Inventions Wanted 006 – The Data Bank

I’ve worked with computers for decades and backing up has always been a hassle – both at work and at home.  I used to have a tape system for home but it became impractical years ago when hard drive space far outpaced the expense of tape drive technology.  In recent times I’ve been using external USB drives, but they’re not backup paradise either.

Unless your backups are frequently taken off site there is always the problem of your house burning down, blown away by tornados, submerged in a flood, or invaded by thieves.  In the early days of personal computers valuable home data was limited to word processing files, spreadsheets and financial records.  Most of that stuff could be saved to floppies.  Now I need 63 gigabytes of space to preserve my digital valuables.

Since our parents died, my wife and I have became the librarians of family photos.  We have boxes and boxes of photos that we’re scanning to digital files.  I’ve also converted dozens of old cassette and CD audio books to MP3 files.  And I converted LPs and CDs to MP3s.  Now I have an every growing expanse of valuable binary data.

The weight of all these digital files is becoming a burden.  Last year I bought Second Copy and two USB 250gb drives.  I made a copy of my files to one drive and took it to work.  I then connected the other drive and let Second Copy replicate my hard drive activity to it in real time.  My plan was to switch drives every week so I’d always have a fresh backup off site.  I never developed the discipline to follow this plan more than a few switch outs.

So this week I subscribed to Mozy.com, an online backup service for $55 a year.  My plan was to create a Mozy backup and then restore it to a drive at work to test it out.  When I purchased Mozy I knew it was going to be slow but I had no idea how slow.  The first backup I set up with 63gb of data was predicted to take 5 weeks.  I have the third fastest DSL from AT&T.  High speed internet access is built around downloading speeds not uploading speeds which are a fraction of downloading speeds.

I called AT&T and asked about getting their fastest DSL service but they told me it wasn’t available in my neighborhood.  I even considered switching to Comcast high speed cable internet but I’m living with slow uploads for the time being.

The next thing I did was stop the current backup and cut it down to 7 gigabytes of essentials.  I was able to upload this data set in a couple of days.  At work today I ran the restore to test things out.  Mozy.com offers different ways to restore your data.  The fast way for large backups is to have them burn DVDs and express mail them to you, but this costs extra.  I used the free web restore method.  You log into Mozy, request a restore and wait for them to email you when the files are ready for downloading.  It took about an hour to be notified.

Mozy makes one or more compressed .exe files for you to download.  I assume they divide your backup into the same DVD size chunks as they do for when they actually burn DVDs.  I got two 3gb files that I downloaded in less than an hour.  Download speeds were 1.1 – 2.2 megabits per second at work. 

I discovered that my backup had no .mp3 files in it.  I then read Mozy’s manual and discovered you can configure your backups with all kinds of filters.  The basic data set of My Documents files were set up to filter out .mp3 files because I had unchecked the Music backup set.  But I was expecting to get my audio books, which are also in .mp3 format.

In other words you will have to play around with the settings to get exactly what you want.  If you don’t have much to backup I’d just backup everything at once.  Mozy is light on documentation so I’m guessing at some of their methods.  I emailed Mozy several times and got answers, but for other things I just speculated about how to do things.  It’s easy to use, but you have to second guess them at times.

One problem with online backups is how and when to copy files.  My Second Copy program patiently waits and every ten minutes copies any newly created files to the USB drive.  That’s great as long as I don’t mind an ever growing backup because it never deletes files on the backup drive.  That’s great if you want to fetch a file you’ve accidentally deleted last week, but bad because your backup contains all those files you thought were deleted.   

Mozy works by creating backup sets.  Each set is a snapshot of the moment.  If you make a backup with Mozy one week, clean up your hard drive and reorganize your files and make another backup the next week and that backup will reflect your new system.  That doesn’t work with my USB system.  Working with the Second Copy method I’d have to wipe the folder on my USB drive and start Second Copy running fresh.

What I would like is an online backup that copies files as I make them but waits one week after I’ve deleted a file on my hard drive and then delete it off the online backup.  In other words I want backing up to be totally automatic and without backup sets.  Mozy doesn’t work that way, but the way it works is best for the technology we now have.

All this begs me to put on my wishing cap and imagine a perfect service.  What I would like is a Data Bank that protects my digital wealth the same way a normal Bank protects my money.  I want to feel totally confident that my data is always protected, maybe even with government regulations.  I’ve read horror stories about online backup companies going out of business.  Online backups is a fantastic concept.  It would be nice to know that Mozy or companies like it replicate their stores to multiple cities and I’m 99.999999999 percent sure I’ll be able to restore my files in case of a catastrophe. 

I’d also like my Data Bank to work with a standardize filing structure so I can easily find my files.  Mozy copies Windows My Documents’ structure and appears to use Vista’s new structure with my Vista machine.  Mozy is starting to support Macs and I hope they follow on with Linux.  It’s a shame that all the OSes don’t use a similar filing structure so people could learn data organizing principles.  I think it’s great that Microsoft started segregating music and photo files.  I wish the OS could tell the difference between music and audio books.

Because we can’t trust online backup companies yet, its important that you restore you files to a computer not in your house.  I did mine at work, but if that’s not possible you might want to find some backup buddies to trust.  It would be wonderful, that in the future, Data Banks do become a reality and they are guaranteed 100% trustworthy.

What I also want from the dream invention is perfect access from any computer I’m working on.  Just as I can log into my money bank from my work machine I want to be able to log into my Data Bank and have easy access to my home files.  For instance, as I rip my CD collection I’d like to copy it to my work computer to play songs there.  Or if I start a project at home on the weekend I’d like to get it out of the Data Bank on Monday.  Mozy isn’t set up like that.

I’d love to log into my Data Bank and see two folders at the root level:

/data

/library

Data would be where I go for any files I created and Library would be media files like music, photos, audio books, video, ebooks, Acrobat files, etc.  It would be very cool if the Data Bank worked like a network drive and I could just play my media files from that location.  However, I don’t know if that’s practical.  If a Data Bank had six hundred thousand customers could they handle such a load?  Maybe in the far future where everyone has fiber optics and gigabit bandwidth.  But for the near future I think causal access for backing up and retrieving should be practical now. 

Even that is beyond Mozy at the moment.  Mozy is designed to backup your files and then in an emergency restore them.  I think I’m pushing their system when I plan to backup my home system and then restore it on my work computer a couple times a year.  Since Mozy could go out of business I don’t trust them yet to hold my files without having them on a second computer.  I’m mainly using Mozy to eliminate messing with the USB drives.  That’s another source of saving electricity for those wanting greener computing, but I’m also getting tired of hearing my USB drive grind away.  Mozy should make my life simpler, and that’s good.  It will take a year or so of living with Mozy to really decide how they do.

Jim