3-Level Backup Strategy-Why you should care!

The Digital Age. No other age has served to simplify our lives only to actually complicate it more with the little nuances, that if not noticed, can wreak havoc on your psyche and make you spend weeks, maybe months wishing you had done one simple thing....backup!

Photos, resumes, email, music, the family Christmas letter, scanned PDFs of really important documents like a will..you name it, it is likely on your hard drive and all these little bits of 1s and 0s add up together. For most people, if they were to reveal their hard drives publicly I am guessing you could get a pretty good picture of who they are, what they do and what hobbies they enjoy. Take all that away and you will have just created your first real-life zombie as the poor soul will sit and drool not knowing how to cope without being plugged into the data.

So.......Backup!!!! (a.k.a. Zombie control). My mantra (and the mantra of many other professionals I follow on Twitter) is: "if it does not exist in three places, it is not real".

How do you go about achieving this in a simple way? In my experience a good backup plan is not always an easy thing to do or schedule, and trying to keep track of it all can be daunting at best. You need an array of tools to help you do this and while it can sometimes be a technical challenge, it is always worth it. The dentist tells you to only brush the teeth you want to keep, so only backup the files that you want to keep as well; there are no "false teeth" for missing Word documents!

Some of the tools you might need to accomplish this are:

• a good and reliable and easy to use backup program (I use Cobian Backup and CrashPlan but there are many others)
• an external hard drive like a Western Digital MyBook (or a Drobo if you got money!)
• an off-site backup solution or service
• patience
• and did I mention patience yet?

Are you wondering why off-site backup is important? If you back up all your files to two external hard drives but those drives are sitting at home next to your computer, you essentially are gambling that nothing catastrophic will happen to your home. A flood or a fire can render all your technology useless, leaving you with no data at all to work with. Off-site storage can be accomplished several ways, one of them being an online backup service. Most off-site backup services such as Mozy or Backblaze have a minor cost associated with them. In addition, the initial backup can be painfully slow as you will be trying to get a large amount of data uploaded to their servers over your home internet connection. The nice thing about these services is that they tend to be set and forget, you set it up once and the program does the rest. I choose however to do a more manual off-site strategy because of cost and also because of speed (and I am paranoid). This way may not be better but it does work for my situation.

The off-site solution I use is the BlacX device which allows you to plug in a SATA hard drive into it and mount on your PC like an external USB hard drive. Since I have some 1TB SATA drives laying around this was an easy win for me. I simply move a 1TB back and forth to work so as to create my own "off-site" backup. Of course this would fail if both my house and my work burned down at the same time.....but then I think I have bigger problems to think about.

One more thing: organization is really important with backing up your files. It is a very good idea to have a folder strategy in place when creating a backup solution. If you manage your folders and files well, you never have to worry about your backup programs not picking up newly created folders or files in the future. Ideally, you only want to backup your important data. You could backup your entire hard drive to catch everything you ever do on your computer but that is an awful waste of space and will take a considerable amount of time for each backup. By creating one folder where you will store ALL your documents (like 'My Documents' for example which is already created for you) and making organized sub-folders within, you will be much farther along than if you saved files willy-nilly anywhere on the hard drive; an unorganized strategy adds another layer of complexity to the backup solution that is not needed.

Below is my 3-level backup strategy for my laptop and my home PC. 3-level means that there are always 3 copies of my files somewhere. It is not perfect and is somewhat of a technical challenge, but my strategy is mostly free and works very well for me:

Enviornment:

• Both computers have two backup programs installed: Cobian Backup and CrashPlan
• At work I have a 2TB external drive (Western Digital) and a BlackX device for a traveling 1TB SATA hard drive
• For home, I have another BlackX device for the aforementioned traveling 1TB hard drive and an external 1.5TB hard Drive (Western Digital)
• The first copy of all my files is what resides on each computer. These are the files that will be copied and backed up but they are the master files.

Level 1

• The Home computer is set to backup to the WD External 1.5 TB drive every Friday night using Cobian backup via the scheduler.
• My work laptop has Cobian as well but I do not auto schedule it because laptops are not always on and I do not always want the backup running at the same time. So I have a task that reminds me to backup my laptop to my external 2TB drive at work every Friday at noon.
• I now have one copy of all my important files for each computer.

Level 2

• The home computer also has a manual task to use Cobian to backup files to the BlackX drive using the 1TB SATA hard drive. I manage this task with a reminder. This is my off-site backup solution as I bring the hard drive back and forth to work. When it is done with the backup up the home computer, I bring it back to work and my home data is safe from disaster.
• The laptop uses CrashPlan at home with my home PC acting as the central repository. Whenever I am connected to my wireless network, the laptop begins an automatic CrashPlan backup using the WD External 1.5 drive that is connected to the home PC. This serves as my off-site storage for my laptop in case I lose the laptop or work burns down.
• I now have 2 copies of my important files on 2 different storage devices.

Level 3

• The Home computer also uses CrashPlan since it is the central repository for all CrashPlan backups. These are completely automatic and use heavy encryption and all backups go to the WD External Drive connected to it.
• I also backup the laptop to the traveling 1 TB drive via the BlackX at work and mange this backup with a task reminder
• I now have 3 copies of my important files on 2 different storage devices.

