Your home/computer should maybe have a terabyte of local cache, but the remaining petabytes of your accumulated life work and memories should be managed by the Data Office, that’s what you’ll be paying them for! (Historical note: For obscure legal reasons, when Google took over maintenance of the Library of Congress, they had to adopt the commercially neutral name of the “United States Data Office”.)

Remember, too, you won’t need your “own” copies of the Star Wars movies and all that iTunes crap you “downloaded” back in the 200x’s.

Should run about $10 a month for typical users.

Cases of actual data loss will be extremely, extremely, extremely rare, and often settled out of court for around $1 to $10 million. Small consolation for your tragic loss, at that. (Still, one can predict the occasional settlement in the billions.)

Me? Today? 2005? Yup, stack of shiny firewire drives right next the computer. No iPod, though.

Nothing could have prepared me for what actually happened to my drive: my girlfriend’s nephew found it and tossed it out of a third story window.

Three years of my career, gone in about 6 seconds.

Yes, backup is hard, it’s a pain in the ass, and it often seems like no matter what you do the data will find a way to destroy itself, if just to spite you.

For remote, distributed, encrypted (buzzwords!) backups, try allmydata. Windows only, for now.

I don’t think that my parents would be happy about receiving a DVD every week (assuming that everything I wanted to back up could fit on one DVD). At the end of a year, they’d have at least 52! Some could be thrown away after a while, but then I’d be forcing my parents to organize and search through the DVD’s.

My strategy is to burn an encrypted disk image of my home folder to DVD a few times a week and store half of the backups at the office. It’s possible that a tornado could destroy both my home and my office yet leave me alive. That scenario is pretty darn improbable, though, and it’s the most probable of the worst-case scenarios. I’m willing to take that risk.

I would welcome better software with big wet kisses, but reliable offsite backups seem more a function of much faster bandwidth than any other factor (especially as long as “broadband” remains asymmetrical). When that changes, backups will change, just as quickly as SOHO users like myself were glad to stop buying tape drives.

Even blessed with speedy pipes, I strongly suspect affordable, invisible RAID on desktop machines would rescue more from the bit bucket than the availability of cheap offsite network-based backup tools and infrastructure, despite the continuing risks of theft and local catastrophe. I’m not crazy about SuperDuper because I’m in that 1% who demands incremental backups, but the transparency of ubiquitous RAID would still be a giant leap forward.

In the meantime, it’s perhaps a touch flamboyant to brand as useless a system that “only” protects you from the plurality or majority form of data loss, all risks considered. When a Katrina comes, I expect the little league photos will be among the least of my concerns.

When thinking about backups you should prioritize your data. Don’t backup the entire system because off-site backups become prohibitive in terms of storage and bandwidth cost. Besides, you can re-install your OS in half an hour. Why would you choose to back it up instead? It doesn’t make financial sense unless the cost of that downtime justifies.

Anything that I absolutely cannot afford to lose is backed up off-site nightly using Apple’s Backup tool. It’s easy and cost effective if you do not have that much data to backup. I backup my entire Documents directory (which contains all of my writing projects, personal documents and my Subversion repository for source code) as well as my development projects (to capture things that have not been committed to svn yet) and preferences.

It’s not that hard if you think about the problem logically. Are your MP3s really that important if your house burns down? No, because they are 99% likely to be replaceable by insurance money. Only the truly irreplaceable stuff (photos, dev and writing projects, etc.) should be shuffled off-site and for most people that should be a relatively small chunk of data.

TR