Backing up is Important

Backing up is Necessary

In the 90’s, a caring friend like Bob would ask you, “Do you backup your data?” And Bob tells you a sob story about how his hard drive crashed and he lost all his important files. And so you backup your data together, and come Hell or high energy cosmic rays, your and Bob’s regular backups onto discs would keep your files safe from harm. If one copy was destroyed, you still had other copies. And Bob would share cool stuff he found on the computer by backing up on a 1.44MB 3.5” floppy diskette and walking over to you. Copy to another disc, label with the date, and call it a day. Today, this copy-date policy is, well, dated. If your hapless friend Bob weren’t wracked by chronic flashbacks to the late 90’s dot-com bubble, Bob might relax his stern eyebrows and ask, “Do you still back up your data? That’s good. But do you sync your data?” Today, writers collaborate in a single Google document, Amazon is selling mountains of storage space, and Windows Shares keep your paperless office filled to the brim with the PDFs for employees to print and sign. With so many reservoirs of data, traditional data backup has become obsolesced and pitied, outclassed by newer paradigms. If Bob lapsed from his stock-induced coma, he would see that the tech industry is still going strong, pumping digital content across the world, as ubiquitous and vital as a municipal service like drinking water. YouTube, Google, FaceBook, iPhones—Help Bob sit down, he may need some time to adjust, having just woken up from his old world of manual backups. Pity not the old ritual of backup, unidirectional synchronization, for it is simply a special case of more modern bidirectional sync. Take two data reserves, say a hard drive and a USB flash drive; or Google Drive and Amazon S3; and form an intelligent link that makes a change on one end happen on the other. Now your Google docs and local Office docs are one and the same, accessible physically at home and ethereally online, from wherever you go. Bidirectional sync is backup with benefits. Siber Systems automates backup and file sync jobs with GoodSync, software for Mac and Windows that connects dozens of data sources including Windows Azure, Apple iCloud, USB flash drives, and plain old local files. GoodSync manages the finer details of block level hash-based file synchronization, technological special sauce that Siber engineers implemented to crank out fast-as-lightning file syncs. Now you and Bob share a GoodSync folder, and when you find cool stuff on your computer, you drag it to the folder, and the folder syncs, and Bob looks at your cool stuff on his computer, and Bob smiles.