The latest update on my attempts to back up files off-site

If you read my last blog you know that I thought I had a solution for backing up my files off-site. But for the last couple weeks I have been trying to optimize the solution I found and get it to work the way I think it should. That is why I haven't posted anything since that last blog.

I want to recap to lay out where things stand as of now. (Sorry to repeat some stuff, but you may not want to go back and read my previous posts.)

How to move your back-up copies off-site

"Experts" agree, it is a good idea to have a backup of your files off-site so if your house or office is destroyed, you will still have a copy of your files. I suppose you could limit this off-site backup to just your "important" files, but what is "important" and what isn't? Making that decision could take more time than simply going ahead and making the copy.

There are several ways to create this off-site copy. If you are a business, it may be easier because you may own several locations, and you can just have copies on multiple hard drives in the various buildings you own. For a private individual, however, it isn't that easy.

If you are that private individual, you could make a copy of your computer's hard drive on an external hard drive and store that external drive somewhere like a relative's or a friend's home, or even put it in a safe deposit box. But then there is the problem of periodically retrieving the back-up hard drive from its off-site location so you can update it with the latest files.

I hadn't come up with a good, easy way to accomplish this goal of having an off-site backup. But then all this talk of the "Cloud" lead me to believe that I could back up my files to a server "out there".

As I said in my previous blog, for some time I have been using a service provided by Nomadesk. However, it was always a struggle using their service and I never was able to back up everything I wanted to. So I went looking for a better service.

What is being backed up

My situation is this. I have over 50,000 files on my MacBook Pro laptop totalling about 30 GB. My goal has been to copy all of that to an off-site server. I don't want a solution that provides automatic syncing of my files to the Cloud. Those types of solutions seem to be designed to sync those "important" or "essential" files. Apple's iCloud service, for example, is designed to sync your mail, music, photos, and iWork documents. It is not designed to sync documents you scan, or documents created in other applications like Microsoft Office or Photoshop, etc. Other services are designed for collaboration, so any files associated with a particular project would be backed up or synced to the service and then all of your collaborators on the project would have access to those documents.

I decided that the terminology for what I am trying to do is file storage. I want a service that will store copies of all my files on their servers and provide a way for me to recover those files if needed after some sort of disaster, or simply provide access to the files from my iDevices whenever I am away from my laptop.

As described in my previous blog, the service I found that I thought would provide what I was looking for is Online Storage Solution (OLS-CS). They provide unlimited storage for your files which you can access either through their web application which they call "File Manager", or by connecting to their server as a Network Drive which appears in the Finder on your Desktop, or on your iDevices through an App called "AjaXplorer". What I have been struggling with over the past couple weeks is how to copy the files from my laptop to the OLS-CS servers.

When I posted my last blog on July 23, I said I had been able to get all the files in my Documents folder copied. I accomplished this by using Fetch, my FTP client, and the Finder, simply dragging and dropping files from the list of files in the Documents folder on my hard drive to a Documents folder I created on the Network Drive.

Simply copying files is not the solution

This might seem to have accomplished my goal. I now had an off-site backup of my files.

However, there is one problem with this way of backing up your files. The minute you change, add, or delete a file, you need to go to your FTP software or the Finder and copy the files that were changed to the folder on the off-site server. 

You definitely don't want to do this manually. It would be just to difficult to keep track of what you worked on, created, changed, and deleted during the period since the last time you copied your files to the backup.  So you need a back-up program that is going to do this for you, a program that will do incremental backups based on what has changed in the source folder. So this is what I've been studying for the past week. What software is out there that will be able to do this for me given the large number of files involved and the fact that I'm trying to do my backup to a Network Drive.

In my next blog I will try to explain what I have learned.

Off-site back up solution

I may have finally found the solution I've been looking for which will provide an off-site location for backups of my laptop.

Backup, backup, backup

We are always told to backup, backup, backup. The more backups the better.

I started using computers in the olden days of the 1980's. In those days I was rescued many times by backups when a floppy disk failed or a hard drive crashed for whatever reason. Though things don't fail as often as they used to, it instilled in me a kind of obsession to make sure everything is backed up.

Time Machine, of course, is an amazing solution because you just have to set it up, and then basically, you can forget it (with some caveats, of course.)

The problem with Time Machine is that it only backs up files. If your boot disk goes belly-up, you can't get it back by using Time Machine. You have to create a boot disk from an original installation disk or disk image, and then you can restore your files from Time Machine. But I'm pretty sure you will have lost all of your settings, and those will all have to be restored.

