I’ve just had my second laptop hard-drive die on me in about 6 months. After much hassle, I am finally back with access to MOST of my data (down to a nice little auto-incremental backup tool I use).
The only thing that went smoothly was restoring Firefox — those guys really are getting ahead of the industry in terms of install/reinstall usability now. I literally just downloaded the install, ran it, used MozBackup to restore my profile (which I had rushed to save as soon as the laptop starting making grinding noises…) and now I’m back. With all my (many thousands of) bookmarks, saved logins and even my plugins loaded for me. No effort whatsoever.
It got me thinking though — lots of people get very worried about their stuff being hosted. I’ve heard people who object to Flickr because “the servers might go down and I’d lose EVERYTHING!”. I suppose they have a point, especially when their data is being encrypted away from them (not the case with Flickr, but there are some offenders).
The other side of the argument is this though: do you really think that your hardware and backup regimen is BETTER than that of the company you are concerned about?
When my harddrive started making sounds like it was trying to grind sand into powder, I was suddenly very happy that so much of my life was online. The really important bookmarks? Largely on delicious and this blog. The photos? Flickr. OK, so my document management is a little haphazard — I imagine I can fix that.
I’m quite enjoying relying on other people to keep systems up and running, to make sure backups are happening of my stuff on the web. They seem to be a lot better at it than I want to have to be 
June 20th, 2006 at 6:16 PM
I’m using OS X Server on my Mac Mini to host a “mobile home” folder. This syncs in the background with my home folder on my iBook every twenty minutes, so I should be largely immune to a disk failure on either machine.
I need to do something to protect my data against more serious problems like my house burning
down or both computers being stolen…
June 20th, 2006 at 9:24 PM
I’ve had disastrous things happen locally and at a distance (oh, the days before Blogger got bought by Google!)…as far as I’m concerned, the more copies of anything important, the better.
June 20th, 2006 at 10:26 PM
Yeah. I’m the same. Although I avidly backup (OK, so I lost everything once) I still love the security of flickr and the like. I’ve been playing with Amazons S3 as well for a potential mass backup thijng. We shall have to see.
June 21st, 2006 at 8:59 AM
@Rich — do you not have enough space on your hosting to do the same thing to an online folder too? rsync is your friend
@Elaine — I agree completely. Thing is, I have the capability to back up well, I just can’t seem to care about it enough to do so.
@Gareth — LOL, that was my first thought about Amazon S3 as well! TBH, I’m really surprised noone’s built a tool for that already. I imagine cheap, easy, synchronized backup for Windows is a real niche in the market.
June 21st, 2006 at 6:08 PM
My home folder is currently as impressive 18GB so I don’t think an online folder will do.
Maybe I ought to go through it and get rid of things that I don’t need…