Imagine you have worked on a project for 6 months. Tomorrow is your final presentation, the big day that will decide the success or fail of all your hard work. You’ve been working all night to finish your presentation. In the morning when you wake up, your hard disk crashed. All data lost. How will you feel?
Data backup has been an important issue since the emerging trend of digital information. Few years ago, putting our files in CD was considered a good backup by most people. Then, it was found that a CD can be easily damaged even by few small scratches.
Next, people use DVD discs. More reliable, yes. More space, yes. But still damageable. Strong magnetic exposure can damage it, scratches can damage it, careless action can damage it. Some of might ever experience trying to copy a file from a DVD disc, and getting a CRC error, the file can not be copied. Frustrating, isn’t it?
As the price of external drive becomes cheaper and cheaper, more people now use external drive for data backup. It is generally safer and more economical than using discs, but it brings new problems : bad sector, accidental delete, device damage from electric shock, and many more.
So what is the ideal solution for backup?
Have your data stored online. Somewhere in the Internet. Or, as some people called it “cloud storage”, means we don’t actually know where is the physical location of our data, but it’s there in the Internet, it’s accessible, and it will stay there even if your hard disk is broken, your computer is stolen, or your DVD backup is damaged.
There are many providers of online backup service available.
If this is new for you, you can start by reading this excellent review list from tomuse.com
I personally have tried Mozy, iDrive, DropBox, Carbonite, SpiderOak and XDrive. All the free versions. They provided different pricing methods and offers different ways of testing their services. Some give X days free trial, some give 2GB to 5GB free online backup without time limit.
After testing many services, the best I would recommend for now is SpiderOak. It is considered the best service because of the following reasons :
1. True privacy. I always concerned about the safety of information inside my files, especially work-related ones. How can I feel safe when I know someone from the online storage service can actually open and read my files, even when they aready stated they will not do that in their agreement. In SpiderOak, our files are not stored as files in their servers. Instead, the files are stored as sequentially numbered containers of encrypted data. So even their staff will not able to read our file names.
2. Cross platform. I need to access the online storage from Windows and from Mac. SpiderOak supports both (it also supports Linux).
3. Unlimited number of devices with sync. Sometimes we need to have a folder that contains exact same files in our home and work computers. When we edit a file in one location, we don’t always remember to update it in the other location. SpiderOak does this automatically, hassle free.
4. Fault tolerant. I have tried “evil” things to test whether the system will experience problem or not in case of distruption : electricity blackout, forced shutdown, reset button, etc. So far, everything works fine.
5. Good support. Few weeks ago I found an annoying bug in their software and decided to email them. I had set my expectations low as other services I tried before only gave “short and standard reply” like telling me to restart computer, reinstall the software etc. Not helping at all ! SpiderOak support replies me in a detailed answer, they asked me to send my log files so they can check the bug, we had email conversation in few days, an finally, they release an update that actually solves my problem ! Two thumbs up. I hope they can keep up this good support.
6. Free 2GB lifetime. Recommend 3 friends and get additional (maximum) 3GB. I am now enjoying my free 5GB online storage with unlimited number of devices.
In case you wonder, I am not affiliated in any way with SpiderOak. I’m just a satisfied customer.
Robert
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