So about once a month I try to create a bootable backup on an external hard drive. This is basically a clone of my laptop's hard drive. If my hard drive were to fail, I will be able to boot from the external backup and restore everything to a new laptop hard drive, if that is what is called for.

NomaDesk

But we are also told to make sure we have a back up far from our house in case the house is destroyed and all the computers and disk drives with it. Since 2009 I have been using a service called NomaDesk. I got in the door early and the cost was very reasonable. And, though they emphasized the ability to share files with other people, I was able to use the service to back up my files. As the years passed, however, they seemed to become more restrictive on the types of files they would allow on their system. The first thing I noticed was they couldn't handle "packages", which is how Apple bundles programs. As time went on, I was calling their support people more and more for help. Things would work for awhile, but then I was back with the support folks.

I must say, their support was excellent--very responsive and willing to try to fix the problem.

After the last go-around, though, I finally gave up on NomaDesk. It just wasn't working for me. So I went shopping.

Comparison shopping

One of the best sites I found for seeing what is out there is onlinefilestorage.com . This site specializes in the field of on-line backup and storage and is an excellent place to learn about on-line backup and storage and to comparison shop. I spent a day on the site doing just that and came up with a spreadsheet which you might find helpful. You can download it from here: online backup.xls . NomaDesk is not one of those they review.

Backup vs. storage

The first thing I learned after all of that research was that I didn't want an on-line backup solution. What I really wanted was on-line file storage. Most of the reviews on the onlinefilestorage.com web site were of companies that provide on-line backup. They provide software that monitors your local hard drive, and whenever you make changes, it backs-up the new file, much as Time Machine does. Or the software lets you schedule back-ups at regular intervals. But all of the services have certain limitations. Like NomaDesk, most won't back up your programs or applications. Some won't back up your computer's settings. A few limit the size of the file you can back up.

Off-site file storage does not have all these bells and whistles. Automatic or scheduled backups and the ability to sync may be exactly what you want. But I'm more of a hands-on person when it comes to things like this. Off-site file storage is simply a way to store your files on someone else's server. You manage the files yourself including adding, moving, and deleting.

Online Storage Solution (OLS-CS)

It didn't take me long to find Online Storage Solution (OLS-CS). I am very excited about this service. In my testing this morning everything worked perfectly, just as I wanted it to or expected it to. Here is an image of their Dashboard:

 

There is no free trial. You have to sign up before you can use it or even test it. The cost is only $48 for 2 years for UNLIMITED storage! If you don't like it, you can get a full refund within 45 days. If you find out you don't like it after the 45 days have passed, they will give you a pro-rated refund.

 

There are no restrictions on file types or file size you copy to their service. You can use your own FTP program or backup program to copy the files. You can access their server as a network drive from the Finder. Once the files have been copied to the off-site location, you have complete control over them just as if they were on your own computer. You can set up sharing, you can define permissions. You can even play or "stream" your mp3 songs by double-clicking on them, just as if they were on your local hard drive. But only realize that there is no syncing going on here between your files on their server and your files on your computer. You have to take care of that yourself. Which is exactly the way I want things to work for my purposes.

You can use an application called AjaXplorer on your iOS or Android devices to access your files. The iOS version costs $0.99. This means that because you have access to all the files you copied from your computer to the OLS-CS servers from within AjaXplorer, that if you have an app on your mobile device that can open a particular kind of file, you can not only read it, but work on it as well. Then it is up to that application as to how you get it back on your computer's hard drive, whether you have to email it to yourself or use some other method provided by the application.

Besides file storage, OLS-CS provides web site hosting complete with unlimited domains, email, and database access. They have a few projects in beta, as you can see from the screenshot.

Results

So I used Fetch, the FTP program I've been using for years, to copy some of my files to OLS-CS today. Copying about 2 GB took about a half hour. The FTP copying got hung up when two files were found with backslashes ( / ) in the file name. Other times the backslash was automatically converted to a colon ( : ). That was a minor glitch.

When I tried to Go to the OLS-CS service and see my files by connecting to their servers as a Network Drive, I had to contact their support for help. The only method they provide is by filling out a web form. They then reply by email. The response was received within a half hour. It turns out that there was a typo in their instructions. The instructions say to enter https://dav/ols18.com/username. The correct entry shoul be https://dav.ols18.com/username, using a dot rather than a backslash.

It will take some time to copy everything to OLS-CS. But so far, everything is working and I think I have found a solution that will finally be what I've wanted all along.


 

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