Backups are vital, we all know this but so many of us don’t do it, or don’t backup frequently enough. In the past backups were very manual and time intensive but these days they can be completely automated.
Traditionally you would plug in an external drive and backup the entire system taking hours. While these types of backups are still common, new cloud based systems offer many advantages.
The biggest consideration with any cloud based product is data security. Many cloud systems are operated by overseas organisations in countries with different privacy laws. If you are storing sensitive data such as medical or banking information you will need to carefully examine the legal implications and may be better served by more traditional backup systems and/or locally based cloud offerings.
Various cloud storage products such as DropBox, Google Drive and OneDrive offer free accounts for personal use and/or small quantities of data. Most also offer business packages at reasonable costs. These can easily be used as offsite backup storage. However, unless you also use these as your primary storage you will need some software to automatically sync your main files with your DropBox (or equivalent) folder.
Personally I use a product called Cubby mainly because unlike the ones mentioned above, it allows me to nominate any existing folder as a Cubby folder. I can also use it to synchronise folders between PC’s without that data going into the Cloud. This is useful for more sensitive information or large bulky files that I don’t need in the cloud, just backed up to another PC.
Of course there are many other types of backup but the above are easy and relatively cheap to setup.
Contact us if you would like more information about backup systems