Found a really cool service today for automatically backing up files. It's called Xdrive (www.xdrive.com).
Like most people, I want to have my files backed up, but I find myself putting it off, so I only tend to do it every few months at best. Also, since I don't consider saving to local media a very good backup solution, I usually zip my files, encrypt them to myself using strong encryption (PGP) and then upload them to web space. Although I have been happy with this method, it has a couple drawbacks:
- It takes a while to get everything together and go through the process.
- Since my web space is limited, I tend to be very conservative and back up only what I would die to be without.
- You have to keep things straight in your mind - what you are backing up, where you are backing it up to, making sure the PGP key is itself backed up, etc.
So I've been thinking about remedying this by writing my own backup software and getting some big time web space somewhere. My plan was to write an application that would allow you to designate individual files or directories to back up, and schedules on which to perform the backups. The app would zip and encrypt, and then send to some FTP space somewhere.
Just to be sure, though, I spent an hour or two searching to see if anyone else had already thought of this. Turns out, Xdrive is almost exactly what I would have written! For $10 a month (or $100 a year), you get 5GB of backup space. Their client app is really cool - you can schedule backups in almost exactly the manner I wanted. The app doesn't zip the packages, but they are transferred securely. Also (this was a biggy for me) it supports incremental backups, so that only affected files are transferred on subsequent backups. This means that I can define a backup package for, say, my mail, and then let a scheduled backup process take care of the changed files only, so I can stay up-to-date quickly. You can also hit the Backup Now button. I just updated a very important project I'm working on with over 600 files, and it took about a minute to perform the incremental backup.
I've found a few small issues with the client app, but all in all, Xdrive seems to be a great product at an incredible value.
To be completely fair, here are what I see as the pros and cons so far:
Pros:
- Designate multiple backup packages with independant schedules.
- Define a backup package as full or incremental, and say how many versions you want to keep in history.
- If you choose to use incremental backups, you can backup on demand very quickly. You have no excuse to lose important files now.
- When the application is running, it is mapped to your system as a named drive (for example X:). You can use Windows Explorer to navigate your remote drive.
- The service was obviously written by people who know tech. Security was a major focus for them.
- Lots of space for not too much cash.
- Unlike other absurd backup programs I tried using, the engine of this one does not needlessly appropriate half your processor and memory. :-)
Cons:
- The service is designed to go through firewalls and work from anywhere, so it uses SOAP over HTTPS, which is not the quickest horse in the barn, if you know what I mean.
- The UI for the client app is cool (they support skins, etc), but there are small fit-and-finish errors like screens not painting correctly sometimes.
- On a couple of my backups, the manifest file did not get saved correctly, so my incremental backups ended up being full backups, which can be a bit of a chore if it's a 100MB backup. Seems to have been a hiccup, though - on the second try, the manifest worked and the incremental backup happened as it should have.
Anyway, these guys are pretty good so far. Just thought I'd pass their name on!
SNG