There was a black cloud over the Internet this week with the announcement that T-Mobile users who synced their phones online with Microsoft’s Danger have probably lost all their data after the server crashed. So what’s the problem? Sidekick handsets need to be linked to the Sidekick servers in order to keep data synchronized. When those servers go down, so does the link. That wouldn’t have been a problem if Microsoft had backed-up the data and restored Sidekick servers back to their pre-crash state. Guess who didn’t have a back-up in place!
Now, for someone like me who is an avid cloud advocate it opens up a stack of emails from people who say that they kept telling me the cloud wasn’t safe but from Day One I have always chanted the following mantra:
“If you rely solely on the cloud service and do not have supplementary backup system in place you are an idiot.”
So let me explain how I use the cloud and safeguard my data.
First, Gmail. Like millions of people I rely on Gmail to provide me with a ISP (Internet Service Provider) free email system. Over the years I have lost count of the number of email addresses I have had as I have swapped ISPs. This has proved a nightmare where software username and password data has been linked to my then email address!
Gdocbackup, an essential part of my backup system
With Gmail with IMAP and POP I am in email heaven but I would not presume to rely on Google to keep my email data safe. Every day – running in the background – is Thunderbird – the desktop email client sibling to Firefox which every minute polls my Gmail and Web2 and More email servers and downloads all mail to my hard drive. Being IMAP based it doesn’t matter if I work on my emails from Thunderbird on my desktop or the web based Gmail client on a netbook while I am having lunch in a pub, everything is kept perfectly in sync. Simple but effective.
All my writing, spreadsheets etc are mostly done in Google Docs but even with these I do not trust Google to treat my data well so I use a really neat free facility called Gdocbackup which downloads all my Google Docs stuff into a directory of my chosing – and here’s the twist. I subscribe to Dropbox and I have turned my My Documents section into a Dropbox folder so that all the regular My Documents folders are sub folders of Dropbox. As soon as anything saves itself to my Dropbox folder it uploads itself to the Dropbox server on the net. Photographs are also up[loaded manually on a regular basis to the Picasa web server.
I decided to subscribe to the Dropbox 50bg service not because I will use all that space but it provides a restore facility that is not available in the free 2gb service. This costs me around £6 a month ($10), that’s roughly two pints of beer for peace of mind. I call that value for money.
But I take it all a further step – you can call my anally retentive if you want – because key folders within my desktop Dropbox system are backed up to Mozy every day. At the moment I am still within the free 2gb limit as I have increased my available space through referrals but if I ever needed to purchase more space I wouldn’t hesitate to do so.
Data on my mobile phone is manually backed up every two days or so to – yup, you’ve guessed it – a sub folder within Dropbox which then gets uploaded to Mozy. Oh, and every now and again when I can remember I drag the whole desktop Dropbox folder to an external hard drive.
So almost every aspect of my data is secured on at least two or three different locations in the cloud and all for the princely sum of £6 a month. Using the methods I have explained there is no reason for anyone to (a) not have faith in the cloud and (b) keep their data perfectly safe.
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