... and 1 man's quest for more freebies.

Years ago I was stung with losing my hard drive without a decent backup. This was in my early days of IT and thought Windows XP would create a DVD using the built in software, oh how wrong I was!

Since then I have been sure, almost OCD, to backup regularly, recently onto an external hard drive. 5 months ago, a good friend of mine posed the question about the best backup solution possible:

“Permanence, Security, Integrity, Accessibility, Redundancy”

Internal hard drives can fail or become corrupt.

External drive and flash drive can also fail. USB storage in particular has a limited number of read-writes (depending on the workload this is not a massive amount of time!)

CDs/DVDs will fail at the slightest touch

Tapes will stretch and fade over time (ok a long time), and are not in great use for the home user.

All of the above, unless you take precautions (fire proof safe, take it with you) will not be of any use in the event of a major accident like fire, or more appropriate these days, flood!

But all of these suffer from a more common issue: How often do you actually backup to these other devices? Because it doesn’t matter just how much you do, much like saving you Word file: you’ll do it in a minute, in a minute, opps too late its BSOD-ed (Blue/Black Screen of Death) on me…

So…

I began investigating online storage, starting with Google Docs as, at the time, the most popular/well known. My specification for storage has changed since I started, but has settled on the following:

>It has to be free. I am about to bring a baby into this world, I have no money for most things let along online backups!

>]I want it to be accessible anywhere. If the computer dies on me, I need to still use my files

>I want to sync. Otherwise I fall into the same traps as the above point.

>I would like it to be available on different devices. Like my iPhone, again, some convenience, but not a deal-breaker.

>I need to backup: Documents, Pictures, Music

This is the story from there to here, where I am now.

Choice 1: Google Docs – 2/5 (Free version only)

I began with implementing Google Docs, as I already had a Gmail account it seemed like a convenient place to start. Instantly I noticed that without paying (Big no no!) for the Google Apps account, I had only 2GB storage, and there is no sync available, so everything needs to be uploaded via the web interface. I tried using this for a few weeks, but I had far too much to backup even trimming down to bare essentials.

Google Docs is ok for storing and sharing the odd few files, but further than that needs a better solution

Choice 2a: Syncplicity – 4/5 (Free version only)

I came across Syncplicity during my search for an alternative for Google Docs, and was instantly attracted to the sync tools it offered. Syncplicity still offered only 2GB of storage, but during my research I found that this is the standard for free offerings. At this point I decided to split my backups between different providers (not idea, but allowed me to take advantage of each companies niche facility), allowing me to comfortably have 2GB for storing my documents. I used this for some months before looking again at alternatives

Syncplicity’s attraction comes from the software which allows you to select which folders to sync on your hard drive. It monitors these files and immediately updates when needed, both directions. It claims to be able to sync with Google Docs, but I could not get this to work successfully, but a good option for anyone looking for a simple but robust backup. iPhone app available but, and this is where the dropped mark comes in, you are charged per download.

The see the complete article, visit http://www.reedsoft.co.uk and leave a comment here or there!