Backing Up Your Files Online

An article by Brian Reich    4 Comments

Hard drives crash, USB drives disappear, and laptops get stolen. Sometimes bad things happen to good data.  In fact just six months ago a student of mine lost 9 months of projects and homework when his dog peed on his laptop. Work in IT long enough, and you’re bound to experience or hear dozens of “worst-case” scenarios like this one. But in the face of such daunting odds, how do we protect our data?

Apply Corporate Thinking to Your Home Computer

In the corprorate world users are often secure in the knowledge that their files are safe in an off-site backup somewhere, sometimes on tapes stored in a bank lock box, or maybe even on a server on a different contintent. Off-site storage is key to any backup plan because it protects an organization’s data not only against day-do-day data loss (accidental deletion of a file), but also against acts-of-nature. If your corporate office in California shakes to rubble from an earthquake, your accounts are still secure on a server somewhere in Deli.

Think about it: backing up your critical files to an external hard drive or CD’s doesn’t protect you if your house burns to the ground, or when thieves disappear into the night with not only your computer but your external backup drive as well. You need off-site storage.

Off-Site Storage On a Budget

So how can you apply the big-business idea of off-site storage to your home PC? If you have broadband Internet access it’s not only easy but cheap as well. There are dozens of online backup services available, some more feature-rich than others.  Most of these services will provide a small application that you download and install on your PC that allows you to manually perform backups, or schedule them for a specific time. PC Magazine has provided a short list of quality online backup services. I’m currently evaluating a service called ADrive that doesn’t appear on their list, and I’ll be back with a review of that tomorrow night.