BACKUP! BACKUP! EVERYBODY BACKUP!

Why is it that no one seems to think about doing this? What if there was a flood or a fire, and your server/desktop got destroyed? How screwed would you be, personally and/or professionally? Tekzilla did a great episode not too long ago that gave a really simplified consumers guide on backing up your files, both in Windows and on Mac.

For me: my photos, personal details like banking records, documents and presentations past and present, chat logs, saved histories, preferences and bookmarks. These are what matter to me the most in terms of my digital life. We’re all really lucky at this stage in digital evolution as we’ve already been blessed with reliable online services that can reduce not only the need for high storage capacity on our computers but also the worry that we face answering that question – what if a hard disk just stopped working?

For example, Google handle my email, and I’m safe in the knowledge that I can access that on any internet-connected machine and it have the exact same user interface to it and thanks to its insane storage, I’m not limited on attachment sizes or concerned about deleting items. Looking at the two accounts I have with Google, personal and public, they are both now over the 6gig size, which I find impressive. Even more incredible is that I’ve managed to fill up 4%. I use Google over other mainstream email accounts like Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail just because I prefer the simple interface that seems to me to load a lot faster on slower connections. I have also been impressed by the ease with which you can use Google’s Partnerpages – they take over the running of email on your domain and also give you the full suite of Google Apps.

But we’ve progressed beyond mere email now with web services. Online storage looks to allow us simple uploading of photos, video, and music and a lot of those services also provide a social network dimension that allows the sharing of all this data. Having ads served to me is a price I happily pay for using the services of Facebook, Flickr, Youtube etc. But what if you want something that I’m going to define as “more hardcore” – no ads, bomb-proof reliability, and the sky being the limit on capacity?

A lot of companies have launched themselves on Amazon’s S3 service, using it as their storage back end. I believe this to be genius, as it means that these companies can be paying their fees to Amazon, outsourcing the cost of setting up and maintaining the servers to them, leaving ‘Mr. Web 2.0 Entrepreneur’ free to focus on an innovative front end. There are two examples of such companies that I am going to explore: Jungle Disk and Scribd.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have just recently made the total switch over to Ubuntu Linux. Whilst Canonical and the open community that contribute to Ubuntu are doing a phenomenal job of increasing compatibility and function, it’s still a nuisance that so many programs and services are locked in on providing solely for Windows and/or Mac users. An example of this is Carbonite, who provide a highly recommended online backup service to Windows users. So some folks at my LUG did some research and came up with a short list of linux compatible online storage services, of which my favourite stands as Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk is not only available for Windows, Mac and Linux but also lets you install a program to a usb pen that’s compatible with all three OS’s and will backup in just the same way as on your own machine. Their Why it’s better page accurately outlines their best features, but what wowed me the most was the section on “Pay only for what you use, with no minimums”. This feature is something that’s part and parcel of S3, which is why I really like what Amazon are offering to other companies that can be passed on as a sensible option for all end consumers.

Scribd takes on a much more user-friendly community approach to its use of S3. It markets itself as the ‘Youtube of documents’. Users can upload documents, with unlimited storage, and they share these documents. This free consumer community side will prove to be a very useful tool for education and I look forward to watching this grow. It’s had excellent press so far, and they’ve done the most sensible thing in creating a platform including API so that it can take on a much more commercial business market. I’ve already signed myself and a couple of friends up to the API, who each have very specialised knowledge in certain fields and have been looking for a straightforward way to publish their work while being able to monetise in a controlled fashion. Scribd will embed ads into your documents and then the ad revenue is split between them and you. Obviously with this business model, they can quickly jump to the absolute front of the race, provide a collection of widget options, and with this embedded ads system pioneer the use of widget ads.

Next I’d like to see more competition in the S3 market to drive innovation, as always. Someone should develop another S3 style service because I feel front end operations are already suitably saturated with some great companies like Jungle Disk and Scribd. Let’s see some more of the tech giants offering web 2.0 startups the backbone systems to launch their ideas from, and ultimately it should also do something for internet infrastructure in the process which can only be seen as a good thing.