A couple weeks ago, a friend had a data disaster on his home computer involving data that he didn’t back up. Shortly after that, my brother’s secondary computer lost a hard drive under mysterious circumstances. This is the second time that his computer ran into this problem, but luckily this time around all of the data was already backed up on his primary computer.

Now, on my advice, both my friend and my brother are backing up all of their data over to an online backup company, Mozy. It’s a pretty good deal: $55/year for unlimited, encrypted remote storage. The only down-side is that you have to upload all of your data to their site, which can be very time-consuming for that first-time backup.

All this data loss around me has me thinking that I don’t have a very good backup system in place for all of my data. And I have a lot of data. I converted all of my CDs to MP3s years ago for convenience, and all of my new CDs get immediately ripped and added to the digital library. I have a large digital photo library that I’ve built up since I got my first digital camera (circa 2001). All of my personal data, 2D and 3D images and animations, wedding planning information, and who knows what else are all scattered across my hard drives and across different computers.

I now have a plan to fix my woefully dangerous data situation. I bought a new main computer, which should be arriving tomorrow or Friday (alas, it’s not a $12,000 computer, but it is still a nice upgrade from my current system). Once that arrives, I will work on migrating all of my programs and data over from my old computer. Once that is done, I will install a new 500GB hard drive (already purchased) into the old computer, reinstall the OS, and then turn that into my centralized backup server. I’ll try to come up with some automated method for backing up the systems, probably using Cygwin, rsync, and shell scripts, assuming rsync will work well with that much data (I don’t know, I haven’t used it much). And I think for even better security, I’ll use Mozy to backup the backups.

I’ll post more info on the final solution once I figure it out.