Tech Tips: Back-up practices and tools
Do you take a lot of digital photos and worry about them. Do you write a lot of documents or the “great american novel”? If so, then Back-up is essential. There are many services to back-up to “the cloud”. They are economical and safe. You can also do it yourself via a portable hard drive.
Portable drives are cheap nowadays. As low as $65 on Amazon for a 1 Terabyte portable.
Remember, that just one copy does Not a back-up make. There should be the Original, and 2 other copies. Ideally, one copy off-site. This can be a cloud storage solution or simply taking the portable hard drive to work and leaving it there. Periodically bringing it home to update this back-up. Keeping these portables synced can be achieved with simple software that would compare the original folder(s), and back-up all additional or changed, so the subsequent back-ups would be quicker than the original copy to the portable. One of these programs is called Second Copy. Read about this process here.
Carbonite:
Approx $60.00 per year per user. Unlimited storage
http://www.carbonite.com/backup/pricing-plans
Amazon Glacier:
As little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month
http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/
This solution is great for data that you would not need to retrieve often because the download speed to restore can take a long time, but is a great & cheap solution for personal data.
Another Back-up, of sorts is a Cloud Drive such as DropBox or Google Drive. Both have apps that reside on your computer. They both take a local folder on your computer and back it up to the cloud. Both have smartphone apps which allow access to any file on your home computer that you designate. Convenient for some pictures or documents that you may need to edit or refer to on the fly. The nice part of these 2 solutions is that they are free [to start]. DropBox will award you more storage space when you refer people and they sign-up as well.
These suggestions are well documented by one of the tech world’s most knowledgeable. Techguylabs.com