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Free 2 Gigabyte Offsite Backup
Posted Tuesday, November 20, 2007, at 1:54 PM<< Previous | Read comments | Respond | Email link | Next >>
Bumped into this product today and tried it out and was stunned that such a wonderful product would be absolutely free! It's called IDrive-E and what you get for free is 2 gigabytes of encrypted, off-site storage. You will also receive a utility that allows you to select which files you want backed up and the program locates normally hidden files like Microsoft Outlook pst files and Windows Mail folders automatically. Also included in the free utility is the ability to schedule backups and you can select how much bandwidth the program is allowed to use. If you need more than 2GBs of storage, Idrive also offers a version with unlimited space for $4.95. If you have never backed up your files before, use floppies to store important documents, or don't currently don't have an off-site backup I highly recommend you take advantage of this offer while it is available for free. For details go to IDrive's website. Comments Showing comments in chronological order [Show most recent comments first] |
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Also I forgot to mention that restoring files to their original location is extremely simple making a stressful event like data loss a whole lot less tense.
The only thing I don't like about these offsite backup products is that if you have 2 GB of data to backup it is going to take quite a while to upload. Depending on your upload speed the time could be measured in days. Most people's upload will be slower than download, just because of the nature of asynchronous DSL. How much of your data will actually get backed up?
That being said, free is nice, and it is much better than nothing.
What I've done for my parents is put a second hard drive in the computer. I have a program, Cobian Backup, that will periodically backup what I want to the spare drive. This could be documents, financial data for specific program, outlook or thunderbird emails, whatever. Then they have an external drive that I keep off site and every once in a while I'll take it over there and do a second backup.
This provides 2 good backups and will even protect against a fire or something like that. I think the money spent is worth it. They have thousands of photos and thousands of hours of work into other things stored on that computer. How much would you be willing to spend to keep your precious photos from being destroyed? Or your emails from you children or parents or whoever? Or your ITunes collection? Because eventually, that harddrive will fail.
I work on computers and systems for a living and I have seen what happens when people take backups for granted. For a business, data loss can mean thousands of dollars in lost information.
So long as you have a form of broadband and not dial-up, off-site backup solutions will work perfectly. Just start it when you go to bed or leave work and forget it about it. Once the initial backup is made, incremental backups do the rest ensuring that your data is safe and secure every single day.
Back-ups are worth more than you can imagine.
A cynic might not want sensitive material off-site but additional hard drives and putting less private stuff (like the tunes) off-site could be a lifesaver-especcially when you're ready to duplicate the material you have onto a new machine.
If a fire,flood or other disaster should hit,how wonderful it would be to not only have your regular personal and business data preserved but a detailed household inventory (with descriptions,anecdotes and pictures),insurance and warranty information,tax records,medical information on all your family(even pets) and all the information that seems trivial until you need it.
Assured access to that recipe or or term paper or custom paint color could mean a lot some day.
Exactly!