Each and every day, you are creating and managing more and more information. From your Google Reader and Email accounts, to sending and receiving files and of course to blogging about your experiences. The question isn’t how much information you create, but rather if it’s protected and secure. The information you store electronically is the lifeblood of your personal eBrand. It allows you to promote your brand through various marketing pieces visually.
I work at the leading “Information Infrastructure” company, EMC, which provides solutions to enterprises, mid-size companies and small businesses. We purchased Iomega, which many of you will remember as offering external storage devices such as Zip drives and Jazz Drives. This post will have a slight bias due to my affiliation with EMC and it’s subsidiaries. My 2 years of experience at EMC has made me almost paranoid about my data, so today I’m going to give you all the resources you need in order to backup and protect your personal eBrand.
What you need
1) An external hard drive: Storage is relatively cheap per gigabyte right now and the ratio of price per gigabyte will always decrease. Along these lines, you must understand that we will always need more storage, so we are willing to pay more money for storage because file sizes keep increasing and over our lifespan it adds up. I own a Western Digital external hard drive at 80 gigabytes (always subtract a few gigabytes from what you receive because of formatting, so it’s about 72). An external hard drive allows you to freely backup your data by connecting the drive to your computer and copying files back and forth. You can always retrieve the files but it’s a manual process.
Recommendation: $250 for 1 TeraByte at Best Buy (1TB=1024 GB)
2) Automatic online backup: EMC employees received a free subscription to Mozy, our online backup service. I just subscribed this weekend because I’m typically a slow adopter until a disaster hits and it did about 3 months ago for me when my Sony VAIO broke (I backed up don’t worry). Mozy is a truly remarkable service and ranks #1 in Google for “Online Backup,” which is a big deal. I recommend Mozy because it automatically backs up your data in certain intervals, such that you don’t have to worry about manually uploading or transferring files periodically. Mozy acts as a separate and virtual remote hard drive (In tech they call this “the cloud”). Mozy works with Mac and PC.
Recommendation: $5 a month for the Mozy Home Edition (save 10% using the promo code: SDCMOZY)
3) Manual online backup: There are other online backup services on the web and most aren’t very good or trustworthy. I subscribe to Xdrive, which is owned by AOL, and you get 5 GB of online storage for free. The difference between this service and Mozy is that you can access these files from any location, whether it’s at work (unless their is a firewall) or at your friends computer, etc. The ADrive just came out, which gives you 50GB of storage, but I just don’t trust my data with some unknown brand, so I can’t recommend it to you either.
Recommendation: FREE 5GB from Xdrive
4) Blog backup: Many of you consider your blog as being your personal brand and for some, it just might be. If you value your blog and I certainly do, then you should back it up. There are two ways you can achieve this. If you have a WordPress.com blog, you can casually download the XML file by going to your dashboard and clicking “Manage” and then “Export.” The other way you can accomplish this is by using a somewhat new service called BlogBackupOnline.com. Once you login to your blog account by using this service, it will automatically save all of your posts. It’s hard to even understand how important this is until you lose a post or your entire blog.
Recommendation: Using BlogBackupOnline.com and save your blog XML files once a month
Conclusion
The proper mix of all these backup services and products will make you spend less time worrying and more time enjoying life. The information we create and manage is so vital to our brands that if you aren’t reading this post, hopefully a friend will forward it to you. If you have any other recommendations, please leave them in the comments field. For $300 this year, you can have a safe brand. Doesn’t that sound like a bargain?
