Backup, Back down

I have, at various times in my career, been tasked to look into the viability and functional specifications of backup systems for domestic computing. There are some pretty good technical solutions out there but this is never an easy sell to the end user. Until you have had a bit of kit go bang, you can't really appreciate the trauma of loosing its contents and capabilities. Would everyone really buy car insurance if it wasn’t compulsory or would they gamble on their driving prowess or the grace of St Christopher?

Even now, when the personal generation and collation of digital media in ever greater quantity on our computers suggests we have more to loose, few indulge in regular back up activities and fewer still are prepared to pay to do so.

To this end I am not sure that backup is something that can or should be sold to the domestic users (there are all sort of compulsions on the corporate world). Rather it perhaps makes sense to charge for retrieval or restoration.
Save for the obvious privacy paranoia (not to belittle these concerns – but this isn’t the time or place for that discussion), how compelling would a free automatic system backup service sound to an end user in this always-on broadband world? Delta indexing can avoid lengthy consumption of system resources for such purposes especially if the service was active from the moment a new system was unboxed and plugged in.
Simplicity is the key to end user adoption so Dell (named purely as exemplar of OEM provider) and their partner ISPs could have everything pre-configured.
The end user is then charged at the point of trauma for retrieval – it sounds cruel, but this is exactly the time in which the immense value of backup becomes blatantly obvious. Pricing would have to be none exploitative however.

Of course if backup were to be such an inherent system component, the model of adding a couple of quid a month to ISP charge for the piece of mind of free retrieval may also be viable.
Trustworthy computing anyone?

There are some steps towards a sense of data security. Photographic memory may be saved by Flickr, conversations forever archived in Gmail and MP3s written to CD (lets not get into a DRM debate now) but in many cases its not just the loss of media that can cause issues, and its not just computing disasters that we can address, what about computing mobility.

The problem I have with most backup systems is in what they encourage the user to back up. The focus in on media files; pictures, text docs, music etc
My biggest source of frustration when moving to a new machine is the sudden lack of those little behaviours to which I have become accustomed, the Firefox extensions, widgets, utilities and applications them-selves which are all part of my customised computer.
[There is of course no mystery why online back up systems don’t tend to encourage backup of applications, for one thing in the Windows world, who knows where to find all of those little library files etc let alone how to restore them into the correct folder structure and system settings tables.]

No, in short what I’d like is my system ‘DNA’ stored in a way which allows me to port it from machine to machine such that I can easily move my interfacing habits. Now, living a wholly online life is one solution, though this is not yet entirely practical, and much as I’ve tried to live like that, I still draw immense value from the customisation of the very browser I use to access those online resources. Now, not being technically inept I do upload my Firefox profile to a secure online locker so that pain at least is reduced – though this is hardly a mass market solution – again, simplicity!

What I want as a user is a stress free way of making any new or recently repaired PC feel like home. I don’t want to get into backup – but I do want the power of retrieval.

Kind of on topic, I just read Paul’s post and thinking about profile backup though my Digital Home research eyes I couldn’t help wondering if this model could be applied to equipment other than PCs. Just where can the Telco live in the data security space?