I’m always amazed at the little niches people carve out for themselves in the tech world. I came across backupcentral.com today, a site and blog run by Curtis Preston; he’s the author of O’Reilly’s Backup and Recovery and Using SANs and NAS books (his original title, Unix Backup & Recovery has been replaced by the aforementioned title).

This guy lives and breathes backups! And I think that’s not a bad thing at all. His writing is interesting and has a nice tone. I found myself getting engrossed in his “Mr. Backup” blog with entries like “Agentless Backup: Not evil after all” and “Dedupe, Immutability & Non-repudiation” (dedupe products are pretty interesting in and of themselves, but that’s another topic).

I consistently get a few calls a year from friends who ask something like, “so what can I do to get my stuff back since my hard drive died?” And I always know the answer to my first question, “do you have any backups?” The part that makes it even worse is after they say they don’t, I ask if they have an external USB hard drive and they usually do, they just didn’t rig it up to back up their data automatically.

Since USB drives are so cheap and easy to use, it’s a no-brainer to task them with regular backups. On the Mac there’s Time Machine, a pretty cool system that automatically creates versioned (ie different time-point) backups with a really easy to use interface. Most of the drives themselves come with some sort of Windows software to do the same thing, though it may not be as elegant.

On my Mac I run a shell script from a cron job that rsyncs everything over each night. If the prospect of losing my data files wasn’t enough simply because they’re, well, my data files, having the music files I’ve purchased online means I have files with actual known monetary value.

Once in awhile I do hoark some file and it’s great to be able to pull it right off the USB drive. In fact, now that I think about it, I had a hard drive die last year. Replacing it and reinstalling the system didn’t entail any data loss at all. Very handy. And instead of being a traumatic memory of losing all my stuff, I didn’t even remember right away that it happened.