Sep 04 2008
Backing Up My Backup
My friends have all left Bangkok and I spent the day doing annoying things like laundry, attempting to get a Myanmar visa, and heading to a massive shopping centre dedicated to electronics to buy a second portable hard drive.
Yesterday I was scare-mongered into doing something about the fact that all of my photos (about 100 gigs) from the past five years of my life are on one portable hard drive and nowhere else. If something were to happen to that hard drive I would be kicking myself into next week and my friends pointed this important fact out to me.
So I finally decided that backing up my backup was essential for my peace of mind and took a cab to this huge, impressive shopping centre for computer and other electronic goodies. The place is six or seven floors of chaos but has everything you could ever hope for as far as computer goods go.
I wandered around for a while before seeing the same model, a Seagate Free Agent, that I currently have. I figured sticking with a drive that hasn’t let me down is a smart move and picked up a 250 gig model for 3600 bath which is about $104 USD by today’s exchange rate. I think I paid about 80 quid a couple years ago for a 160 gig model so I can’t really complain about that price.
So now I’ve got some more annoying things on my plate for my last 24 hours in Bangkok. I’m about to back up all of my files to the second hard drive, tickets to Chang Mai need to be booked, Myanmar visas need to be collected and then tomorrow I’m off to the post office to send the smaller drive home to Canada for safe keeping. It’ll certainly be a relief knowing that my old photos are safe and sound and I’m looking forward to filling up another 100 gigs worth of new stuff.
I’ll be hopping a bus to Chang Mai tomorrow night to catch up with my friends again and have another week of fun before I will have to get down to some serious work. My August earnings update will hopefully be coming tomorrow and things should be getting back on track around here pretty soon. Who knew the whole work/travel thing would be so tricky?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
I've been travelling since January 2008 living off earnings from the web. Follow me as I bum around Asia and beyond, getting up to mischief and working online as I go. 
What about buying a Flickr PRO account for $25/yr for UNLIMITED storage and then spend the next few weeks backing up a few gigs a night. Then at least you have an offsite backup.
Just a thought. You can set them all to private.
Enjoy your blog. Thanks!
DM
@DM, have you ever tried to upload 100 gigs via a public internet connection in Asia? I wouldn’t hold my breath and wait for it to finish anytime soon. Assuming you have a 512KBit/s upload link all for yourself this would take about 450 hours.
I agree with DM, I use flickr to store all my photos (and video). They store original quality and there are no limits with the professional account. If you have time to tag pictures it’s much easier to search through them than it is on a hard drive. It’s also a great way to share your journey with the world and meet people through interest groups related to your photos.
I also have a backup for my stuff that doesn’t travel with me; I pass through Ireland every few months and copy everything on to my dad’s Terrabyte external drive; that way I’m safe against theft / damage that is much more likely to happen to my copy as I’m on the road! Everything on my PC was wiped from a virus last year (I swiftly abandoned Windows forever after that), but at least a backup from a few months before could be sent to me and even pictures from that week survived on my flickr
For a longer term strategy, backing up your hard drive online would make sense - what if your bags go missing on your next fllght? :knocks on wood:
We’re currently grappling with the same issue here and are looking at finding a secure server for online backup somewhere. Of course, that initial terabyte upload is going to be scary
Don thanks for the suggestion. I’ve looked into online backups before but got overwhelmed with the choices and didn’t ever get a good recommendation so gave up. I have a Flickr account but don’t really like Flickr… I hate the interface for people who are browsing the photos… but it might be worth a closer look. I have more things to backup than photos but I can keep the other stuff on my computer hard drive and also the portable one so at least then I have two spots for my site stuff. My worry was that the hard drive as of yesterday had been the only place my photos are living. I didn’t realise you could upload them without losing the quality.
Lea can you suggest anywhere to do this?
We’re looking at amazon aws. Doesn’t cost too much and has a good rep.
Its a http based service, rather than rsync (which is a pain for us, but probably suits you?)
There are a few add on services around that give a nice GUI on top.
I got there from this article:
http://eirikso.com/2008/08/13/my-current-backup-strategy/
It is unlikely all your bags would go missing so definitly worth backing up on a portable hard disk.
I have two backups, one 300GB external hard drive with everything on my laptop and one small 4GB stick that is on me nearly all the time.
try mozy - $5/m for unlimited versioned backup, runs in the background, and you can restore via the web or DVD (in the worst-case situation of a total HD failure).
Its a bit low tech -but it works for me- I just get DVD’s cut regularly - 2 copies - one mailed home, one I keep in my partners backpack - never lost one yet!
I just had my laptop and harddrive die on me in the same month. So I am desperately trying to recover what I can from both. Other than flickr, are there other websites where I can keep them at original size? I hate that Snapfish shrinks them to websize.