I knew someone who several years ago wrote a book … on his laptop … for a year … and never backed it up or retained a print copy. You can probably guess what happened next.

Almost as bad are these folks who relied on a cloud-based company to store backups of episodes of the children’s show they produced. One malicious employee later, and (per the Register),

CyberLynk had fired an employee called Michael Scott Jewson and, according to a Honolulu courthouse news report, one month after being given the boot, Jewson accessed CyberLynk servers and wiped out 304GB of data, including 14 Zodiac Island episodes, a full season of the show.

The Zodiac Island producers were based in Hawaii, and Cyberlynk in Wisconsin. A cloud-based service is probably a very good solution for a television production team to share assets among disperse groups all working on a television show, but as a primary backup as well? Seriously?

Especially considering the small size of the dataset involved. Local backup of 304gb would have been dirt cheap. Having a cloud-based backup for convenience or as an alternative in case of a local disaster is a good idea, but I can’t see ever giving up local backups entirely unless the dataset is too large to do so meaningfully (if they were dealing with 100s of terabytes, then maybe I’d understand why they weren’t doing local backups as well, but 304gb…puhleeze).

Photojojo is usually a pretty interesting photo-related site/blog, but they had me shaking their head with their effusive recommendation of Backblaze for computer backup,

Backblaze is the best online backup tool we’ve ever used.

Why we love it:

• No DVDs, no hard drives to mess with
• Backups happen invisibly as soon as files are added
• $5/month, no matter how big your hard drive
• Won’t slow down your computer. Really.
• Your online backup can’t be lost or stolen
• Download your backed up files anytime (of course) or have them overnighted to you on DVDs or a hard drive (spiffy!)

Sigh. Okay, here’s the deal — if you really think these service that offer unlimited data backup for ridiculously low prices are sustainable, you might as well go all the way and send your life savings to Bernie Madoff for those consistent 8-10 percent annual returns.

And, no, I’m not suggesting Backblaze or other services like it are fraudulent. In fact I give Backblaze credit because they are very upfront about their business model,

How Can You Backup Everything Online For Just $5 per Month?
We have developed a highly efficient storage system that enables us to optimize how we store data. And we’re counting on some people having a lot of data and others not very much, but that it will work out on average.

Backblaze also has some interesting upselling options including offering to send users DVDs and hard drive backups of their data which is a very nice option to have.

Who knows, it could work out for them. But this is an extremely crowded space at the moment and we’re presumably talking about extremely important files. I’m not sure I’d want to count on a service that’s counting on a certain usage pattern and that is competing against any number of firms counting on exactly the same thing.

Personally I think asking “what’s the cheapest online backup option” is not a good way to think about backups. Rather, I’d start by imagining all of your data has been wiped out today — how much would you be willing to pay to recover that data? Then discount that price over time based on your income and other backup options you’re using.

Maybe ultimately backing up all your data is really only worth $5/month. If so, Backblaze certainly seem like an interesting service to explore. Otherwise, I’d look elsewhere (I’m using an Amazon S3-based system, but the caveat is I pay $50-$60/month for the 300+gb I’ve got stored there).

The Long Now Blog has some excellent advice on how to increase the odds that those pictures and documents you’re regularly backing up (you are regularly backing up your data, right?) will still be readable decades from now,

Format. Always try to use the most common and least proprietary file formats when saving your files. If you have important email files that you would like to preserve, save them outside of your email platform as simple text files. For other documents, it has been recommended that they be saved in the PDF or PDF/Archive format. Though the PDF format is technically considered to be proprietary, the fact that the source code is available and the PDF format is now universally accepted, it is a good solution for keeping your files and their context intact. It is important to remember that for image and sound files, the larger, higher quality files are much more readable and can be used in many more ways than files that have been reduced or compressed. Compressing files for storage or emailing causes significant data loss, so avoid this when possible.