The Best Off-Site Backup Solution

I did some research on backup solutions recently, so I thought I would share some of what I learned.

I already had some processes in place for backing up my files locally. Of those, I think Norton Ghost is the best, and PC Backup is lousy. Of the free solutions, GBridge is interesting.

But with all my backup data in the same house as my primary data, I was worried about losing everything in case of a fire, power surge, or some other catastrophe. So I checked out some options for off-site backup. I found a number of options that look like decent solutions. But I ended up signing up for one called IDrive.

I have 100 Gigs or so of data that I wanted to back up. It's all on a local network drive that I share among various local computers. IDrive will let you back up and store up to 150 gigs of data for only $5 a month! It's supposed to be $5 for one computer, but they support network drives, so you can put all the important data from all of your local computers on a network drive or drives, and then you can run the backup from one computer that has access to the network drives, and that way you'll back up everything important from all the local computers.

$5 a month was a lot cheaper than most of the other ones I looked at, and it seemed like a no brainer, although I've since read that Mozy will provide unlimited backup for $5 a month, which seems crazy. I don't know if they allow for backing up of network drives or not. I've also noticed a few other comparable options in that same price range, so I guess IDrive wasn't quite as far ahead of the pack as I initially thought.

But for now I'm definitely sticking with it since I've already got my data uploaded. It took me over a week to upload 100 gigs of data. It was not entirely painless. I was running the uploading application on an old computer with 384 Megs of RAM, and the application kept freezing. I upgraded to 1 gig of RAM, and now it works much better. After getting all the data uploaded initially, I now have it set to update new or modified files once a day. You can also set it to back up continuously, but I haven't tried that out yet.

Accessing the backed up data on idrive.com is straightforward, although it takes a couple of minutes to load (at least for my account with 100 gigs in it). But once it's loaded everything is pretty snappy. The files are displayed in an intuitive hierarchical manner like Windows Explorer, and you can save or open them by clicking on the file name.

The one thing I haven't tried is doing a full Restore. Hopefully I'll never have to.

UPDATE: Since posting this, I heard from a reliable source that "Live Drive is the best". Looking at the livedrive website, it does look like they have a pretty unbelievable deal: $7 a month for unlimited data, AND I think they're indicating unlimited computers! (I'm not for sure on that.) I haven't tried it out but it looks pretty sweet.

Why Won't Firefox Remember My Username?

I was about to get a little bit miffed, but I finally figured out why firefox wouldn't remember (auto-complete) my username on a couple of sites that I use constantly. Turns out that if you have more than one username saved for a given site, then firefox doesn't know which one to fill in, so it doesn't fill in anything. That doesn't explain why it wouldn't do the normal auto-complete (after I typed a few letters of the username I wanted and then hit the down arrow), but it's good enough that I can stop gnashing my teeth for the moment. To get rid of the unwanted usernames, go to Tools -> Options -> Security -> Saved Passwords, and then find the username you don't want and delete it.

PS... Boise State is the national champ! Not only do I not recognize the BCS "champion", but I disqualify them from consideration for taking part in that tainted monopolistic nonsense! On another note, I can't believe Colt McCoy got knocked out and cost me my College Bowl Mania championship!