What's your offsite backup plan?

You do have a plan for backing up your data, right? You've heard the saying "it's not a matter of 'if' your computer crashes but 'when'." Personally, I use Chronosync to automatically backup my iMac to my Time Capsule. I hope you do something similar.

But what's your offsite backup plan? I had a friend email me last weekend. Someone broke into his house and stole his laptop and the external harddrive he used for data backup. He lost everything. He had no files left from seminary. So what's your offsite backup plan? From time to time I burn my data to a DVD and sent it to my father's house. If thieves steal my stuff or a fire burns my house down, I'll at least have my most critical data available to me.

If you've got a good idea for an offsite backup plan, leave it in the comments.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

James,
I am thinking about utilizing dropbox for this. I love that little program. Its works pretty flawlessly. Furthermore, its accessible from my other computers and on the web.

James Garriss said...

One potential problem - you only get 2GB with Dropbox. My data backup needs are much higher than that. I think there's a pay version of Dropbox, so maybe that gives you more space.

Anonymous said...

yes- the pay version gives you 50 gbs for $10/month.

Reese said...

I send DVDs to my parents as well, but it's not frequent enough. I know a guy at works that uses Mozy (http://mozy.com/) and he really likes it. Unlimited backup for $4.95/mo.

James Garriss said...

Online backups make a lot a sense. They are always there, available from anywhere, and definitely off-site. On the other hand, there's a certain risk with putting your data out on the net. Data theft is all too common, even from the best of companies; you have to be willing to have your data exposed for anyone to exploit. Still, that's probably a pretty small risk overall.