I was chatting today with some folks about my biggest home-IT horror story from the year and what I’ve done to alleviate a rerun. In a nutshell – get a home data backup strategy.
Solve your data backup concerns TODAY and subscribe to an online backup service. It is well-worth the cost. Yes – there are certainly ways you can save money, but in my opinion, an online backup plan is the most hassle-free (hands off) and worry-free approach.
This blog isn’t meant to provide you with a comprehensive comparison, nor to sell you a particular product. I simply am sharing this to advocate action now. It has already saved my family a number of small headaches – and it would have saved me over $1200 if I had it in place at the beginning of the year.
- What would you do if your hard drive crashed or your laptop was stolen today? How much would it be worth to you if you could instantly recover the important data?
- What would you do if you were working on a file for several hours or days, diligently saving it along the way, and it suddenly became corrupted? How much would it be worth to you if you could easily recover the version saved just before it got corrupted?
- Let’s say you are working on a project and you get called away. Can you easily retrieve a file via the web or phone?
Solutions to problems like these are readily available at a very affordable cost. For around $5/month, this is some of the best insurance you can buy. Depending on what you need, it may even be free. A few of the products available are listed here:
Since each tool has various compelling feature advantages, you should spend a few minutes to think about what you need and how much data you have. Then take the plunge and make it happen. At these price points – you can change your mind later too if your needs change.
Some key questions to consider:
- Do you need to backup any folder – or only selected ones?
- How much data do you have?
- Do you need versioning – archive of multiple saved versions of each file?
- Do you need remote or mobile access?
- How many PCs/Laptops do you want to cover – and do you need to share space/data between them? What are the operating systems you use?
- Are you saving and sharing media (photos/music/video)?
If you have another suggestion, please share!
Fritz's Blog 
I’ve been using Acronis True Image Home since 2005 for complete hard drive backup from 3 XP PC’s to my Home Theater PC, and lately, also a USB external drive (which I keep in my RV in case my home burns down). You can also do incremental back-ups and scheduled backups, but I always do a complete system backup (about 20 Gb which takes about 1.5 hours).
For quick data file back ups, I use GoodSync which is very easy to use and only needs to be on the host computer (as opposed to PCsync by LapLink which has to be on both the host and target PC, as is VERY difficult to get both talking to each other, and has a approx. 2 Gb directory size limitation).
Thanks Lee. Yup – it is a good practice to have complete hard drive backups as you’ve done. What I love about online backups – is the “set it and forget it” approach. Install on your pc/laptop – and it does the rest continuously.
I use a combination of Dropbox and JungleDisk. I prefer Dropbox, but they only have plans up to 100GB, and JungleDisk lets you scale infinitely. Dropbox’s sync algorithms are superior to JungleDisk, but the space constraint forces me to have two solutions.
Thanks Roopesh. Good information.
Thanks for the information.I have to say that it is so helpful.I never forget to backup my important files online onto my account because i know that it is with online backup services that i feel my files are secure.Am currently using Safecopy backup.This service suits all my backup needs.
Gracias. I’ll look into the set-it-and-forget-it approach. Sounds EASY! Thanks, that’s extremely helpful.
The problem with on-line backup is that it relies on an Internet connection which relies on the Network Interface Card (NIC). Somehow, my NIC driver got corrupted. I didn’t have a backup driver since the OS was pre-loaded on my PC, there were no back-up OS discs, so there was no driver to roll back to, so I couldn’t connect to the Internet. Also, for some reason System Restore didn’t work either. Fortuneately, I had a two week old complete system backup on a USB external hard drive and the USB port still worked.