Note: This is the first in a series of posts taking a long-term look at the Mirra Personal Server (MPS). The folks at Mirra were kind enough to provide me with an evaluation unit to test. In this and subsequent posts, I'll be looking at the MPS in terms of setup, backup functionality, and file sharing capabilities. These will tend to be long-ish posts.

I spoke to a users group yesterday afternoon - something I do every few months - in a Q&A session to try and address concerns about a number of topics including internet security, PC maintenance, and assorted other topics. Inevitably, the question of how to back up your data came up - it always does. In the 20+ years I've been writing and teaching about personal computers, I always quote Marc's Three Basic Rules of Computing:

1. Save. Early and Often. When you create a new file, save it. Every time you stop to think, take a sip of coffee (or your beverage of choice), answer the phone, whatever… hit Control-S and save your work. Do it often enough and it becomes a reflex.

2. Back up your work. Save it somewhere other than just on your hard disk. I don't care where - just do it. Hard drives are mechanical devices - they fail - usually at the least appropriate time (Murphy rules). Back up to an external hard disk, a CD, a DVD, a USB flash drive, a server… just back up anything you neither want nor can afford to recreate.

3. Don't Panic. If you follow rules number one and two, when something bad happens (and it more than likely will at one point or another in your computing experience), don't panic - you have saved your work and backed it up. Worst case scenario - you have to rebuild your system and reinstall your software - that's easy. Recreating all of your data is not.

I asked for a show of hands from the group (about 35 people) asking how many backed up. About 30 hands went up. Then I asked how many backed up regularly. About half of the hands went down. Then I asked how many backed up weekly. Another 50% reduction. Daily? One. One person out 35 backed up daily.

Than I asked how many of the attendees had suffered a catastrophic loss of data at one point or another. About half of the hands went back up, accompanied by sheepish grins and looks of embarrassment. How, I asked, can you have lost everything and not learned the value of backing up? No one had a very good answer, except the lone gentleman who backs up daily. "Only had to lose everything once to learn my lesson," he said.

OK… I'm not trying to get on a soapbox here. I know that backing up is a pain. Backup software is often hard to use (especially for home and small business users who don't love tinkering with software and hardware). Performing routine maintenance chores (whether on your PC or your car) is a bother. And, unlike the Jiffy Lube you last visited who's kind enough to mail you a postcard (or, more recently, send you an e-mail) when your car is due for another oil change, there's nothing automatic about getting a reminder to scan your system for virus infections or spyware or to back up your stuff.

The makers of antivirus and anti-spyware software have gone to great lengths to make their products as automatic as possible. They check for updates silently, they scan daily and the user never has to think about performing these chores. Too bad operating systems don’t offer the same transparency with regards to backup. Microsoft has finally gotten religion about automating software updates with Windows XP SP2. Apple’s had the ability to update your system automatically for a long time. But backing up precious data gets, as Rodney used to say “no respect”.

A number of technology innovations have made it easier to back up personal data over the years. Today, with virtually every new PC including a CD-R drive and the ubiquitous availability of blank CD-R media (I actually saw blank CD-Rs at a convenience store recently), backing up is easy and cheap. Windows XP includes a basic but perfectly adequate backup utility that will get the job done and there are literally dozens of shareware and commercial backup programs available.

Another recent innovation has been the bundling of automatic backup software with external USB and FireWire hard drives. I’ve seen a number that include the excellent Retrospect software I’ve used and recommended for years. Iomega includes an automatic backup utility with their drives (fixed and removable) that also works well. Both of these applications not only back up files on a regular basis but are capable of saving every revision to a file if you wish.

With all of this innovation, there’s still a problem in today’s world of the multiple-PC home or small business. Every machine needs to have the right tools and user training and discipline to ensure adequate data backups are being performed. And that has proved to be unrealistic at best, even in my home where we have three PCs and a Mac, each of which has a CD burner and a network administrator (me). You see, no matter how much I harp on my wife and kids to back up their stuff, it’s simply something they “forget” to do.

Not too long ago, Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for the consumer and small business market began showing up. Some of these devices were simply a hard drive with an Ethernet port and just enough firmware to allow them to show up on the local area network. Others were more sophisticated and included a management interface (usually access through the browser) to configure and administer the device. Prices for the units, as with virtually everything in the PC world (except iPods), dropped quite quickly.

There was just one problem. Very few people bought these devices. Why? I suspect the reasons are pretty much the same as those I cited earlier for not backing up.

”It’s a bother.” “It’s too expensive.” “I keep forgetting to do that.”

My keenly honed marketing instincts lead me to suspect there’s another reason. There’s nothing cool or exciting about backups. An iPod is cool. A new digital camera, personal video recorder, PDA, smart phone… these are cool. We’ll invest hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in these exciting products and spend hours learning how to use them. But we never think about the fact that every one of these “toys” creates more data. Data that we should be backing up.

So how do you make backing up into a cool thing? The folks at Mirra have figured it out, I think. Well, maybe that’s a misstatement. What the Mirra Personal Server does is provide the ability to do something really cool - share your files (digital photos, music, artwork, whatever) with anyone you choose, over the web, with solid security and point-and-click simplicity. And, as a bonus, all your stuff gets backed up - automatically and in real time. Now that is cool.

Next: Mirra Personal Server setup and installation.