cloud in Tech Bit 46.
Key advantages of cloud backup is you can do it from anywhere and it is off-site so if your office were to burn to the ground (or a tornado, or whatever) you will still have your files.
One caveat of cloud backup I warned about is whether your cloud storage provider is financially stable. Quite a few of the cloud backup companies have simply gone out of business, leaving their customers’ stranded (and often wondering what happened to their data).
At the Consumer Electronics Show two years ago I ran into a neat solution, so I requested a review unit. The company was a start-up and units were limited at the time. I forgot, they forgot, until this year’s CES. It turns out the wait was worth it because they had just introduced a new version and promptly got me a unit.
The PogoPlug is a small box the size of an external hard drive. In itself it doesn’t have any storage (that you can use). You supply your own external USB hard drive(s). The box contains a totally self contained, specialized computer that connects to the internet and provides storage services.
PogoPlug advertises 60 second setup, my experience is close. Given I put the unit and its hard drive in the basement near the cable modem’s router, was configuring it from a notebook computer in the family room (on the main floor) and had to go into my office to confirm an email sent when I registered the unit with PogoPlug, and had to go back downstairs when I realized the USB cable on my hard drive was defective, installation still took less than 15 minutes. I’m pretty sure that if everything was in one place I could get it done in less than 5 minutes. Installation consists of plugging in the PogoPlug unit, plugging a USB hard drive into the USB port, and plugging the PogoPlug unit’s Ethernet cable into your router.
After that you go to pogoplug.com and create an account. If you are connecting to pogoplug.com from the same network you’ve connected your PogoPlug into, the system is smart enough to find that unit and register it for you. If not, you’ll need to enter the PogoPlug’s unique address contained on a label on the bottom of the unit. Confirm your account by clicking on a link in an automatically generated email and you are all set. You can log into your PogoPlug from anywhere in the world via a web browser and start copying files.
The price is amazing! $129 gets your PogoPlug directly from pogoplug.com, there are several on-line retailers selling it too. My first external hard drive was 1 terabyte that I paid about $95 for. This past weekend I added a second 1.5 terabyte hard drive for $110. So for about $300 I have 2.5 terabytes of web accessible storage!
And I know exactly where my data is, it’s in my basement.
That data is secure. Access to pogoplug.com is via the encrypted https protocol, so if you are accessing your data via a public wifi network (like here at Starbucks where I’m writing this), no one can easily sniff your data. In fact pogoplug.com doesn’t even store your password. All pogoplug.com is used for is to let you find your PogoPlug unit (in the “old” days the whole issue of network address translation from routers connected to routers made connecting web devices a pain). And, if you are using web access, to provide you a nice web interface.
But I almost never use the web interface. PogoPlug has a small piece of software you can download and install on your computer that makes your PogoPlug look like a drive on your computer (appropriately identified as the “P:” drive). It operates pretty much like any mapped network drive under Windows, except it doesn’t care where you are. You can be at home, connected via a high speed wired or wireless network, or you can be sitting in your favorite coffee shop, or at a hotel anywhere in the world with Internet access. It really doesn’t matter, you can copy files to/from your PogoPlug “drive” just like it was part of your computer. Of course, if you are connecting through a hotel, which often have much slower connections, you will notice it takes longer to copy files. I wouldn’t recommend trying a 250 GB full system backup while on the road, but an incremental backup works fine. Since the PogoPlug looks like a computer hard disk you can use any backup program you want.
You are probably saying to yourself, “but Gregg, your files are still at risk if your house burns to the ground!” True, right now I don’t have true off-site storage. But I will soon. It turns out you can have more than one PogoPlug attached to your account. So when my second PogoPlug arrives, I plan on setting it up at home, a 5 minute process.
I’ll then use a feature in the latest version of the PogoPlug firmware and drive software called Active Copy. You set up Active Copy to keep a folder on your computer (or a PogoPlug drive) copied to a folder on your PogoPlug. Active Copy monitors that folder, copying any files that change to the second folder.
Once I’ve let Active Copy make a complete back up of my main PogoPlug drive (aka folder) onto the backup PogoPlug’s drive using the high speed network in the house, I’ll turn off my backup PogoPlug (with its attached hard disk) and take it over to my oldest son’s house. I’ll plug it into his router and power, and the PogoPlug universe will figure out where the drive is now living and do the backups over the Internet to a second location.
So for not much more than $500, I will have two complete backups of my important files (beyond the copies I have inside the network anyway). Either is accessible from anywhere in the world via the web or using the PogoPlug drive software on my computer.
I’m trying to think of any scenario short of full scale thermonuclear war that might cause both copies to be destroyed. But then I probably won’t care about my data anyway.
From the Department of Redundancy Department, whose motto is “save early, save often,” may you never lose any data. Or forget to take some file you really need with you (unless you have a PogoPlug, then you just copy it from anywhere).
