The PutPlace Blog

So you’ve decided to set up a digital storage plan? Congratulations! But, before you take your victory lap, review these 12 common backup mistakes and do your best to avoid them. Your data and your sanity will thank you.

1. Lack of Consistency: It’s important to have a number of places to store your data. Even more important? Being consistent in using them. Get into the habit of using the defaults that your operating system suggests (My Documents or Documents, Music, Video, and so forth) for your data.
2. If You Have to Remember, You’re Going to Forget: The human mind is an undependable backup system. Let your computer, or better yet, your backup software, do the heavy lifting here. An automated schedule frees up your mind for the more important things, like remembering to Twitter about your pancake breakfast.
3. Be Thorough: Microsoft Windows is particularly bad at dumping valuable stuff (like your mail file) under c:\Documents and Settings. Make sure you grab your user directory from this location as well.
4. Making a Copy of a Copy of Copy: Can’t remember the last time you backed up a directory? Don’t start down the slippery slope of copying over everything every time. Invest in reliable backup software to manage incremental backups and keep track of what needs to be backed up and what doesn’t.
5. Trust and Verify: Running backups is great. But like putting money in the bank, it’s always worthwhile to make regular withdrawals to see where your savings are at. Make a point of dipping into the backup once in a while to make sure the content is there and up-to-date.
6. I Don’t Need to Backup, I Use YouTube: Web services like Flickr and YouTube are great for keeping photos and videos stored online. However, what they’re keeping isn’t always exactly what you uploaded. For example, many people don’t realise that YouTube doesn’t retain your original video file. Flickr, on the other hand, does actually store the original size, even if you’re only using their free service. If you’re really attached to the original, be sure to save it somewhere else as well.
7. Don’t Forget Your Bookmarks: If you’re like us, you spend most of your day in your browser and live and die by the dozen bookmarks on your browser toolbar. Don’t forget to export these and back them up periodically.
8. No LOLs for Lost Chats: If you’re an avid IM user who saves their chat transcripts, be sure to include those in your backups. Skype automatically saves transcripts of chat conversations, and MSN Messenger does the same. Just grab these files, add them to your backup queue and you’ll always be ready to wow them at 4Chan with your IM pwnage.
9. Forget the Expiration Date: If you’re saving important business or personal documents (like financial statements, medical records, etc) don’t assume that you only need to keep them for seven years. Data retention laws are changing, and differ from country to country. To be safe, plan on keeping these documents forever. You might even consider creating a special subdirectory in your backup for long term storage items. Better yet, encrypt and password protect it.
10. Don’t Lose Your Encryption Key: If you do use heavy-duty encryption, make sure to store your key somewhere safe. Maybe print out a copy and send it to your lawyer or stick it in a safety deposit box. If you can’t find it and need to backup, it’s a major pain in the behind.
11. Save More than You Need: The costs for large portable hard drives and online storage have come down considerably in the past few years. Because of this, the need to pick and choose which data to save has essentially disappeared. Want a full terabyte storage unit for your videos, music and photos? No problem. You may never need it all, but it’s always better to have too much space than too little.
12. Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe: Finally, if you’re using a portable hard drive, be sure to keep it in a safe place. This probably doesn’t include your backpack or laptop bag. A safety deposit box isn’t always the best idea either, especially if you need emergency access after business hours. And be sure to pick an off-site location. There’s no point in having a prudently backed-up hard drive go up in flames because it’s sitting next to your PC during a house fire. Find a happy medium. We used to keep our backups in our Mom’s basement.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that, hey, we do this online backup thing pretty well. Sign up and get 2 GB of free storage.

Photo by So Misguided.

So we have been in public beta for a few weeks and I regularly get asked, What does PutPlace do?

We talk about three things in our tag line,

• Secure
• Organise
• Share

What I’d like to do is take you through some of the features around these areas in the next few blog posts.

This first one is about securing your content.

Now secure is pretty straightforward, we’ll take your files and put them somewhere safe. Safety for most people means "make me a copy and put it out of harms way".  Safety also touches on privacy (nobody else should be able to see these files) and access (except my family). 

But how do you know a copy is backed up, what about old versions, where are the other copies? PutPlace will backup every version of your file and because we track changes in realtime we backup in realtime as well. So each time you change that CV you get a new copy linked to the old copy on PutPlace.

lets see that in action. Here’s my CV directory, that I’ve added to PutPlace.

Now if  I edit the file CV Joe Drumgoole.doc  you will see it uploading.

Every time you save a copy of the file we will upload the changed file to the server.

Now you can go to the server see the file online.

See how all the revisions are stored. Nice. That will happen for every version of a file you create.

Things that we know we have to add,

• The ability to turn off versioning for a file and/or a directory
• The ability set a limit on the number of versions
• A way to look a the space overhead of the versions across a directory vs the cost of the latest revisions

We think this is a pretty good start to file security.

HP has launched an uncapped backup service called Upline. Its for Windows PC’s only and priced per PC. It uses the .NET Framework (so expect a bit of a download if your don’t have it installed) and presents a pretty slick interface.

Pricing is,

• Home (1 User), $4.99 a month
• Family (3 users), $6.99 a month
• Professional ( 3-100 users) $8.99 a month (per license)

Jonathan Schwartz (CEO at Sun) talks about the enormous disk requirements of the film industry in his latest blog entry. I love the quote at the end,

As I was told by Jeff (parroting a storage executive), there are only two types of disk drives in the industry. Drives that have failed, and drives that are about to fail

That comment goes double for consumer electronics (iPod failure anyone?).  With PC crashing all around us it makes even more sense to backup your PC.

Francis explains why…

TechCrunch reports on Mozy’s sale to EMC for 76m USD. Nice exit for Mozy, and as TechCrunch notes that was on an initial investment of 1.9m USD. You gotta love those multiples.

Unlike Carbonite, Mozy has focussed pretty much exclusively on the business market place and this is the obvious motive behind EMC’s acquisition.

We manned a stand at the Photovision Show yesterday as our first official marketing outing. We were interested in finding out few things at the show,

• Was there an appetite for an online storage solution in the professional photography market (answer : yes!)
• What do photographers currently use for storage (answer : external drives)
• Do they backup ? (answer: some do, some don’t)
• How much data do they have (sizes ranged from 5GB up to 1TB or more, with several people in the over 1TB category)

I was amazed to discover that no person who visted our stand was currently using an online solution.