Monday, May 3, 2010

Backing Up (We interrupt this blog for a Public Service Announcement)

I have a whole book sitting on my computer, and nowhere else. What precious data do you have on yours?

I have two external hard drives, and was trying to keep one at my office, the other at home. I was also trying to backup weekly. But I probably backed up about 5 times total. When Sam mentioned dropbox.com on his blog, I decided to give it a try. (It is free, after all.)

I'm at 88% 79%* of the free storage limit, without having uploaded my photos, so the free option may be a bit small. (It's 2G.) But it's working great for me so far. My laptop and desktop now stay in sync with each other on all the stuff I included. (I left out my personal business folder, and my photos - didn't want that stuff floating around online. I also didn't try to include application files.) There's a third copy of all my information online, too. It's all automatic now, and I'll be able to grab stuff from my computer when I'm on vacation.

I think I like it enough to be willing to pay for more storage when I hit my free limit.

If you're interested in dropbox.com (I'm sure there are other good options out there), you can give me some more free storage by using this link to join. I think you get an extra 250Meg for using a link like this, too.

I once had a hard drive crash and burn, on an almost new computer. The warranty got me a new hard drive, but the papers I had written for some lit courses I was taking - gone forever. However you like to do your backups, if you haven't done it recently, go do it!


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*I just now set up a file sharing folder, put my manuscript in it, and invited someone to look at it. That was the 5th thing in a list of steps they'd recommended. It got me another 250Meg free.

3 comments:

  1. My thanks to the 3 people who decided to use my link to sign up for Dropbox (that brought me down to 61%). I hope Dropbox works well for you.

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  2. After 6 months, Dorpbox is still working well for me. I have 3.5G for free (some from people joining through my link), and am at 86%.

    More obviously useful than backup is the ability to regularly scan at my desktop (hooked to an old color printer that's crappy for printing but does scan), and print at my laptop (hooked to a newer laser printer).

    My laptop is so old that I can't download some pdf's. I download at my desktop, and the files magically show up on my laptop.

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  3. When both my computers were stolen in October 2011, Dropbox saved my sanity. I still had my book and all my work files. I had recently moved to the paid version, and hadn't put all my photos on Dropbox yet. Luckily I had the older ones on the external hard drive, so only lost a year or so (when I wasn't taking many photos anyway.)

    ReplyDelete

 
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