Data backups while traveling in Costa Rica…

Written by: joe_carney | November 11, 2009

Am in Costa Rica.

I’d always thought of Costa Rica as South America, but it’s actually Central America. To the north is Nicaragua and to the east and south is Panama, home to the historic Panama Canal, one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken.

I’m here developing an iPhone app, one of the smallest and easiest computer engineering projects I’ve ever undertaken.

Costa Rica is a small country, about two thirds the size of Scotland. Nearly a quarter of the country is made up of protected areas of rainforest and mountainous terrain. The wildlife here is incredible. You can’t walk very far without spotting lizards, monkeys, sloths, hummingbirds, eagles and all sorts colourful parrots and finches. Be warned though, danger lurks under every bush in the form of venomous snakes.

I came to Costa Rica on the recommendation of a friend who is already here. However, it wasn’t the snakes that he warned me about, it was Costa Rica’s power supply. He’s been here two months now and has already blown an external hard drive. Other friend’s have blown either their laptops and/or their power supplies.

The monkeys steal food, the power supplies steal data...

Data Loss

Power failures are as common as power surges here, so I arrived with a UK surge protector (I bought my MacBook Air in the UK). I’d spent the last two months in the Caribbean, where the cable on my Magsafe Power Adaptor had split and broken. Apparently this is quite common with these adaptors. What Apple makes up for in style and size, it loses out with durability. Fortunately for me, there was an authorised Apple dealer available on the island and I was back up and running within a few days. There would be no such luck if the same happened here in rural Costa Rica.

The surge protector I brought with me has two lights. One is red and appears when the connection has been earthed. The other is green and appears when the connection is protected. I was shocked to find that the green light does not appear. I’m now unsure whether it only appears when it is protected (i.e. a surge is taking place) or not. I ended up buying a Costa Rican surge protector as well.

This obviously scares the living day lights out of me and makes backing up while travelling all the more important.

Backing up your data is something which should be done regularly. Not only that, it has to be done effortlessly, so it doesn’t feel like a chore. In a small or home office (larger offices should be doing this by default) it is very easy to have a backup device installed on your computer. While you are travelling, you basically have two options, backup to an external device or put your data onto the cloud. As I write code for both myself and clients, it is my duty to do both.

External Devices

Depending on the work you do and how much you need to backup, there are two types of external devices you can travel with.

The first type is an external hard drive and are quite inexpensive now. The last one I bought was a Lacie Little Disk, cost me about €100, doesn’t require a power cable and stores 500Gb or 0.5Tb of data. This device is small and light enough to keep in a separate bag while travelling.

Note: Never keep your backup device with your laptop when travelling, if you lose one you’ll also lose the other.

The second type is a USB flash drive. Again, these are very cheap, small and highly portable. The last one I bought was made of rubber and holds 16Gb of data. The flash drive is excellent as a secondary backup of your most important data files. They also come in useful if you are out and about and need to copy data between machines.

The Cloud

Saving your data somewhere on the Internet is much safer than carrying an external hard drive. One of the services I use is called DropBox. Available for Mac, Windows & Linux, it allows you to create a folder on your machine where you can drop in your important data. DropBox then seamlessly synchronises your local folder with it’s own held in the cloud. I tend to drop files in there on a night time so it has plenty of time to synchronise while I sleep.

Two people I know so far have lost information while travelling in Costa Rica. I’m constantly amazed to hear from people who have been using computers for years and still don’t back up regularly. Both could have easily avoided data loss by using an external device that doesn’t require a power cable and/or the cloud.

Of course, if your equipment is damaged in Costa Rica, you can always take some time out to enjoy the natural beauty. If you are desperate for another laptop, I suggest you cross the border and head down to Panama City to buy one. Just watch out for those venomous snakes along the way…

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