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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iTS, Internet Tools, iTunes

Backing up iTunes

Just like every machine with moving parts, the hard drive that holds your iTunes library will eventually stop working. Read that line again - I didn't say might stop working, but will stop. It's going to happen, so be prepared.

Mark Nichols at zanshin recently wrote about his own experience of swapping and burning CDs and DVDs to back up iTunes purchases (something we blogged about awhile ago). That got me thinking about strategies for iTunes backups.

Time Machine and SuperDuper make it easy to execute local backups at regular intervals, but that's only half the battle. A good off-site backup of your mission-critical files (and I don't know about you, but for me, music is definitely considered mission-critical) is essential. You can go with services like Mozy or CrashPlan.

Personally, I've been very happy with Bandwagon. For only $12US per month, they provide the means to backup to either Amazon S3 or your own FTP server.

So, what's your solution? Please share in the comments, and save Mark another day of swapping discs in and out of his optical drive.

Filed under: Software, Odds and ends, Internet Tools

CrashPlan: Cross-Platform Off-Site Backup

CrashPlan is a cross-platform, off-site backup solution. Basically, their software allows you to schedule remote backups to a separate server. What makes Crashplan different, however, is that the offsite server is a machine you choose. So for instance, if you have two computers you can set one to back up to the other. But even better, if you have access to an internet connected computer at another location (e.g. at work or even a friend's computer), you can install CrashPlan on that computer and then use it as a backup option (over the internet). Since the software runs on Windows and Linux as well as OS X, the off-site machine can be running any of these OSes.

CrashPlan comes in two editions: the regular one allows backup once a day for $20 and the Pro version allows "real-time backup + unlimited versioning" for $60. Unfortunately, from what I can determine from their FAQ, it appears that one license only allows you to backup on one direction. So if you want to backup two computers to each other, you must buy two licenses. Nonetheless, this looks like an interesting option, particularly given its cross-platform functionality.

[Via theappleblog]

[Edit: Corrected the pricing]

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