… those that backup and those who will.
Thanks to Mark Hurst, Bit Literacy.
Seriously, you need to be backing up on a continuous basis now, especially if you travel. Sync is the start, but you also need to be backing up one of your sync points at least once a day.
With the cost of computer hardware today and the availability of file and folder sync solutions, it makes great sense to always have a second backup laptop available to you at all times such you can alternate or switch between them based on the emergency (machine is dead) to the having a larger presentation laptop and a smaller travel laptop. The sync solutions that work well for me are Microsoft Live Mesh and the Insync solution with Google Docs. Both of these solutions allow you to setup sub folders of your Documents folder as a complete file store that is synchronised to the other machine(s). In the past I have used the sync solutions to provide full files/folder backup and recovery for moving to a new laptop, but with the large amount of data I now sync that has sometimes taken me up to a week to get back and in operation. I see it now as a much better solution to always have two machines on the go simultaneously.
Live Mesh is more flexible in allowing you to have multiple folders all over your machine that you set to sync across all machines, but it does not offer much cloud storage (5GB but you can peer to peer sync without going to this storage) and there are mild rumours that with the coming Windows 8 that it will be ceased. This has proven very reliable for my situation where I have been syncing 80-120GB across three machines but I am not sure I will be sticking with it.
Insync is a much more interesting tool that allows you to use the universal storage nature of Google Docs to sync all your machines to Google Docs, and due to the low cost of Google’s storage ( free for 1GB, $5 for 20GB, $20 for 80GB, $4,096 for 16TB! per annum) you have ultimately unlimited storage. This service also allows you to share individual files and folders using the sharing functionality of Google Docs, and your remote and mobile access is via standard Google Docs on whatever device. I can see me transitioning to Insync only in the coming months.
Email is just a matter of using a webmail solution or one that offers full sync or IMAP to a PC client such as hosted Exchange solutions (Office365) or ,my favourite at the moment, Google Mail for Apps. Both of those solutions offer a complete storage solution for all your email, contacts and calendaring needs. Google offers more capabilities in being able to share calendars with people outside of your organisation and having access to some very interesting Google Apps platforms solutions such as CRM. Microsoft is definitely more behind in that side of things, and way more costly.
On top of that, using Google Chrome with full browser sync also makes sure that every bookmark and extension is synchronised to every machine I use. The final piece of the puzzle is the use of Lastpass to ensure that I have secure access to every password that I need.
So you have no excuse but to have access to a laptop with all of your data, all of the time, and even have access to your data in the cloud.
One of great things about Google Android mobile phones combined with Google Apps or MS Exchange, is that you do full sync your email, contacts and calendar between your mobile devices and your ‘cloud’, so it is available everywhere. I can heartily recommend any independent or small firm to utilise Google Apps if their employees have a smartphone (Android or iPhone or both!).
However, this sync solution does not cover everything on your smartphone, as it leaves out the SMS/MMS and call records, so if you have a crash like I did a couple of weeks ago that leaves your Android phone clean of any data (I was hacking my phone so I do deserve the loss) then you end up losing your SMS and call record history. What I found though is that there are a number of Android apps that are available that backup your SMS and call records, and one in particular stuck out because of the way that it stores your backup in your Google Mail account. Others tend to store the data on your microSD card or in an archive on a server.
The app I settled on is SMS Backup+ from Jan Berkel, which I have been testing for a couple of weeks and I have found it works – that is it, it works reliably. This software backs up on a schedule (which you can define to manage battery life) using IMAP into your Google Mail account, saving your SMS/MMS under the tag SMS (you can change it to something you want to define) and saving your Call Logs under the ‘Call Logs’ tag (again you can change it to whatever you want). You can also choose from a number of options for the format of the From address (I picked Name+phone number).
This in itself is brilliant and an excellent way of ensuring that you always have copies of messages sent to your phone and the details about all the calls made and received. However this app goes one better that maybe is for the OCD amongst us (me!), in that these Call Logs can be set to populate your Gmail calendar. This gives a fantastic visualisation of all your calls made and received alongside your appointments, and I find this an incredible feature that will prove useful in understanding what has been done when, and with who. It does not record the calls though… that is the wrong side of creepy 
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I have not found something similar for the iPhone as yet but then I am not now using the iPhone everyday as I am a full-on Android convert. I can really recommend you to look at this solution if you are an Android user, particularly if you are a consultant/knowledge worker. Even if you don’t use the calendar integration, this really fills a gap in making sure all of your mobile data is safe, and hooks into your Cloud sync solution.
Being discussed on Friendfeed now, backup strategies – from a post by Robert Scoble. What is your strategy? Mine is in the discussion 
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