Why Yes, I AM A Technology Professional. Why Do You Ask?

rudius_maximus's likely opinions of my "l33t"-ness aside, I do actually make a decent living working in IT, and recently I've found myself in a position where I've been arguing (stridently, here and there) against misconceptions about the reliability and usability of various technologies. But rather than continue to attempt rebutting specific misconceptions, I figured I would take a more constructive turn and offer realistic solutions for common scenarios.

Especially for writers (as was the make-up of the aforementioned forum), one of the most critical issues in dealing with computers is that of back-up. I know, personally, exactly one writer who gets by entirely on writing. Everyone else does their writing in their spare time, and their IT as necessary. Unfortunately, this tends to mean "as necessary" takes the form of a dead PC and lost or inaccessible data.

Myself, at home, I have a central "server" running Windows XP that is home to mine and tappu's combined iTunes library. (I dream of a real server, running real server software. Someday, someday.) Also, connected to that PC is a portable harddrive and the PC runs a four-times-a-day automatic backup to the harddrive. To make sure I get everything, I have critical folders on other machines (including my Mac) shared out and mapped to drive letters (X:, Y:, Z:) on the "server" so it can grab data from them as well. Thus goes all my e-mail, writing, movies, music, and (most importantly) financial data.

Now, I've done this with cast-offs and the backup program written by the owner of the company I work for. Doing this myself would have cost a pretty penny.

But it's not hard to do on the cheap.

If I were to go totally cheap-o with the stuff stored on my Mac, I would knock together a quick AppleScript that would, when run, copy my writing projects and e-mail over to a 1GB USB flashdrive. Altogether, both folders come to around 430MB, so I would have some room to grow. The flashdrive, a good one, costs about $100 and the AppleScript is free. It's easier, in fact, on a Windows XP machine since Windows has a Backup program built in, and can be run with an integral scheduler program. For someone who knows what they're doing, setup is about five minutes. In fact, using Windows Backup is something we at work do in addition to our own backup software, just to be redundant.

More refined solutions are easy to come by, as well.

iBackup offers automatic back up to a remote server for around $100/year. Can't vouch for their reliability, and their service for MacOS does not offer any kind of automatic utility, so some kind of automatic scripting might stilll need to be done for those who have a hard time building the good habits.

NewEgg offers a software package called (imaginatively) PC Backup for $32 that builds in the most important features of a good backup system, and breaks down setup into a wizard for easy installation. All you need is some kind of removable device, or blank media like a CDRW or DVDR, to write it to.

The Geek Squad will come out to your house for $85 and do a one-time backup of your system to the media of your choice. Not the best solution, by any means, since you have to keep paying them to keep them coming to do it, but it works in a pinch. Sweet talk, and the willingness to pay a little more, might get the Squad to setup an automatic backup system on your PC such as the one described. It's not listed as a service (since they do pimp the one-time-only backup), but if you approach them armed with what you need, then I'm sure they'll be amenable.

For Mac users only, the .Mac service at $100 a year offers not only automatic backup, but the ability to do redundant backups to your iDisk space on Apple's servers and also to any local device, including one's iPod. (.Mac also offers a slew of other features, making it something of a better bargain than iBackup)

For $200 you can buy a Maxtor OneTouch II portable harddrive. It comes with its own backup software that will guide you through the process of choosing folders to backup and, once configured, only requires that you have the harddrive plugged in and press the button on the front of the drive to launch a backup. $200 gets you a 200GB harddrive, so most any individual will be able to back up their entire harddrive two to four times over, at the press of a button.

For the business, small or otherwise, Symantec (makers of Norton Anti-Virus) and VERITAS offer enterprise-grade backup solutions in the $400-$500 neighborhood. If you've got the money, you can do backups like the big kids for about $1000, including an hour for an IT consultant to set it up for you.

If you want to get really crazy, and you have the money to spend, you purchase a server that works off what's called a RAID array. RAID can both make many harddrives look like one, huge harddrive and take many harddrives and make them mirrors of one another. The Really Big Boys of IT use RAID extensively to make harddrive failure, essentially, a non-event. (Really sweet servers even make their harddrives hot-swappable, where they can be removed without shutting down the system or otherwise interrupting services.) But this is by no means necessary, and I can only think of one or two clients where we've done something like this.

Next time on real-life IT Today, we'll discuss fileservers...

...until then, remember to backup up your f***ing data!