I’ve had a rough couple of weeks with my computer — at times I’ve felt as though I’m back in the 90’s when computers just crashed on a regular predictable basis for all sorts of nonsensical reasons. The focus of this post is on various cloud backup solutions, and how well they worked for me throughout my most recent computer mishap. For anyone reading who doesn’t use cloud backup, I’d seriously consider it if you have content you don’t ever want to lose.
My recent problem all started with an upgrade to Windows 8. I paid the $40 to try out the new OS, and the install went fairly smoothly. I won’t spend a lot of time reviewing Windows 8, but I will say that most of what I’ve read out there hits the mark. It takes some getting used to, it isn’t completely intuitive at first, and the lack of integration between the desktop environment and the new app launch environment is a bit awkward at first. But it’s fast, clean, and I generally liked it.
The one problem I had was that my external display adapter that connects a second monitor via USB wasn’t working. I read about potential solutions, and a common answer was to uninstall and reinstall my graphics driver. This seemed harmless enough, so I gave it a shot. After uninstalling, I restarted my computer, and when Windows booted up I saw lots of weird flashing on my screen and then got a display error message. My system proceeded to immediately turn off. When I started it again, I got a message saying “Operating system not found.” I went into the BIOS, and found that my C: was in a critical state and was corrupt (I forget the exact language). After trying a few things with no hint of luck, I decided it made sense to just do a clean OS install of Windows 7 (I had the disks).
This was the first real test of my cloud backup arrangement. Over the past year, I’ve combined a few different cloud storage options to back up pretty much all of my digital content. But I’d never tested my comprehensive solution.
Here’s what I use and how each solution worked for me:
Dropbox: I keep a few gigs of documents that are either shared, or that I want to access remotely (e.g., on my phone) in my Dropbox account. The service works great and is free, but I decided against upgrading to a paid subscription to use it as a comprehensive backup solution since all files need to be in a single designated folder. It was easy to get Dropbox to resync all of my files back to their original location after my Windows reinstall. If you don’t have a Dropbox account, I definitely recommend getting one — you can sign up here for free.
Mozy: I use Mozy to backup the rest of my documents, all of my photos, and my desktop. It’s $5.99/month for 50GB, and syncs everything overnight. I had never put it to the test other than accessing a few files on their website once, and it was very important to me to save all of my raw and edited photographs. Their system restore software was fairly easy to use, and it put all of my files back in the exact place they had previously been. The only reason I’d stop short of calling it perfect is that I’m currently having a problem getting my Adobe Lightroom catalog up and running. After the full restore, I installed Lightroom, and I think the install saved over my restored catalog. I went back to Mozy to try and get the original file, but since I had already resynced my backups to my new environment, the file wasn’t available. I’m working with their tech support to get it back. We’ll see how that goes, but I’m optimistic, and the problem was really my fault anyway.
iTunes Match: Rather than pay a monthly fee to back up my music, I joined iTunes Match for $25/year, which does two things. First, when I initially joined, it took all of my music, matched each song to Apple Store files, and replaced any of my low quality content with the high quality Apple store version — regardless of whether I bought the music from Apple. It was like music library amnesty — whether the music was from Napster circa 1999 or was ripped from a friend’s CD, I now have the Apple store version. The second thing iTunes Match does is keep track of all your music, so that if you ever lose it, you can redownload it. I was surprised to find out that Apple had even kept copies of my personal music files such a s band practice recordings and voice memos. I think this might have been kept in my iCloud account, but it wasn’t clear to me. Regardless, iTunes Match worked perfectly as a backup tool. The only catch was that there was no clear way to redownload everything at once, but the workaround I found was to create a playlist containing my entire library, and then click ‘Download Playlist’.
One week later, my computer is back to normal, with the one Lightroom catalog exception that I’m hoping to resolve today. Hopefully this post was somewhat useful for any readers who currently don’t have a good backup solution. Also, for anyone looking for a good external hard drive, I love this Toshiba hard drive. I kept all my install files (e.g., Adobe Creative Suite) on mine. It’s small, relatively cheap, and is pretty quick. Feel free to recommend any other solutions in the comments, and I’d be happy to put them in a follow-up post.