Don't let this be you the morning of a final
In addition to whatever backup you do to a physical thumb drive or external hard drive, you should backup your data in the cloud. There are a lot of cloud backup services available, and many offer free versions in addition to the paid plans. Personally, I prefer SugarSync. They offer 2GB of free space, which should be more than enough for all of your law school documents. If you want to backup all of your data including photos and music, you will probably have to go for one of their paid plans.
SugarSync is extremely easy to setup and use, and has some great features besides just the generic backup. Once you sign up for SugarSync you will get a website that is http://YOURUSERNAME.sugarsync.com where you can access all of your files remotely. Of course, at initial setup you won’t have any files. The easiest way to use SugarSync is to download the desktop software which is available for Windows and Mac operating systems, and synchronizing can go cross-platform. With the free 2GB you can synchronize to the cloud and two computers, but when you pay for a plan you can use more computers.
SugarSync's desktop manager is pretty intuitive and easy to use
Once you download the desktop software, simply point it in the direction of your law school folder or folders. That’s it. You’re done. The initial backup may take some time depending on your internet connection and how much data you have, but once it is finished, SugarSync will keep all of your files up to date. After you backup your files, you can use the desktop manager to decide which folders you want to synchronize with other computers. Then you can start exploring some of the cool features that SugarSync offers.
My two favorite features involve photos and my Blackberry. If you upload photos to SugarSync they offer a photo album option for easy photo maintenance. Once all of your photos are in a photo album, SugarSync lets you publish your photos directly to Facebook. Not a very necessary feature, but cool nonetheless.
Easily manage which folders are synchronized across computers
Finally, SugarSync offers a mobile option. That means I can access my SugarSync files on my Blackberry and view compatible files right on the device. If I wasn’t so cheap and had a document editor, I could edit the files from my Blackberry and the changes would be synchronized to all of the computers where that file is synchronized.
Setting up SugarSync or any other backup software is quick, painless and often free. Go do it now and thank me later.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Back it up twice. If I was still in law school, I would have a Dropbox account (2GB free) and would put everything for law school in the Dropbox folder. Also, I currently use Backblaze, which does automatic continuous backup to the cloud of essentially everything but applications and OS files. It’s $5 a month or $50 per year, free download of your files, or they will overnight you a DVD of some files for $99 or a hard drive of all your files for $169.
@John Infante, Backing up twice is definitely a good idea. I currently back up to a portable hard drive in addition to SugarSync. Backblaze sounds like a very good deal at only $50 a year. How much data does that cover?
Great advice!
I had my computer fritz out on me just this last Monday (four days ago) before my first class of the new semester where I had already done weeks worth of briefs.
Fortunately, I back up using Norton Ghost which images the entire disk drive on a scheduled basis and does incremental changes are you see fit.
Simply booted to the recover disk and had everything restored in under two hours without any loss.
I have a US 1tb drive that I do weekly full backups and nightly personal file backups. Said backups are also then mirrored to an offsite FTP location for disaster recovery.
Really nice thing is that you can push the saved image to any computer you like? I can completely replace the drive with a new one and push the image to it, push it to a different computer, etc. I can even mount the image remotely via VMware and use it virtually if I so choose while hardware is being repaired.
I third (fourth? fifth?) this notion. I just had to send my computer in for repair of an LCD problem. I backed everything up before I sent it, but didn’t have to worry too much because I use two automatic backup-to-web programs (one came with my EEEPC and one comes from Microsoft– both free).
Fortunately, I’ve never been in a situation where my notes have spontaneously disappeared/become corrupted/whatevered, but knowing that those backups are there greatly reduces my stress level.
Agreed. My online backup to the cloud has saved me more than once.
As resident Luddite, let me just say: nibs & ink haven’t failed me yet. Outlines prepared with TeX are very small plain text files that I e-mail to my (effectively) limitless gmail account.
I agree with backing up in the cloud – that way you can access from any computer with internet access. My school laptop died this week (classes start on Tuesday – yikes!) and thankfully I have everything in GoogleDocs and Dropbox. This way you don’t need any extra hardware to get back up and running. (Although Adam’s solution is best if you’re replacing an entire system, for sure! What a pain to reinstall all your software, remember all of your passwords and bookmarks, etc.)
@ouij, You can’t be a Luddite while outlining in TeX, man. That’s f’ing progressive. When I’m planning on selling my outlines, I always outline in TeX :D
Amen to that. I’ve lost a hard drive twice since I’ve been in law school – the second time I was running Syncplicity and was back up and running with all my data on a new laptop the same day.
The nearly instantaneous backup also let me get rid of the flash drives I was constantly using to swap files between various computers. Folder sharing also allowed my moot court team to collaborate more effectively on our brief.
@Joshua Auriemma, Can we have a LaTeX for Lawyers post sometime this year? I’m dying to know if anyone has made the most recent revision of BibTeX work for Bluebook-style citations. If BibTeX could bluebook, then I would be a happy man–I could have tables of authorities in my own outlines!
I hope most students are backing up, but like you said, if you backup to a thumb drive and your laptop bag gets stolen, you lose both your data and your backup.
Pick a backup solution… look for the features that you need (do you need to synchronize amongst multiple computers? do you need to share files with others?). You should be able to find everything you’re looking for for $50 – $100 / month.
@ouij, Good suggestion. I don’t know that anyone except us will be interested in such a post, but I’ll kick around the idea :p
I’d really like to see something on this topic too. As if I don’t have enough to do already, I want to learn LaTeX so I can use more plaintxt in law school. Ah, footnotes.
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