How do you backup your music, photos and data files by and large? Remember when ZIP drives came out? 100MB of cheap, portable storage, and they were such a saint over floppy? Well oh well, if mine still operates fine, I can probably stick in 20 photos in there, no problem. But that's all.
If anything happens to my hard disk right now as I type (touch wood), there goes my 10 years worth of digitally-taken photos plus a music library that will play nonstop for 60 hours without repeating! Can't afford to lose any of the 120GB of data for sure. I currently resort to the tedious exercise of regularly copying all my files in my home computer to an USB External HDD and I have been wondering if there are more ingenious ways of doing that.
I can probably set up automated backups with external drives, but then either I have to remember to plug in the drive at the right time (so much for unattended backups), or keep the drive plugged in at all times, which means my backup isn't physically separated from my computer - losing the whole point of disaster recovery!
I tried exploring the options of automated online backups - a physical separation between my hard drives. The problem: horribly, horribly slow. Gave up on that and back to my good old 2.5" Hitachi HDD.
Then in the last year or so, Dropbox appears as a rather popular "in the cloud" tool for backing up files. One can go for just the free service offering limited storage or sign up for a plan and store all our data in the secure cloud and be able to access it anywhere, any time on any devices. Making the big assumption of course, that we have internet access always!
We have certainly come a long way from days of a floppy disk, yet backing up what we need to back up is fundamentally the same. The storing, transferring and sharing of 2GB only with Dropbox - so far so good, particularly impressed with the ability to drag files into my iPhone as I want them!
I however, can't wait to see how Apple's iCloud will beat Dropbox. Apple may be late to cloud computing, but what's that saying about better late than never? Late has worked for Apple before, and I expect it to do so again.
Enough said, it's time to backup those precious files of ours.
1 comment:
Used to be... if you invite friends to join Dropbox, you get more allowance once they sign up. (my friend had asked me to sign up with all my three email accounts!)
I do backup photos on external drives, or even better -- print yourself a "personal year book of photos" (ask my personal expert if you are interested!) I think they are really good, good quality and you can add text to each page, good present idea too! ;)
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