You get off the plane, head for the hotel room, and spend three hours tweaking
the next day's PowerPoint presentation to perfection. Tired but satisfied, you
turn off your notebook and drift into the arms of Morpheus. The next morning you
wake refreshed and confident. That is, until you switch your notebook on, a puff
of smoke appears, and all signs of digital life cease.
You can rent or borrow another notebook, but what about your perfected
presentation? You should have backed up. OK, it's a story as old as the digital
hills--the moral of the tale is as valid today as it was when said
personal-computing landscape was formed. So now that you've got backup religion,
what's the best way to go about doing it on the road?
Note to Self: Use the Internet
If you don't want to be burdened with extra hardware, backing up over the
Internet is the way to go. Some are lucky enough to work for a company with a
virtual private network (VPN) or FTP site that allows connecting via the Web and
backing up to the company server. Others, such as myself, are not so lucky.
Hence, I've developed a number of tricks for backing up on the road. One of my
favorites is sending myself e-mails with my important files attached. This
generally works fine for me because my important data consists solely of small
word-processing files--generally 50KB or less.
I have several e-mail accounts, so I send these backup messages to an account I
don't check on the road. If you only have a single account, set your notebook
e-mail program so that it doesn't delete the messages from your server. You might
also filter out messages with attachments or over a certain size so you don't
inadvertently download your backups.
If I'm offsite working with larger files, it's time to visit a free online backup
site. One of my favorites is i-filezone from Atrieva, which
offers 10MB of free online storage with password protection and encryption.
Atrieva is now pushing its new driveway service that offers a
more substantial 25MB for free. Another highly regarded online backup service is
Connected Online Backup. It's not free, however--100 MB of
storage costs $6.95 a month.
Old Faithful
Don't neglect the ubiquitous floppy. It's chic these days to deny the old
workhorse's existence or usefulness, but for many of us it's all we need. I do
recommend that if you're relying solely on floppies for backup, always make two
copies onto two separate disks.
Higher Capacity Back-Ups
If your data won't fit in 1.44MB, there are two other large-capacity solutions
I've found roadworthy. The drive I use the most is Iomega's svelte 250MB USB Zip
drive. It has the capacity for most chores, and is very fast. Also, its USB
interface makes it easy to connect to both my notebook and desktop. One tip:
Always remove the disk from the drive before you move it about. At $175 street,
the 250MB Zip USB isn't cheap, but it represents a substantially lower initial
investment than the portable CD-RW drives I'll talk about next. Alas, 250MB Zip
cartridges cost $12 versus $2 for 650MB CD-RW media. If you need lots of
capacity, cost per megabyte can quickly swing in CD-RW's favor.
My two favorite CD-RW drives for traveling are Ricoh's MP8040SE and
Hewlett-Packard's M820e. I could say "my one favorite drive," since they're
identical except for color and logos. Both 4X/4X/20X drives fit easily into a
decent-sized notebook case and use a PC Card SCSI controller (CardBus or 16-bit).
Though neither drive ships with the required cable, you can attach them to a
desktop SCSI adapter as well.
The largest obstacle with portable CD-RW drives is initial cost. Though I've seen
the M820e for under $300 on the street, the Ricoh is closer to $400. If your
notebook lacks a CD-ROM, however, purchasing one of these drives kills two birds
with one stone.
One last word of advice: I always make one backup to the media on hand and send
one over the Internet. That way if the media fails--and believe me, it shall--my
editors will still love me.
Jon L. Jacobi is a longtime writer and technical consultant for PC World and the
author of the Take Note musical ear training program.
