My Google account was restored to me about a month ago. I thought it would only be fair to let people know, since my little rant a few posts back. I’m still in the dark as to what happened and I received a pretty vague email from Google simply informing me that they have “re-enabled” my account. They then ended the email with “We look forward to having you as a Google Accounts user again”. That made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Nevertheless, I lost my account once and I could lose it again. This time, however, I will be ready. You see, I’m that guy who always preaches backup, backup, backup, and never actually backs anything up. But that was the old me. The ignorant me. The hypocritical me!

Let me show you how I’ve changed and maybe, just maybe, I can inspire you to follow in my footsteps and become, as I have, a born again backuper.

The first thing I did was choose a backup location on my home computer (I split my time pretty evenly between my home PC, work PC, and laptop). I made a folder on my F drive called My Files. I recommend not using the same physical hard drive as your operating system, if possible. If you don’t have multiple hard drives, then C:\My Files will do just fine. Everything I want to backup will live in this folder and its subfolders.

Before I get into the intricacies of my ultimate data loss prevention plan, allow me to divulge to you my backup tool of choice. It’s called Carbonite and it’s $54.95 per year. I know, I know, it’s not free, but it’s good –and when it comes to my data, I want good. I don’t want to turn this post into a Carbonite commercial, but I will tell you that Carbonite offers unlimited backup space (I’m pushing 90 gigabytes already), runs in the background so you never know it’s there, and has all the security bells and whistles you could want, including good encryption to and from their servers. The backup / restore options are very user friendly too.

Still here? Good. Let’s get back to business. Inside the My Files folder are the subfolders My Audio, My Backup, My Documents, My Dropbox, My eBooks, My Music, My Photos, My Stuff, and My Videos. Your folders can be completely different, depending on what you want to backup. I will go over some of these folders in a little more detail, but first, look at the picture to the right. You will see either a red or green circle on each folder. The circles tell you that those particular folders have been chosen for backup by Carbonite. The colors tell you whether or not they’ve actually been backed up yet; green means yes and red means no. Carbonite constantly monitors these folders for changes and when it sees that a file has been added or modified, it flags it for backup. This is key because, as you will see, these folders are in a constant state of flux.

Most of the subfolders in My Files are just the standard My Documents folders in Windows. I simply moved their default location to My Files. You can learn how to do that here.

Most of the Folders are self-explanatory. My Documents contain my documents, My Videos contain my videos, etc… My iTunes library is in My Music folder, so anything I add to iTunes will be placed there. Like I said, most of these are pretty obvious, but there are a couple of folders that I would like to go over in a little more detail.

You may notice that My Dropbox resides in the My Files folder. Again, I just moved its default location, which can easily be done from the Dropbox preferences menu. I’ve talked about Dropbox before, here and here. It’s a special folder that syncs its contents to all of your other computers that have Dropbox installed on them. Now, here’s the beautiful part; let’s say that I’m on vacation with my laptop when inspiration strikes. Perhaps I write a 5000 word short story or maybe I took some fantastic photos of a once in a lifetime event. Whatever it may be, I may not feel safe with the file(s) sitting on my laptop, so I simply drop them into My Dropbox folder and off they go to all my computers. That is a decent backup in and of itself, but now it goes a step further because, once those files reach my home PC, Carbonite grabs them and backs them up to their servers. Redundancy is the name of the game in the realm of backups.

The My Backup folder is probably the most important folder in My Files. This folder consists of Cameron, Contacts, Documents, Email, Evernote, Lightroom, and WordPress. Let me go through them one by one.

• The first folder, Cameron, is a folder containing little things that my daughter has done over the years (videos, drawings, poems, etc…).
• The next folder is Contacts, where I backup all of my contacts from my Gmail account. (Tip: My Gmail contacts are also synced with my Blackberry and imported into Thunderbird for redundancy.)
• The next folder is Documents where I store mostly old documents that I can’t bring myself to delete and that I would never need quick access to.
• Then comes Email. Here’s how this works, I made sure IMAP was enabled for my Gmail account (Settings >> Forwarding and POP/IMAP). I then configured Thunderbird, which is Mozilla’s email client, to download all email from my Gmail account. The next step is important; I changed the default location of my email profile in Thunderbird to the F:\My Files\My Backups\Email folder. You can learn how to do this here. The email profile contains all of the downloaded email, as well as all future email. All I do now is leave Thunderbird running in the background to retrieve all of my email; Carbonite does the rest.
• The Evernote folder contains the database for all of my Evernote entries (mentioned here). Evernote, like Dropbox, syncs to all of my computers and to Evernote’s own servers. Moving the database to My Files and having Carbonite back them up just adds one more layer of protection.
• My Lightroom folder contains the database to all the changes made to my Photographs (which reside in F:\My Files\My Photos). I lost this file once and I never want to lose it again. You can tell Adobe Lightroom to backup to any directory that you would like.
• And lastly, there is the WordPress folder which houses the database and other files for this little blog. The latest version of Worpress, however, allows me schedule an automated backup which then emails me a copy, which then gets retrieved by Thunderbird and backed up by Carbonite. Isn’t this fun? So in all reality, I don’t really need this folder. But if I haven’t mentioned it before, I like redundancy.

That pretty much wraps it up, …so far. This is sort of a work in progress. Two things I didn’t mention were my Google Calendar and my Google Docs. I haven’t found a good, automated way to back either of these up yet, so I do it manually from work every so often. You can learn how to do this here. I then take the files and plop them into my Dropbox folder at work. From there, they are whisked away to my home PC and then, …well, you know the rest of the story.

“Backup, backup, backup,” I say.