Now that I have this blog, I thought I'd post some legwork I've done trying to figure out a mindlessly simple way to backup my hard drive at home. Mindless because I have kids, and simple because I have kids.

I solved the problem before (back in the day) by rolling my own application that copied off new and updated files from one location to another (usually another computer), but that, of course, requires both computers to be on when the backups are scheduled. It's also written in an obscure out-of-date programming environment called VB4 -- or maybe it was 3, I don't remember. AND, it assumes that whatever disaster might befall me and my data be pretty localized -- only one hard drive or one computer. And whenever I come back home from a vacation, I'm convinced that I'm going to drive up and find that my house had been transformed into a pile of ashes while I was away. So there must be a better way.

I considered signing up for a terabyte web host and just uploading everything, but that would require writing a lot of code (security and otherwise) especially if I wanted it to behave nicely with respect to my CPU and 'net bandwidth. So I dropped that idea. But there are backup solutions like Areca, Cobain, and Amanda that have done all the hard work for me. And I could even partner with a friend and swap disk space for backups using one of these tools. But that requires learning a new tool, configuring it, etc -- and it also requires both computers to be on and connected whenever one of them wanted to backup. Too much trouble.

So I turned to online backup services, partly because one was recommended by a presenter at TechEd this year. At first I was a little nervous about storing all my data on some server somewhere, but I'm getting over that. Besides, I'm not sure I have any files that would be of any real value to anyone other than me and my family -- among them over 60,000 photos at last count. Wow.

So here's where I am:

Mozy. Mozy at $5/month uses 448-bit blowfish block cipher before the files hit the wire. It's an EMC company (30B mkt cap), but looks like it limits its upload speed to 133k/second for the "home" edition. So the first backup can take days (weeks?), but after that it's block-level incremental, which is usually super-fast.

Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain, at $10/month, uses Rijndael block cipher (AES) before it hits the wire. It's public at about 5.5B mkt cap, and I guess it started in a big iron mountain. I don't know about its upload restrictions, but it also uses block level incremental backups after the first "big one."

Carbonite. At a little over $4 a month, Carbonite is the least expensive, and it's the one that was enthusiastically recommended by a speaker at TechEd. It's a private company funded with $27M VC, but I figure if I subscribe and it goes out of business, I haven't really lost anything unless the house happens to vaporize at the same time. It uses a combination of blowfish and 3DES before the bits hit the wire. Again, block level incremental is used after the initial backup. There's no upload throttling. Carbonite also versions files, so if you save over a document and you need a previous version back, you can recover a version going back 90 days. But perhaps most importantly, carbonite the stuff Han Solo was frozen in when The Empire struck back.

Why isn't Google in this business? Hmm.... maybe they'll buy Carbonite...

All of their agreements seem like pretty much the same legal gobbledygook: "We're not responsible for anything, even if we are responsible for it."  I wasn't overly alarmed by them.

So once I convince myself that 99942 Apophis isn't going to make this all a moot point, I'm probably going to sign up for Carbonite.