I’ve needed to figure out a decent backup solution for my personal files.  I haven’t tried, but I’ve read about some of the online backup solutions (the ones where for $5/mo you get [x] amount of space) and it trickles the files you choose to some big drive in the sky. 

My interest is there, but I just haven’t acted yet.  But I know something’s coming up where I’m going to lose my mp3′s or my photos or something.  And I don’t spend the time I should to back them up to DVD.

So I needed something to at least make a backup.  I could go out and buy a huge drive, but I keep procrastinating.  So I remembered that my 1 & 1 account has 150GB of disk space.  I love 1 & 1 for hosting.  I have several domains there (including this blog) and they always keep impressing me with new features and stuff.  I joined, what.. sheesh it must have been 5 years ago or so, so it’s not like I’m a new customer.

As I was looking for tools to sync up my local files to the FTP site, I landed on FileZilla.  I’m happy enough.  It’s free, it works, it resumes, and is very easy.

See the extended entry for more info, including sexy screenshots.

One thing that’s nice is that I can specify to only upload newer.  This is cleverly disguised by an option that says “Overwrite if newer”.  Also, it’s resuming was great – I started my initial 29GB upload last night, it worked through the night, and then I suspended my laptop, got to work, and when I resumed the laptop, FileZilla resumed it’s uploading right away.

The top section shows how easy it is to connect to a system — you just put in the server, username, password and click connect.  This is soooo much easier than a dialog box that you have to call up, fill in, and click OK on.  I love intuitive interfaces!

That middle section shows how it’s uploading two files at once.  That’s a definite nice to have.  And check out my upload speed.  Jealous much?

The bottom circle on the first larger screenshot shows that I have 27GB in the queue.  So I guess I’ll be waiting a while.  But it’s nice to know what’s left in the queue.  Too bad it doesn’t aggregate time spent, avg upload speed and estimate how much time is left.

Another nice feature is that I can click around my local files and directories, right-click on something I want to send and choose “Add to Queue” and it’ll just get to it when it’s done doing what it’s currently doing.

Other items of note:

• I tried Winzip 10, with it’s ‘zip and ftp’ feature, but my problem is I don’t want to zip it up locally (taking up disk space), and THEN ftp.  This is 29GB and if something breaks either during the zip or the ftp, I’m kinda stuck.  Or at least I assume I would be.
• I saw a couple of products that let you install a client on 2+ systems, and then you can sync and copy files between them, but I’m not ready to go put in that infrastructure yet.  But it sounds like a good idea — say you have a big hard drive somewhere, and then a couple other machines that have medium to low amount of used drive space.  You can point the other machines to the big one and it keeps it all synced.  This seems like a good way to support low-tech family and friends, also.
• I’m interested in an open source syncing program that would work between windows files/folders and ftp/sftp/scp.  Filezilla is a transfer program, not a syncing system.  I’m very familiar with unix’ rsync and I may look more into that, but if you have an idea, post a comment.