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Backup Your Data — Especially if You Play in the Cloud

I guess we’re close enough to New Year’s that this could still be a resolution, instead of just a preachy reminder. Except you should really do this — backup your data regularly.

Reminding people to backup the data that they care about is like when my dad tells me to check my car’s lights and tire pressure. It’s always “yeah, Dad, uh-huh, okay,” and then invariably, I finally get around to checking and find out I should have done it months ago.

The old, old truism is that there two kinds of people — people who have suffered data losses, and people who will suffer data losses.

You’re hopefully already backing up your critical business data (note: that’s not what they mean when they say “keeping two sets of books”), but what about your other stuff?

This goes double for data that you upload to a service (free or otherwise) on the Web — the so-called cloud.

Cloud computing is great — it gives you access to a whole bunch of powerful new capabilities, and you don’t really have to do anything complicated like host, configure, or maintain your own infrastructure, or any of that stuff — just register (for free, even) and start plugging your content in.

(For most users, every Web service is, and always has been, part of the cloud. You put up your stuff, it goes somewhere, and you can get it back from somewhere else.)

The thing about the cloud, though, is that you’re already placing a huge amount of trust in the providers. If they get hacked, suffer a catastrophe, or go belly-up, you’re at the mercy of their backup and disaster recovery plans. So hedge your bets — always back up your own data, and especially the data that you put online.

Here are two recent reminders:

* As reported by Techcrunch and others, blog provider Journalspace cratered, taking all of its users’ six years of data down with it. The loss was total and unrecoverable, though users are trying to cadge bits and pieces of their content from caches and whatnot around the Web.

* AOL (where I used to work) has been in the process of shutting down a bunch of its community products, for the most part giving six or so weeks of notice for users to migrate or archive their content.

1. Read your terms of service. For the most part, companies that provide free services reserve the right to pack up their toys and go home at any time. Any transition or migration time they provide is simply a courtesy, so don’t depend on it.

2. Backup the data that you put online: Photos, blog entries, shared bookmarks or contact lists… anything that you’d miss if it disappeared off the Web. Save the data to your local, physical machine, then backup your computer on a regular basis.

Doing this doesn’t have to be onerous — for example, when I write a blog entry, I’ll typically save my working drafts on a document on my local machine, or maybe online on Google Docs. After I’m done, it’ll serve as an archive.

(To some extent, your online data can be a backup of your local data, but this is mostly an accident of timing, not a backup strategy. Also, while one Web service can serve as the backup for another, if you want full control, save your data to media that you own and have full access to.)

I’m not going to get into the complete best practices for backing up data (there’s tons of literature out there), other than to say that the D: partition of the C: partition of your hard drive does not count as a backup. Separate media, preferably stored in a separate location, is the way to go. Oh, and test your backups — remember, Murphy’s Law is always in effect.

The content that you share online in an investment of your time. Protect your investment and keep proper backups.

Lastly, while we’re on resolutions, you should floss more, eat right, and get more exercise.

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