Manic Monday: Backup, backup, backup!

Tropical Storm Ida is headed straight for me….so I am backing up everything I can. Why bother with backups? Because hurricanes happen. Fire and earthquakes do, too. Software and hard drives fail for mysterious reasons. To have years of work gone with the wind is not a good feeling.

Online storage services are a convenient way to store offsite backup copies of critical information. Some services that are free until you reach some level of use are docs.google.com, HP Upline, SOS Backup, Carbonite PCBackup,IDrive, MozyHome Online Backup, and Wuala.

Simply use your favorite search engine to find one.

If you need more than the basic free space, they all offer additional storage, costing from $5 to $30 a month, depending on how much room you need. Several of these services will let you make certain files available to other people while keeping other files secret and secure. Although all of them will work with both Macintosh and PC computers, some of them are picky about the Web browser you use. Experiment with several of the free services and find the one with the right fit for you. Then use it often!

I loved the Xdrive service that AOL used to offer, but they discontinued it in 2009. Now I upload backups to Google Docs.

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Addendum: A friend just told me about DropBox: I’m now giving it a whirl.

Download and install the Dropbox application. This creates a special Dropbox folder on your computer.

These files will automatically be synced and backed up online. Then you can access the files in your Dropbox from anywhere by logging into the Dropbox website.

Install Dropbox on other computers you use. Computers linked to your Dropbox account automatically sync and always have up-to-date copies of your files.

To learn more about Dropbox, check out the  tour.

This entry was posted on 9 November 2009 at 09:35 and is filed under And More..., Genealogy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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