Do you use Online Backup?

SilverLiz

I get really confused with my Windows Backup system - what to back up and how to use it.


Does anyone use an Online Backup, which they can recommend for Home computer use and is easy to use and not too expensive?

faifai

You can use google cloud or just by a harddrive and backup everything you have on your computer.

lovinituk

Google Drive gives you up to 15Gb for free. I've been using it for over a year now and its been fine.

System

SilverLiz wrote: »

I get really confused with my Windows Backup system - what to back up and how to use it.


Does anyone use an Online Backup, which they can recommend for Home computer use and is easy to use and not too expensive?

It's funny you should say that. Every few times I start up my ipad, a pop-up box informs me I haven't backed the contents up and I always think to myself, I know that because I don't know how to.

Doshwaster

I was using DropBox for cloud storage but have recently switched to Google Drive as it has more free space. Their paid-for storage of $1.99 a month for 100GB looks attractive too.

RumRat

If you have a windows machine use Onedrive.

stevemcol

Syncback free is a nice little backup scheduler. I've been running it with onedrive and a NAS drive for a year or two now.

SilverLiz

Thanks for these suggestions everyone - I shall certainly look at these suggested ones.

securityguy

Most of these proposals assume you're going to back up manually.

I use Crashplan, which runs as often as you like (down to every minute for the truly paranoid) and sends changed files to a variety of destinations (your other computers, portable disks, their data centre if you're willing to pay for that service). I recently had a machine drop its harddrive and was able to recover back to within about fifteen minutes of the point of failure. It runs on my children's laptops away at university, too, so that their work is backed up every few minutes: vital, given just how reliant they are on their computers.

I have an unlimited subscription for up to ten machines --- overkill for most people --- and around 2TB of data backed up with them. That costs me about £8 per month: a one-computer subscription is about £3, I think.

bluesnake

backing up is only 50% of the answer, because without being able to restore it, you are stuffed.

If your pc fails, you will probably not easily be able to restore from the cloud, assuming you can still even connect to the cloud, so you may need something like a full disk, bare metal backup using acronis, or http://redobackup.org/ There are quite a few alternatives of these.

As more photos and other data is being added, doing a full backup takes a lot of time, resource consuming, and is a pita to do regularly. This is when a cloud backup becomes useful.

You probably want to use them both. Before you do a bare metal backup, sometimes it is beneficial to shrink the partition on the disk by a few meg, because when restoring some programs will only restore to the same or larger size disk, and if your disk develops a bad patch, then reformatting may shrink the partition size and you may not be able to restore to this smaller size

SilverLiz

Some good advice here that I am sure will help others too - thank you again.