Making Cedric the Squirrel work harder, faster, stronger for you!

Disclaimer/Caveat: This is a personal blog, and all opinions within are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employers, Memset.  I provide support for the SquirrelSave service and therefore everything you read here is merely a personal view rather than official Memset opinion or documentation.

Online backups versus traditional backup methodology

Over the past few years, I’ve found online backup systems to be absolutely invaluable alongside backing up to DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as using external hard drives.  An online backup account allows you to instantly retrieve a deleted file from the Internet much faster than it takes to find the right discs, put them into the drive (or hook up the right external drive) and then copy the files across.

Additionally, with historical online backups, you can delete a file – forget about it for 30 days or more, and then suddenly realise that you need it again.  Big problem if you’re simply dumping/overwriting the contents of a backup on a hard drive.  Your physical backup may also die when you least expect it.  DVDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life, and hard drives are quite prone to failing at any time for any reason.  Online backup services could be seen, in my eyes at least, to be like an extra insurance policy against both your computer and your physical media backups from failing.

Where SquirrelSave steps in

The service that I provide support for, SquirrelSave, has been successfully running for the past few years.  The datacentres in which data is stored are based in Reading, UK.  All data to and from the datacentres is encrypted between your computer and the backup server, and the filesystem in which your backups are stored is also encrypted.  But the real beauty and major advantage of SquirrelSave, for me, over all the other online backup providers (Jungle Disk, Mozy, Humyo, Carbonite, Backblaze, etc.) is that it’s based around existing open source software.  SquirrelSave essentially provides a GUI wrapper around SSH, rsync and SCP.

With SquirrelSave you define your Include and Exclude lists within the GUI (SquirrelSave ships with a set of sensible defaults – generally your C:\Users\<username> directory is set for backup, and many temporary/system directories are set for exclusion[1]) and then hit Start Full Backup.  This kicks off the long backup process which can take several days to several weeks depending on how fast your broadband provider’s upload speed allows[2].  You can specify a limit to the amount of bandwidth SquirrelSave uses if you find that Cedric the Squirrel is feasting a bit too much on your uploads.

Examining backed up data or restoring is simplicity in itself.  While SquirrelSave does not provide a web based interface for this, it does include the WinSCP client that makes it easy to navigate through the backup server directories to recover your files.  It is then simply a case of dragging and dropping directories and/or files over to your hard drive to restore them.  SquirrelSave also has multiple historical backups, so that if you do delete a file from your machine, you can restore a file from 2,4,6,12,14, etc. days ago (the historical data doubles each time).

I’ve used SquirrelSave myself both at work and at home to recover files that I’ve been stupid enough not to back up manually first.  The most recent case was when I had to reinstall the Macbook due to serious rainbow beach ball issues upon start-up.  I recovered all of my documents, SSH keys, etc. within a matter of minutes of installing the SquirrelSave client.  Note: the Mac SquirrelSave client is still in development/testing at this time.

SquirrelSave Tip #1

If you see “Some files not completely transferred (23)” when performing a SquirrelSave backup, don’t worry.  This indicates that somewhere within your Include list, you’re backing up temporary files which existed when SquirrelSave (or rather, rsync) was compiling it’s list of files to back up.  By the time the backup started, those files were deleted or moved.

Restoring files to a new PC

There’s no right or wrong way of restoring files to your new/replacement PC.  But there are several ways of doing so.  My suggestion would be to ensure that you keep a backup of your local SquirrelSave config directory.  This is located (on Vista and 7 machines) under C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\SquirrelSave.  I’d make sure that you’re using something like WinZip, PowerArchiver or any ZIP utility to back up the contents of this directory and keep it safe.  Not a problem if you forget to do this, as you can restore without this data – but any customisations made to your Include and Exclude tabs will be lost.

On the new PC,  if you’ve kept the config files, then restore them to the same path as was on your old PC.  Install SquirrelSave.  If you don’t have the config files, you’ll be prompted to login and run the configuration file from your SquirrelSave online web account.  If this is the case it is VITAL that you pause/select backup later when prompted.  You do NOT want SquirrelSave to start backing up your new PC just yet.

Once SquirrelSave is installed and configured, you can then use the View Backup button to connect to your files and then copy them over to your new PC. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not want SquirrelSave to back up these files again, or delete the contents of the current directory hierarchy on the backup server – make sure you copy these files back to the same paths on your new PC as before.  If you put files into different directories, SquirrelSave will think these are new and back them up.  Eventually the files in the old folders on the backup server will be deleted.  So files and folders must be like-for-like on the new PC if you wish to avoid these issues.

Once the files have been restored, you can unpause SquirrelSave and it’ll start to back up your new PC.

SquirrelSave Tip #2

The more advanced SquirrelSave user can use any SCP client to connect to their backup store.  Your private key is stored as ssh_key in the config directory (see above), and you can use this to connect to the backup store (the host that you need to connect to is formed from your SquirrelSave username, followed by .backup.squirrelsave.com).

There you have it.  SquirrelSave is a safe, easy-to-use, online backup service which costs just £4.95 + VAT per month (with 30 day money back guarantee) for unlimited storage.  While it is offered and supported on the Windows platform (XP, Vista or 7) at the moment, it WILL be expanded to the Mac and Linux platforms in due course.

If you need assistance with SquirrelSave, please do NOT contact me directly here – please use the official support email of support@squirrelsave.com.  We aim to reply within 2 hours of receiving your email (Monday-Friday in office hours).

Footnotes

[1] Users of Microsoft Outlook will need to explicitly declare the path to their PST files as SquirrelSave exlcludes the AppData path by default (this is because it can contain a LOT of unnecessary data).  To backup Outlook data on a Windows Vista/7 machine, you’d need to include C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook within your SquirrelSave Include tab.

That said, I HIGHLY recommend Outlook users consider buying a copy of AJ Systems OutBack Plus 97 which can bundle Outlook configuration and PST files into a single file, as well as other Windows application preferences.  The resulting file can then be backed up by SquirrelSave quickly and easily.

[2] I’ve found that Virgin Media customers are seriously disadvantaged due to the peak usage caps that they place on customers.  I would advise that Virgin customers seek another broadband provider if you’re wanting SquirrelSave or other online backup provider – regardless of whoever you choose, you will see major delays in uploading your data versus other providers who do not impose such limits.