On June 6, Apple announced the latest incarnation of its OS X operating system: 10.7, more commonly known as Lion. Also announced were the imminent release of iOS 5 for Apple’s mobile devices and, hand-in-hand with that, the iCloud.

Folks who’ve been handy with Apple’s products for a few years now might recognize the source of this “new” service as MobileMe (née .Mac), the yearly membership with an email address, online storage, and push syncing for your mobile devices.

But iCloud is more than just a name change. Apple is revamping the service to expand its offerings and its reach. MobileMe used to cost $99 a year to subscribe. iCloud will be free to anyone using iOS 5, that is to say, anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch capable of running the new software when it comes out this fall.

And as Apple says, for free, you get a lot. iCloud, like MobileMe, will continue to push-sync your contacts, calendars, and email, but it will also do the same with your photos, documents, and purchased content like apps, music, and books. It even uses that syncing feature to back up your device’s content and settings, so that plugging in to your computer to sync becomes nigh a thing of the past. New devices that ship with iOS 5 can even be activated through iCloud if you already have a membership. Apple is slowly but surely removing the computer from the equation.

But the thing I’m most excited for is the music. You can push new purchased music to your device directly, or access your purchase history and re-download songs you’ve already bought. And, for a yearly fee of $25, you can “match” up to 25,000 songs you didn’t purchase from the iTunes store (so, stuff you either ripped from your CD collection or, ahem, acquired) with iTunes Plus-quality content and download it to your devices whenever you want. Simply put, iTunes says, “oh, I see you have this song in your library, but you didn’t buy it from me. Oh well, it’s your song. Here, have my version if you want to listen to it. It’s encoded at 256K, so it’s probably loads better than that 128K version you pirated or the 192K version you ripped five years ago.”  You know what I say to that? “Gee, thanks iTunes!”

But even with this stable full of awesome new features, a little caution is warranted. As much as Apple declared its MobileMe service “just works,” there are plenty of users out there (me included) who can tell you it sometimes doesn’t. If you don’t understand how push syncing works, you can often end up with duplicate and even triplicate contacts or calendar events. And Apple’s servers, like all servers, do sometimes go down. There can be cons to relying too heavily on someone else’s storage space for all your stuff. And will those remote backups be more useful for troubleshooting, or will they, like the computer backups, be basically useless if you’re trying to remedy a software bug? And I don’t even want to think about the poor souls who share one big iTunes library, and thus whose devices are filled with content purchased by a handful of different AppleID accounts.

So the moral of the story? iCloud could be as revolutionary and awesome as Apple wants you to think it will be, or it could be a big old mess. I’m pretty sure it will wind up somewhere in the middle.

Probably leaning a little more toward awesome.

Thanks to Apple for the image!

It’s not a question of if your hard drive will fail, it’s a question of *when* it will fail. Hard drive life is rated in MTBF or mean time between failures which basically means that your hard drive will only run for so long before mechanical breakdown or physical damage will render your computer and your data unusable. Professional data recovery companies can charge several thousands of dollars to recover data from a failed drive and even if you make sure to use new drives and replace them frequently a fire, flood or theft can wipe all your data out in a heartbeat.  What can you do about this?

The first line of backups should always be local, an external hard drive or other device that your computer backups up to on a regularly scheduled basis.  If your system goes down it’s always faster to restore a large data set from a backup on site than it is to restore from the internet.

Local Backups

If you’re using Windows 7 (you have upgraded already, right?) you already have a great back up solution built into your system! Just get an external hard drive that’s at least as large as your internal drive (2 TB external hard drives are under $150 these days), connect it to your computer, go to your control panel and then click “backup and restore”

Then just follow the wizard to select your data, select the external hard drive and set the schedule and you can rest a little easier now.  With Windows Backup and Restore you can go back through all existing backups and recover individual files or whole directories.  This is especially useful if you make changes to a file or accidentally delete something and later realize you need the old version.  With a large enough backup drive you can go back months.

If you’re using an older version of Windows you can still backup your data, you just need to use some extra software to accomplish it. I’ve used Cobian Backup for years.  It’s a great free backup software that gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of choosing how many full backups, incremental backups, scheduling and other options.  You can even configure multiple backups to different locations (multiple external hard drives, thumb drives, etc) so you can better organize your data.

If you’re using a Mac with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or newer you should definitely give Time Machine a try, like Windows 7′s Backup and Restore it comes built into your operating system.

Just like in Windows 7 you connect an external hard drive, and configure Time Machine and then just let it automatically back up your files. You can also use an Apple Time Capsule as your wireless router and backup hard drive.  That way as long as your computer is powered on and connected to your wireless network your backups will run on schedule!

