themonkeysdidit

Everyone should backup their data. We all know it, but how many of us actually do it? Well until today, I didn’t. But I knew I should so I began looking into various solutions.

First off , you need a lot of space for backups, and however much space you have now, won’t be enough a few years down the line. So all the free online services were out as space is pretty dismal.

Secondly, it had to be cheap. It is for home use only after all so fire proof data centres are hardly required.

Thirdly, it has to be automatic, otherwise you just don’t bother or forget to run your backup and that’s when disaster strikes.

So what did I decide? As of early this year I use a mac book pro as my primary home computer, which means it comes with the excellent Time Machine software, perfect for my needs. Next problem was where to tell Time Machine to store the data. I could use the server in our house but this doesn’t guard against fire, theft etc as presumably both laptop and server would suffer the same fate. So I bought a 1TB USB drive from amazon and back up to this. The clever(?) bit is the disk is actually kept in the office at work and I only bring it home once a week (ish) to run a back up before taking it back to work the next day. Thus I have 1TB of off site backup storage – awesome.

And how did I get a network speed of 1456MB/s? Well, it takes about 12 minutes to get from home to work on my bike, so with the disk in my bag, that’s 1TB of data transfer in 12 minutes, which equates to about 1456MB/s bandwidth (all be it with horrible latency )