Easy...right? I am not done, not yet. So I backed up all this data in 3 places. WOOT! Great for me! Now I have to TEST IT!

Testing your backup is really the most important part because a real life failure is a really BAD time to find out that your 3-level backup strategy was only saving blank folders and was not getting all your data; you may as well have been brushing your teeth with your finger! There are a multitude of ways to test your backup and I will not go into them here. It is probably safe to say that if you got the point where you are backing up your files, you can figure out how to test your backup.

This post has been mostly PC centric since that is the platform that I work with every day and so I know it well. There are other, just as good if not better solutions for the Mac, Time Machine being one of them. I also did not get into incremental backups versus full backups because that is another topic of its own.

So, keep your teeth, keep your files. Brush, floss and and backup! 4 out 5 dentists recommend it for their patients that have teeth and files!

Going Barefoot - The war against shoes

I once heard that some people run barefoot. Hard as this was for me to believe, I started to dig into the topic and became slightly interested in how this was achieved without serious injury. Most of this started when I bought my first pair of Vibram Five Fingers at a trade show while in Duluth, MN running Grandma's Marathon. I had heard good things about these crazy looking shoes and how they can help you prevent injury (I have had IT band issues in the past). Everything I have been told was that you need to transition into them. I love them for the freedom they provide me but I wanted to learn more about how to run in them! I did not know what I was getting into and how much fun it would be! A simple curiosity has now turned into a passion as I have been doing a lot of research on barefoot running, Chi-Running, Pose Running and simple forefoot strike technique.

Now I am almost to a point where I detest shoes and want to go barefoot (or wear a minimalist shoe) everywhere I go. While I realize that is highly impractical (and will keep me out of most retail stores) I still feel that most shoes are basically coffins for my feet.

I will try to explain:

You were not born with shoes on. Your feet were not designed for shoes! Look at your baby pictures and count how many times you had shoes on. Babies, by the way, HATE shoes! They always try to take them off and I would guess it is because they know better. Your feet were naturally designed to utilize muscles that would help you with balance and speed. But somewhere down the line we decided that we needed better arch support and protection and so we stuffed our feet away in the dark recesses of shoes.

You might remember that as a kid, you spent a lot of time without shoes; running barefoot in the grass or even in the driveway or the road did not really hurt that much unless you stepped on a nail or a sharp rock. As you got older, you were conditioned to believe that roads were not safe for bare feet, neither was grass anymore. And social norms state that your boss prefers you wear shoes to the business meeting. Now as a much smarter and wiser adult, when you go and get the mail barefoot because you cannot find your shoes, every little step results in a moment of searing pain because you have over-sensitized your feet by locking them forever in expensive and fashionable Nike coffins......shame on you!!!

When it comes to me and my feet.....I say......BE FREE!!!!!!!!!

But the social norm is against this. So, how to improvise? And how to run this way without turning your feet into hamburger? There are many ways to accomplish this but my research has shown that you need to take it slow and in baby steps; which is ironic since as a baby, this all came naturally too you anyway!

But here is what I am attempting to do:

• Learn as much as I can about different techniques for barefoot running
• Try to go barefoot as much as can around the house, yard and in my cubicle (I try not to wear shoes at work while in my cube, my co-workers seem OK with it)
• Transition into my Vibram Five fingers when running. This requires very short distances at first and then you progress as time goes on.
• Concentrate on form when running. Focus on a fore-foot landing rather than a heel strike (along with proper posture)
• Go slower at first even though I want to go fast, speed will come naturally as the new muscles build up.
• Save up for some Black Vibram Five Finger KSOs that can be worn in public without drawing too much attention
• Have fun!

So far I have increased my speed somewhat and my endurance. I expect better things in the future and less injuries along the way. There is a lot more I could say on this topic, but click on the links I provided at the beginning of this post for more information and well explained theories about running barefoot and proper running form. It all makes a lot of sense.

and.....

Wake up your feet!

My design..yes...my design!

So, as I get back into maintaining this blog, I have decided that I am going to give it a bit of a personal touch. This is one reason that I switched from Tumblr to Blogger as Blogger allowed me some freedom to do what I wanted with it without a lot of coding hassle (I simply do not have time to code).

One way for me to 'personalize' this blog is to make the background image a picture that I took. Not some stock photographer that is monetizing on his or her skill (but good for them) but a picture that I spent some time thinking about and creating. I have many of these type of pictures in my arsenal and will likely change the background and look of the blog monthly.

This month's background is one of my wife's favorite pictures. I called it 'Mossy sunlight' and I took it in an abandoned old farm house in Wisconsin during a men's retreat at Camp Wapogasset.

enjoy....

Stagnant

I hate having this blog stagnant. I have been way too busy to post anything lately. Baseball, running marathons, and a four year old daughter who only stops if she hits a wall have been keeping me in a sort of writer’s funk.

I do have a post in the works regarding my 3-tier backup strategy (by request) and hopefully soon I will have more info about Mission : Photographable! My new Photo Tips blog for the camera newbies.

Anyway, sorry for the pond scum of late. As I get more active with the blog, the stink should go away!