then you can have your backups at home, with you.
Ernest, what do you suggest?
It is fast, a one time fee — drive ~ $80 for ample disk space (1TB).
I'd guess that you would be protected with the online service if your house burned down. But the connection to the Internet is going to be slow. Much slower than a local harddrive.
I purchased a Seagate external drive and back up my computer every night. I tried one of the Patriot Radio shill brands, Carbonite, and it sucked.
It has both a paid plan and a free option where you can back your computer up to another internet connected computer. i.e. your work computer, a family or friends computer, etc.
Crashplan.com
You’ll wish you’d used it earlier.
Note that it is always a good idea to periodically back up to a separate USB hard drive, connected only for that purpose, and disconnected (and unplugged) thereafter.
Basically, they were charging Ferrari prices for Model T performance.
They're off my radar, and I'd really have to be desperate to reconsider the brand.
Maybe they got religion, and instituted a yearly development cycle that keeps up with technology and methods.
I use a USB Drive, and DVD the really important stuff as well.
As people have pointed out, a 1T USB drive can be had for $80. It comes with basic but configurable auto backup software.
And as it has been pointed out, you do lose the off premises redundancy of a cloud-based service.
But, backups are only good if you can retrieve what was backed up.
I guess you can hermetically seal the USB drive in a mayonnaise jar and store it on Funk and Wagnalls porch for safety.
For less than the cost of a year of cloud service, one can get a USB disk drive.
I have always been leary of cloud services. Too many times in the past, Yahoo, Microsoft and similar on-line services have changed or ceased some services. I ended up losing data, because sometimes they didn’t announce what they were doing.
A local backup to an external drive is fine but it does not protect against disasters like fire since the computer and backup are in the same location.
If you feel that you have objects that must be recoverable, such as pictures, then a cloud solution needs to be examined.
I have used carbonite for two years and it works fine. I can access the files online from another computer as well. I have heard good things about mozy as well. There are others.
Usually, if you sign up with one of these companies, you can get two months free by using some radion hosts name as a promotion code.
I never had anything but problems with Norton’s and will never use them again for anything.
I have been using Cobian Backup and an external drive locally.
For the cost of backup media, it doesn’t pay to use the cloud. Buy a decent desktop hard drive and use it to backup your media.
Stay away from Norton...Bad for computers.
1. I use the old DOS command Xcopy to copy my files to an external hard drive on a daily basis. Xcopy has some advantages:
- It can verify the copy, guaranteeing the copy and the original are identical.
- The copy it makes is native. You don’t need special software (like with Acronis, etc.) to interpret it.
- The commands can be put in a text file with a .bat (batch command) extension. Double click on the file and the commands run.
Xcopy has one big disadvantage: It will keep only the latest version of a file. If you need to keep several versions of a file, Xcopy is not for you.
2. I use these same commands to back up to another USB hard drive I keep in my vehicle. Instant offsite storage.
3. On a weekly basis, I use the free Todo backup program (http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/download.htm) to make an exact clone of my C: drive. When, not if, but when, that drive crashes I can replace it with the clone in a matter of minutes. Saves hours and hours of reinstalling the OS and reloading all the software, assuming you can find the installation file. The clone is also kept off site.
This is just an overview of backup procedures I use.
Clicking on the Keyword “backup” (just above Reply #1) will bring up a list of previous FR articles on this topic.
That should do for most everything you need.
IMHO: Backup should ALWAYS be off site.