Online backups

The advantage of online backups is that even if your computer and workspace are totally destroyed by natural disaster or massive theft all your data is safe somewhere on the internet.  Also with a backup solution like dropbox not only are your files backed up but you can also use it to keep files in sync between different computer and devices like Android devices and iPhones.  The down side is that unless you only have a little data to backup you’re going to have to start paying for a subscription.

Last year I wrote about a couple online backup options. An interesting addition to this list is crashplan.  They offer similar features to other online backup providers such as real-time backups, incremental backups to save time and bandwidth and the ability to go back in time and recover previous versions of files. One option that I really like is Backup to a Friend’s Computer.

It works like this.  You and a friend (or family member, or just another computer you own at a different location) sign up for a free crashplan account and link your computers together.  You then backup the files from one computer across the internet to the other computer.  So instead of using crashplan’s bandwidth and storage space you’re trading space with the other computer.  All your files are encrypted and the person on the other computer cannot open them in any way however if the unthinkable happens you can recover all your data safely using your credentials.

What other backup software or hardware do you use?  Let us know in the comments.

So how do I get started backing up my stuff? Here are 3 programs that I recommend.

Bonkey
JaBackup
NasBackup

Of course you need to back up your files somewhere. If you have money to spend I would highly recommend a Drobo. If not you can get by with a cheaper solution, an external enclosure that is either connected to your network or directly to you computer.

Drobo
External Drives

Of course if you are at work you probably have an enterprise solution in place, Ask your administrator if you are worried. And remember to backup!

This is a question that we ask and far too often the answer is “no”. There’s really no reason not to be backing up all your important information using automated software. Whether you rely on DVDs, USB thumb drives, external hard drives or online storage there are a multitude of choices to keep all your files safe.  Today we’re looking at a couple different choices for online storage.

Free, totally free!

http://mozy.com (PC and Mac 2GB storage free, $4.95/mo per computer for unlimited storage.)

Although 2GB isn’t very much space these days, you’ll be able to get all your important word docs, excel sheets and a handful of photos protected for free.  They have free software that automates the process of backing up so you don’t have to think about it once it’s set up.  After you max out the 2GB of free storage their $4.95/mo for unlimited space is a great deal.

http://www.getdropbox.com (PC and Mac 2GB storage free, 50GB for $9.99/mo)

Dropbox is another backup software with a bit of a twist.  Once your install it on computer the online storage acts like a local folder and automatically backs itself up while you work. Drag and drop your files from other folders seamlessly onto your remote storage. Set it up as your “documents” folder and work from the online storage all the time. What’s really nice about their interface is that you can install Dropbox on multiple computers and access the same folders and files from where ever you are.  This gives you the added benifit of keeping all your files in sync and backed up at the same time.

Cheap and good

Not every online backup provider offers a free option, but the pay-for solutions below have features and options that you just can’t find for free.

http://www.backblaze.com (PC and Mac, $5/mo per computer, 15 dayfree trial available)

Backblaze offers a $5/mo per computer, unlimited storage package with automated backup software to safely backup all your files on shcedule.  What’s really great about their offerings is they will overnight you a DVD or USB drive of all your files if you need to do disaster recovery (you can of course download the files directly still).  Afterall, if youhave 400-500 GB or more of files backed up it might take you a week to download everything back onto your desktop, this is a much better way to recover from a drive failure and get back up and running. quickly

http://www.adrive.com (PC, Mac and Linux, $7/mo for 50GB of storage, 14 day free trial available)

ADrive has a basic free package for home users (ad supported) that comes with 50GB of online space, however it does not support automated backups (the whole point of this post)  Their $7/mo plan is where they really shine.  It comes with 50GB space like the free version but has free automated backup software for Windows, Mac and Linux, 14 day history of files (ever change or delete a file and wish you had an older version to go back to?), WebDAV, multiple concurrent sessions, 24/7 support and no ads.

http://jungledisk.com (PC, Mac and Linux, $2/mo + $.15 per gig of storage used per month, 30 day money back guarantee)

Jungledisk uses distributed server technology to host your backup files.  What this means is that your files are stored on multiple servers across the country for high bandwidth and availability.  Their pricing is fair, pay for what you use.  It’s $2/mo  for access and then $0.15 per GB of storage space.  Make sure you choose the Rackspace option, not the Amazon S3 one or you’ll have to pay for bandwidth as well ($.10 per GB uploaded adds up quickly).

http://www.carbonite.com (PC and Mac, $54.95/yr unlimited storage or about $4.60/mo, 15 day free trial )

Nothing special about Carbonite, just completely automated secure backups with unlimited storage.  They also have a small program to install on your PC or Mac that automates the backup process. It’s easy to use and convenient for home users without a lot of techie bells and whistles to get in your way.

These are just a couple of the excellent backup options that are out there.  Do you use a different backup software that you’d recommend?  Let us know about it through the “contact us” page!