One of the goals I wanted to achieve during paternity leave, in those brief in-between moments when both my wife and son were asleep or otherwise occupied with one another's breasts or digestive systems, was catching up on the various 'round-the-house tasks that'd managed to pile up over the year or so since we moved to Seattle. One of them was coming up with a solid backup strategy for all of the freaking computers around here.

We have four actual machines here in the house -- two desktops and two laptops -- and I'm ashamed to admit that until now, they've all been flying pretty much by the seat of their individual pants, backup-wise. I'd tried, when we moved in here, to set up backups using the standard Windows backup-and-restore tools, but they were crude, surprisingly blunt instruments (e.g., Back Up Entire Machine, Back Up Only My Documents, and, well, that was about it -- which, for a D: drive guy like me, with lots to back up and lots not to back up (like the high-definition video captures from my camcorder, for instance -- those files are huge, and since I use an HDV camera, I've got the source material archived on tape already)), and they (the backup jobs) never really worked, anyway. Full machine backups over a wireless network are an all but entirely pointless prospect; pushing gigs of information over a wireless connection (which is our only option here -- only one machine, a Windows Media Center PC connected to the television, is connected directly to the router) can take several hours, and since our laptops were generally not even turned on at the moments I'd selected for daily backups, their data would pile up, backup jobs would fail because of huge data queues combining with general wireless-network flakiness, and the whole thing, well, just never seemed to come together.

And for someone like me, not having a backup system firmly in place can be a tremendous source of stress and psychic weight. Back in Orange County, where I worked as a consultant, life was simple: I'd code all day at my office, then push a big, shiny BACKUP button on my Maxtor external, straighten up for a few minutes while the drive did its thing, disconnect it, tuck it into my bag, and go home -- piece o' cake, all backed up. But then mine was the only machine around: now, here, with several active machines (including that same one) needing to be backed up regularly, and the drive's built-in software being unable to handle much more than a single USB data source, the problem suddenly became, well, a lot more complicated -- something I finally had to spend my free time, which I try to reserve for idling and/or drinking beer, actively thinking about.

Indeed it often surprises me just how complicated these kinds of things become -- the very things the marketing people assure us, repeatedly, will be extraordinarily simple, like backups. I have friends, all of them quite savvy computer-wise, whose entire blogs and/or Twitter streams seem devoted to lamenting just how big a pain in the ass using computers can so often be. I can't tell you how many boring cocktail-party conversations I've seen spring magically to life on the mere mention of some computer-related annoyance -- the more obscure or idiosyncratic, the better. "I love my iPhone -- but it doesn't copy-paste! WTF?!" Or, "Why do all the goddamn bullets disappear when I save my Word doc as a PDF?" "How do I get rid of all this spam?" And so on. We all deal with this stuff. It's become the universal headache.

Take digital photos. Rebecca and I both take them -- lots of them, like everyone else. So in an attempt to fend off disorganization and chaos, I proudly set up, last year, a share on a drive I designated the Media Drive (connected to the aforementioned Media Center PC), and instructed Rebecca to save all of her digital photos to that machine, and not to her laptop, when she imported them from her camera. "Sure," she said, no problem -- but then a month later, she'd either forget to do so, or forget quite how or where I'd set up this particular share, or what a share was, or worse, would actually try to use it, but then be shut down big-red-x style because of some obscure and apparently impossible-to-solve problem Windows seems to have remembering mapped-network-drive usernames and passwords -- so the pictures in question, many of them brilliant, print-worthy moments I'd love to have had copies of myself, would wind up living in obscurity on her laptop, usually (but not always) in the My Documents hierarchy somewhere, and I'd have to remember to go looking for them manually somehow. Sure I could set up some sort of a reminder, say, in my Google Calendar (and don't even get me started on the subject of calendar sharing), to tell me to do so -- but this was 2009, for God's sake! Why didn't all this stuff just fucking work?

Fast-forward to a month or so ago, when, in MSDN Magazine, I happened to run across a brief little piece about an app called SyncBack. The writer, a fellow Microsoft hack, had a lot to say about it, but almost nothing that couldn't be translated as either "easy-to-use" or "versatile" or "awesome," so despite my previous experiences with backup applications, I decided to give it a try. And I'm happy to report than SyncBack has, in a word, become my new best friend. SyncBack and I are in love. Not only has SyncBack solved all of my backup problems, but it's also helped me devise a way move files selectively, and without my intervention, between machines -- quite handy, actually, with the Media Center PC, which should really only expose a subset of the digital stuff we collect, not all of it (because indeed, most of it's pretty boring -- even to us).

Here's a sketch outlining out network topology here at the house (and including the Web server I manage off-site, which I use to power this site, along with a few dozen other sites for my clients), and how SyncBack helps me get everything collected and put into its right place:

1: Copy all media (photos, etc.) to the desktop PC (hourly)
2: Copy all media to the desktop PC (hourly)
3: Download all data (FTP, daily)
4: Back up selected files and directories (daily)
5: Back up selected files and directories (daily)
6: Back up selected files and directories (daily)
7: Copy some (not all -- only the good) media to the Media Center PC (hourly)
8: Back up all media (daily)
9: Offload to DVD for longer-term storage (monthly)

This all works, dare I say, perfectly. With things set up like this, Rebecca can import her digital photos onto her laptop, disconnect, and get on with her life, and the SyncBack process (which runs on all four machines, each responsible for its own set of backup- and copy-related tasks) takes care of the rest, pushing the photos over to the desktop PC, where they can be catalogued, tagged, etc., by me (I use Adobe Bridge, by the way), and automatically copied downstairs to the Media Center PC for the televised enjoyment of ourselves and our captive guests. Backups happen also, of course, and because I opted for the pro version ($50), I get e-mail confirmation of every backup task, which I filter appropriately, watching for failures, with Gmail. If I happen to download something interesting with my laptop, I just download it, and then the next time SyncBack runs on that machine, the downloaded thing gets copied over to the desktop, and ends up somewhere on the backup drive as well. The source code I write, while relatively well-protected by Subversion, now gets backed up daily, too. Edited HD video gets copied downstairs as well, and captures get left behind. SyncBack even downloads changes from the Web server, over FTP, and then once a month or so, I offload everything to one or more DVDs (which SyncBack takes care of to boot).

Task complete, balance restored -- psychic weight lifted. Now we can concentrate purely on creating stuff, not on figuring out where and how to store it -- and on drinking all this excellent beer, knowing everything just works. Thanks, SyncBack! You rule. I love you.