Back in the good old days when backups were done on tapes, there was a lot of discussion of off-site backups. The idea was if your building burnt down, you’d still have a copy of the data you could use to recover your system.
Most people are lucky if they even have a backup, much less one that is off-site. But, when you think of disasters like the fires in California, floods in the Midwest, and hurricanes in the Southeast, there is a very real chance of you losing your primary computer.
And of course if your primary computer is a laptop, you could lose it (or have stolen) anywhere you take it. According to a Dell/Gartner study, Over 12,000 laptops are lost or go missing in U.S. airports each week, 70% of those returned to lost and found are never reclaimed.
So are you prepared if disaster destroys your primary computer (and perhaps where it lives)?
There is a new place to save your files, those in the “know” call it the cloud—aka the Internet.
There are a number of websites you can register with to save your files on their servers on the Internet, most with software that makes it as easy as dragging and dropping the files just like you would in Windows Explorer. Some even offer automatic backup programs. Some alternatives you might want to look at are:
http://streamload.com (2 GB free, used to be 25)
http://www.mozy.com ($5 per month for unlimited storage)
http://skydrive.live.com (25 GB free)
The advantages of these services are their low cost, often free, and ease of use. Plus you have access to your files from anywhere in the world.
However, don’t depend only on web backup for your critical data. Several of these services, failing to find a viable business model, have gone out of business, effectively deleting your data. I would still recommend a traditional backup to supplement the on-line backup. Between the two you stand a really good chance of recovering your important information.
I am a firm believer that you can’t have enough backups. Even though I am pretty good about backups, there are still times when I’ve lost data (or downloaded programs) when something goes horribly wrong.
