Suggestion # 1 for backing up your data on a remote server

Okay, so you have selected a vendor to provide you with online backup. I have picked SOS Online Backup. If you picked someone else, that does not affect my suggestions.

You have in mind exactly what you want to backup. It might be a long list of folders, or it might be something as simple as "MY DOCUMENTS", which of course contains many other folders.

I suggest you start small. Simply pick one rather small folder and its contents to be backed up and then go ahead and run your first backup. The reason I suggest starting small is to familiarize yourself with the software and how it works. Watch it work, displaying as much information as your vendor will allow. In fact, watch it from start to finish. See how it works and try to understand it. When it is finished save the information that has been presented to you by the backup program. You can use this as a check to make sure everything worked okay.

Once finished, take a look at the vendor's server where your data has been backed up. Open up your data folder on the server and review its contents. If you have to, manually count the items that were backed up and then compare this to the folder on your system that you just backed up.

Do you have a match? Contents of the folder on your machine match exactly the contents of the folder on the server? They should be the same.

If you find this explanation to be too complicated, please call me and I will step you through it. It is very important that you get off on the right foot.

Backing up your data at a remote site

I have one machine in my house that is the central repository for all of my important personal data. Here I am talking primarily about MY PICTURES, MY MOVIES, and MY MUSIC.

These three folders account for roughly 75 GB of data. Additionally I have about 25 GB in other personal data. Included in this extra 25 GB are all of the files I have determined to be important enough to keep down through all of my years working and playing in data processing.

I have written in this blog about my Western Digital 1 TB MyBook external hard drive. For the past several years this (and before it several smaller drives) external drive has been my primary backup.

The MyBook drive is still running. Two things: I have found that 1 TB isn't all that much when used to backup data from several home computers, including mine, and TWO, it is bound to fail sometime AND it is LOCAL.

I have long recognized the need I have, and maybe you have the same need, to maintain a backup of my data on a REMOTE system.

I wish I could have had the luxury of testing the major remote backup offerings like SOS Online Backup, Carbonite, and Mozy. But being one person with my small commercial venture, I did not. I instead attended a Webinar sponsored by SOS Online Backup, and some time later came to an agreement with SOS's management that enabled me to use their product with terms and conditions acceptable to me.

So here I am at the end of 2011 telling you that I am an SOS Online Backup user, and I am satisfied that I have all 75 GB of my most valuable data backed up somewhere in The Cloud.

If it is not intuitively obvious to you why I wanted to have a remote backup site, it is because my primary data and all of its backup was right inside my house, and if anything happened to my house, I would lose all of that data.

I have learned a lot about remote backup, and I will be happy to share my experiences and make recommendations to you over the next month or so. You shouldn't go into this blind and you should not rely solely on the management of the backup company to take full responsibility for your data. You need to be involved and take that responsibility.

I believe I wrote some time ago about the owner of a small company which had all of its financial data stored offsite. When their local computer failed and they had to restore their data, they found out that the data they needed was not there at the remote site! They had to manually enter a full year's worth of data into their financial systems in order to restore their books. You mustn't let this happen to you and this is where I will be making some recommendations, so please stand by.

In the meantime, I have to say I have no experience with Carbonite or Mozy or any other backup service except SOS Online Backup. They now hold my precious 75 GB of data that I do not want to lose, and I feel good about SOS and I feel my data is safe and that they will continue to backup any additional data as I add it to my system.

A little extra insurance

A little extra insurance, especially when it's free, can't hurt IMHO. I just downloaded 9 Windows XP updates from the Tuesday Microsoft update. One of these was MSRT (the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool).  If you do nothing but install it, a quick scan will be run on your behalf and this will be done stealthily, so you'll not be impacted, and that's good.

But, I recommend you take the bull by the horns and run a full scan under your own control. It'll run a long time, but what the heck, once a month won't hurt. And although it runs like the wind, it won't impact your system performance much.

To run it, click on START, then RUN, then key in MRT (note: no 'S') and click on OK. When the MSRT program starts, select FULL SCAN and let it run. If any problems are found, you will see the results.