Why You Should Backup Your Data Online Rather Than An External Hard Drive

You might be tempted to buy a 1 terabyte or a 2 terabyte hard drive with prices well below $100 for a new one-off Amazon and use that as your primary backup. That’s all fine and dandy for the hard-core games your teenager’s been downloading, your sweetie’s chick flicks from Netflix and the classic rock LP collection that you’ve transferred over to digital media, but think twice before using that as your primary backup for your hard drive. Below are a couple reasons why.

The most important reason was a lesson I learned from my father, an insurance broker, a long time ago. Never keep your important papers (i.e., backup computer files) in your house. If your house burns down, where do you think your files are? If your house gets blown down by a tornado, where do you think your files went? You want an offsite backup for your files, FAR offsite. If a chemical tank car blows up at the local rail yard, you’ll thank me, and Amazon or Mozy or whomever, that your files are safe and sound 3000 miles away in California. And in Argentina. And in England. Redundancy is the name of the game here. All these online backup services use multiple data centers in different countries to protect themselves against regional calamities. As an aside, this is also a good idea for some of your important papers or at least copies of them. If your house burns down, you’re gonna need that DVD showing the video you took of the house and it’s contents to get your insurance company to pay up. Give a copy to your lawyer, stick one in your safe deposit box, and send one to your anal brother-in-law that lives 2500 miles away because he’ll triple file it and never lose it. Same thing with insurance policies, birth certificates, all that stuff.

Protect Yourself From Data Loss With Backups

Even with proper care and maintenance, computer crashes happen. When they do occur, a proper backup and recovery plan provides protection against data loss. Whether you choose to use built-in Windows applications or other software, the process is quick and easy.

Creating a Backup with Windows Backup and Restore
Most versions of Windows come with Windows Backup and Restore installed. This program allows you to back up your data to an internal or external hard drive, CDRs, DVDRs, flash drives or a network location. Due to their affordability and reliability, external hard drives are recommended for making backups.

Using Windows Backup and Restore is straightforward and simple. After loading the program from your start menu, it will ask you where you want to store the backup. After choosing a destination, you are given the option to let Windows decide what to back up or to set options manually. The automatic option will save anything in your user folders, as well as important Windows files and your system configuration. All that is left is to set a time for the backup to run. One major benefit to this method is that it will run as scheduled. You do not have to remember to manually start your backup.

The Best Free Online Backup Services

File backup has become the most critical course of action to do regularly, whether or not you’re managing a small workplace or simply monitoring your very own material. Having lost my information in my computer last year, I understand the pain sensation of the loss of all my files and images. In the following paragraphs, I’ll be explaining the finest free online backup services I personally use and suggest.

Several businesses just decide on Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) for backup, that generally implies that they do not need to bother about backup software program whatsoever as their information is instantly copied one, two, or maybe more times to their hard disk drives. Then again, for clients having a smaller spending budget, that most likely isn’t what you want if you don’t have a lot of downloaded videos within your computer and you’re simply not having enough room.

Shifting forward, why don’t we first discuss the broad company Windows’ online backup service, SkyDrive? This might be the very best free online backup services due to the quantity of information it can save you, a booming twenty-five Gigabyte. I have not seen an additional free service where one can even achieve ten Gigabyte and this totally is amazing. Because of the crazy quantity of space you will get using this service; I would suggest that you use this for those who have plenty of photographs to store.

In spite of its huge capacity, personally, I do not use this service (regardless of having used it before) due to the “simplicity of usage aspect”. I discovered it hard to download complete folders plus it was a headache to arrange the internet files. For instance, you would need to move files into folder separately for any freshly made folder.

Understanding Online Backup Services

Viruses, bugs, hard drive failures and coffee spills – there are plenty of ways you can lose the data on your computer forever. The modern computer can store thousands of cherished family photos and videos, your prized music collection, all of your accounts, important letters and much more. And these can be lost in an instant with a misplaced beverage, or a faulty hard drive.

Backing up your data is nothing new. In the past the only way was to back up your data to an external device – a hard drive, CDs, DVD’s or a thumb drive being the popular choices. The problem was that it was always an effort to do the backup. You would have to swap disks, wait for copies to be made and generally do boring things with your computer when you would rather be playing games or surfing the internet. That’s why even the most conscientious computer user would never backup their data as well as they would like.

But at last there is a new way of backing up your important data that is a much more 21st century way of doing things – an online backup service. With an online backup service your data is stored away from your computer and so is immune from the day-to-day damage that can be caused to your data. Instead it is stored on the backup companies own servers – ready for you to access in case of emergency.