One of my best friends had her computer stolen last month, and, with it, her dissertation. My reaction to this was visceral, but, though I vowed to back up my writing, I didn’t do anything about it.
Then, last week, my iBook choked; but for its miraculous resurrection at hands of Josh down at the local Genius Bar the last 30 pages I had written would have evaporated. This finally lit a fire under me.
Here’s what I’ve discovered about online backup systems:
NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue’s January ‘07 review recommends two free options: Xdrive (5GB free) and MediaMax (25GB).
My entire dissertation—my prospectus, all my drafts, high-resolution images of several paintings, dozens of PDFs—occupies only 0.14GB. Although this includes only two chapters, I doubt Rushdie and Joyce will tip the scales.
- Both Xdrive and MediaMax have user-friendly applications that will can schedule automatic backups.
- Xdrive is owned by AOL and so, theoretically, is likely to be around in 10 years.
- Although all 25GB of uploads are free, MediaMax limits free downloads to 1GB/month; if you end up needing to restore more than 1GB of your files you’ll probably want to pay MediaMax for their $5 premium service for a month.
However, neither Xdrive nor MediaMax are Mac-compatible, so I settled on JungleDisk ($20 after a 30-day trial; Windows- and Linux-compatible). JungleDisk is a small application that gives consumers access to Amazon’s professional-grade Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 is not free, but its prices are wholesale—we’re talking dimes and nickels: unless you’re Harold Bloom you can upload all the writing you’ve done in your life for $0.30 and store it thereafter for $0.15/month.
If I wrote on a Windows machine I’d use Xdrive, but I’m not complaining: I want to have the choice to delete nearly every word I’ve written; I don’t want my aging iBook or some random burglar to make my editing decisions for me.
Update 4/28/08—Amazon’s storage service lowered its prices substantially last week, so now even if you have written as much as Harold Bloom you can probably store everything for less than the cost of a blank CD.
I have also availed myself of the 50GB of free storage at ADrive—not to be confused with Xdrive—though at the moment of this writing, their site seems to be down, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. In any case, I was at least able to use the ADrive uploader easily and painlessly; the Xdrive Lite uploader, commented upon below, seemed a bit of a mess.
This is my nightmare! I’m paranoid. So paranoid that in addition to my regular backup disk of all documents, I have a copy of my dissertation uploaded to the space UW gives us, a copy on my desktop, a copy on my laptop, and I have a flash drive devoted solely to different versions of my dissertation and other dissertation related materials. Then there are the documents I email to myself. Yes, I am paranoid.
Plus, I have hard copies of final drafts stowed in my cubicle in the library and at the union office, along with copies burned on to CDs. I was thinking of leaving copies with various friends around town in return for storing theirs.
One of my committee members has a great story (well, no, it’s a horrible story) of her apartment burning down and her thesis being saved only because she had stored it in the freezer of her refrigerator. Of course, being crazy, as she is, she never explained this to me in a linear way, but just jumped me in the halls one day and shouted, “Your chapter, your CHAPTER!”
Then she pulled me by the sides of my face close to her own: “Put it in the FREEZER. The. FREEZER. Mark my words.”
Heh. Yeah, she’s batshit crazy, but she’s great.
Hi Mike – Just an FYI…
In late February, the Xdrive team launched a new lightweight application, Xdrive Desktop Lite, built upon the Adobe AIR platform that *is* Mac compatible. The automatic backup functionality isn’t present in this initial version, but it’s on the roadmap for our next release.
If you want to take it for a spin, you can find the installer at http://www.xdrive.com/downloads/
Cheers,
The Xdrive Product Team
Oh yeah, I almost forgot about all of the hard copies I have floating around. And I’ve heard of people storing files in the refrigerator/freezer, too. I also know of a professor on our campus who stored his research in various bank vaults in the city.
Tag, you’re it!
I’m amazed you got a response out of XDrive. I never did and I had the upgrade with them.
Mediamax is shutting down and getting merged into another company as of the 25th.
I hadn’t heard about this hullaballoo: thanks for the heads-up! Here are Dr. Wendell’s further thoughts on the subject.
I should add that after Xdrive’s post here I tried Desktop Lite and couldn’t persuade it to upload nested directories—if I tried to copy over my Dissertation folder, it would freeze, unable to upload the Chapter 1 folder (say). Not only is DL not automated, it will only allow you to drag-and-drop individual files.
Still, it’s 5 gigs of free space and it can’t hurt to have as many backups as possible.