It’s something that’s been on my ‘to do’ list for some time now.
I’ve had a few scares along the way as well. Like the couple of times my laptop ‘blue screened’. Not a pleasant experience! I thought there was a problem, but fortunately I was able to reboot.
Backing up all your important files and documents is something we’re all aware that we need to do, but how many of us are actually doing it?
So a few weeks ago I set about researching the best way to back up my data. I wanted an online solution so that I could access the data from anywhere in the world, as well as avoid storing my files on a CD/DVD.
From all the services available, I’ve found what I believe to be an excellent solution. Please note, none of the links are affiliate links.
Here are the steps I took:
- Sign up for a free account at Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). This is where your data will be uploaded to. In fact, your data will be held on the servers that run the Amazon empire. The way the pricing works is that you will be charged to upload the data, as well as storing the data. Choose to store the data in the United States (rather than Europe) as it’s cheaper. To upload your data, it’s $0.10 per GB ($0.03 during June). So, if you have 40GB of data, it’ll cost $4 to upload it at most! All the data is encrypted during uploading. To store your data, you’ll pay $0.15 per GB. So, for 40GB that’s £6 per month!
- The only downside with S3 is that it’s not very user friendly to get your data onto their servers. This is where Jungle Disk comes in. Sign up for a Desktop account. This costs $20, plus a $1-2 fee each month. Jungle allows you to easily select the data from your hard drive for uploading. The beauty of this product though, is that once all your data is uploaded you can schedule regular back ups (I’ve chosen weekly). Only new/changed files will be uploaded.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that it does take a long time to upload your data the first time. 1GB will take approximately 24 hours. All I did was leave it running overnight/at weekends and it wasn’t long until all my data was uploaded.
I hope this helps and let me know how you get on!
