A long, long time ago a famous British journalist disappeared to France to 'work on his novel'. When the poor chap came back he wrote a piece about how his book would never appear. Someone nicked his laptop. Those precious words were gone, gone, gone. I vaguely knew him and he was, trust me, terribly cut up. So much he never did write a novel in the end.

I'm paranoid about losing things. Before there was online backup I used to leave floppies round with my in-laws in case the house burned down. Today computers are more reliable than ever. I can't -- touch wood -- think of the last time I lost something because a file went bad. Usually the screeches are self-induced -- a lost file, something deleted that shouldn't have been.

None of this need be fatal. Here's how I try to ensure how. It is overkill. Sane people will use less.

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<img class="alignright" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/155504-2tb_time_capsule-tm.jpg" alt="155504-2tb_time_capsule.jpeg" width="250" height="220" />First, I use Apple's Time Machine, which backs up duplicate copies of old stuff to an external Time Capsule drive. Dead easy, and you can retrieve things with a minimum of fuss. If the house burns down it's all dead, of course. But for the minimal investment it seems worthwhile to me.

Time Machine works in the background, backing up your stuff on a regular basis. If you do something wrong you can go back an hour or a day or whenever and, with luck, retrieve a copy from there. Any work between catastrophe and recovery will, of course, be lost.

Second I use standard offline backup, in my case the one that comes through Apple's MobileMe. This is the same old backup people have been using for years. At a set interval it stores copies of your documents on Apple's servers. This means you only get back yesterday's copy if you back up once a day.

On the rare occasion I've had to try to get stuff back from this I've had problems. Missing files, error messages. It's not as good as it appears frankly, and if I could be bothered I'd probably kill the whole thing altogether. Not least because there's something much more interesting around now, and that's intelligent 'cloud' backup.

<img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/dropbox-secure-backup-sync-and-sharing-made-easy.png" alt="Dropbox - Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy.png" width="290" height="75" />

I first encountered this through <a href="http://www.dropbox.com/" target="_blank">Dropbox</a>. This is a clever service that creates a special folder on your computer. Anything inside it gets replicated to Dropbox's servers. There you can share it among other computers and people. It's not backup of the traditional kind. But in all honesty I'm only dealing with five or six active documents these days. It's good enough for me.

Basic Dropbox is free. If you want more storage than you get for nothing you need to shell out $9.99 for 50gb of storage. This seems a silly leap for me. They should have a $4.99 plan. I don't need much storage and I would be willing to pay. Just not $9.99 a month.

<img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/screen-shot-2010-04-21-at-16-02-53.png" alt="Screen shot 2010-04-21 at 16.02.53.png" width="170" height="55" />

Then I discovered <a href="http://www.sugarsync.com/" target="_blank">Sugar Sync</a>, a Dropbox rival. At first glance this looks very similar. But don't be fooled. SugarSync has that magic replicated folder too. But it will also replicate your ordinary folders. So now all I do is choose the folders used for my current projects. SugarSync backs them up <em>as I save</em>. What's more it keeps the last five versions too. So the gap between disaster and recovered file is tiny -- the last time I saved.
<blockquote>Update May 2010. Having taken out a subscription to SugarSync I now see its reliability go south -- even their website is unavailable. Currently everything is down and has been for a while. My advice is: stay away. Hope I can get my $49 back.</blockquote>
Also I can sync those ordinary files between computers. So my main WIP folder is automatically replicated to my laptop <span style="font-style:italic;">even if I forget to copy over the files before I head for the airport. </span>It just happens next time I go online. This is good. No, this is wonderful. Here's a little of what it looks like for me -- as you can see you can keep any number of computers in sync.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/screen-shot-2010-04-21-at-16-14-16.png"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/screen-shot-2010-04-21-at-16-14-16-tm.jpg" alt="Screen shot 2010-04-21 at 16.14.16.png" width="500" height="213" /></a>

You can also get a free companion app for an iPhone or Android phone that will let you browse these folders. So I can drop pdfs of travel documents into a synced folder and get easy access for them, and send up stored photos from my phone too. All very useful stuff indeed.

Why do I need conventional backup with something like this around? I probably don't. But as I said, I'm paranoid on this subject.

One word of warning for Mac users. Cloud backup systems sometimes don't like Mac apps that store documents as 'packages', folders of files masquerading as single documents. Scrivener is one such app. Some people have reported problems on the Scrivener forums with corrupted files on Dropbox because of this. I saw the same problem. I haven't with Sugar Sync, but it's important you don't edit the same file on two different computers, and that you close down the document on one machine before opening it on the next. And if you want to be extra safe in Scrivener simply save a backup file in zip format which will make it absolutely safe.

With those caveats all I can say is... at $4.95 for 30GB this is a steal.