Developing a Backup Strategy

One of the most disturbing days of a computer user’s life is the day that their computer dies. It’s a little known fact that every computer has a surprise expiration date and everyone needs to be prepared for when that day comes. I’m not suggesting that this is a real built in expiration date but just know that one day your computer will die without warning.

There are countless options available from free document back up to services that will back up the entire hard drive. All of these are better and more reliable than the external drive sitting next to your computer. This external local backup is popular because people feel it is more secure than using a remote location. But you should understand that commercial remote locations use a series of encryptions that make them extremely safe and secure. The most troubling aspect of local backup is that the backup device is in the same environment as the primary computer. If you get a power surge from a lightning strike it will blow out your computer and the backup.

Microsoft has Skydrive, which offers free cloud-based storage for documents and pictures.  There is a fee if you need more than 7GB of storage, but that’s a lot of free storage.

Amazon Cloud Drive provides 5GB of free storage. When it was first introduced, you could also use it to stream music. Now that functionality is in a separate service: Amazon Cloud Player. With this latter service, you can upload and stream up to a rather minimal 250 songs to Windows PCs, Macs, and Apple and Android devices.

Apple iCloud comes with 5GB of free storage, but it's more than just storage. Music, apps, books, and TV shows you purchase from the iTunes store, as well as your Photo Stream, can also be stored and streamed from it, and none of the purchased media counts against your storage quota.

There are also paid services, such as Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) that you might consider. The advantage of these services is that they automatically back up everything on your computer without having to store files in special folders as you do with the other services. If your computer dies-- OK when your computer dies -- you buy a new computer, log on to your Carbonite account and click the “Restore” button. All of the files that were on your old computer are transferred to your new computer automatically.  This is the service that I use and feel it’s well worth the $60 a year. They do offer multiple computer discounts.

I don’t want to be there when you realize that all of those pictures of your kids, grands or pets just evaporated so, please, do something to back up your documents now.