Keep Your E-Mails, Photos, Videos Safe. Back Up. Get Free Or Pay?

Jan 11, 2011
Juergen Haber

Keep your e-mails, pictures, videos & other files safe. Back them up. At home or in the cloud? Flash drives? Hard disks? DVDs? Should I pay or get it free?

There's that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when The Blue Screen Of Death - as geeks jokingly call it - appears and that file you've been working on is lost. Or worse, your hard disk starts making funny noises and all your files are lost.

What do you do? Well, some of us reach for the backup we made yesterday or last week. Some of us, unfortunately, say bad words.

Where is my stuff?

The right thing to do is to make copies of the stuff on our computer and store it in a safe place. Or make a backup, in geek speak.

The first problem is that most of us don't know where our stuff is. "Stuff" is divided into files or data and the software that runs it. For the most part, the software "decides" where the files or data is going to be kept.

Sure, if you want click on the "preferences" section or sometimes called "options" section of the software, you could change that. That would make it more convenient for you to find it. Each "user" on your computer, has a "My Documents" folder where many word-processing files are kept.

Depending on the software used for photographs, the files could be kept in a sub-folder of the software used to run the photo program. Don't forget, though, if you're using a Web-based e-mail program like Hotmail or MSN or Gmail from Google, your e-mails and your address book are not stored on your computer. They are kept by the service in their "cloud."

That's something discussed in the article Cloud Computing? What The Heck Is It? Where's My Data? Is It Safe.

File storage is like having a clothes dresser with unlabeled drawers. You have to look in all the drawer and make a list of where what is. Use the "My computer" feature and explore your hard disk.

Where is the software that runs my stuff?

Most modern computers come pre-loaded with much of the software we use. We will likely download a fair amount. So we won't have backup copies of the software. If we've been good, we will have a folder in our Internet "favorites," or "bookmarks" fold showing the Web site that gave use the downloaded software. But then you'd have to know where the folder is that contains the "favorites" list. Like "My Computer," the Windows "Search" feature is useful for that sort of task.

With the Microsoft operating system, it's not necessarily true that you would even be entitled to a replacement operating system if yours vanishes into cybersmoke.

There's a growing tendency to throw the hardware away if the software crashes. The truth is that, in the end, you benefit from restoring the software from a backup. It is less expensive because you wouldn't have to buy and set up a new computer and software, itself a time-consuming task.

Backups in house

Let's start close to home. You probably already own a device to make backup copies. You need a read-write DVD drive. Don't pay more than $40 for an external, USB DVD/CD read-write drive. My past solutions was just simply to "copy" the entire contents of the hard drive onto a DVD.

But, as capacities are usually no more than the about 10 gigabytes of the biggest DVDs, it's not usually an option anymore. But the smaller capacities would probably work for a daily backup of, say, your Microsoft Outlook file, and this is a great idea.

What about external hard disks? As we wrote in the article, Cloud Computing? What The Heck Is It? Where's My Data? Is It Safe, one-terabyte external hard disks, that's 1,000 gigabytes, now cost about $100. That's $0.10 a gigabyte.

Then there are flash drives, also called thumb drives. Prices are now down to about $80 or $1.25 a gigabyte for 64 gigabyte drives. So what are the upsides attached to the increase price point? They have no moving parts; need no battery, are a shirt-pocket item and are practically indestructible.

Of course there are downsides. They're easy to lose, and labeling them can be difficult.

Of course, you can always back up to another computer on the network? If that's available and your network administrator isn't making backups, then now would be a good time to encourage him to do so.

A blast from the past

Here's a blast from the past: floppy disks. In 1980 there was the Ohio Scientific computer with a Motorola 6502 processor running at 1 megahertz. It featured an 8-inch floppy disk drive that had a capacity of 186 kilobytes.

That's about 20% of a megabyte. It took 22 floppy disks to back up a magazine subscription list of 20,000 names. But the lesson of the 180-kilobyte, eight-inch floppy is that there are no drives around now to read that data. DVDs drives may be around now but they may be superseded by Blu-Ray.

That about completes the list of things that you can attach to your computer, use to back up the data and then store it off your premises, just in case there's a fire. Many people have three sets of the same backup.

Backups in the cloud

Google the phrase "free data storage" and it'll take you half the afternoon just figuring out which ones are free. But expect the free ones to offer about 50 gigabytes of space with all sorts of odd Web pages. Don't forget to read the "terms of use" so you'll know your data will be erased if, for example, you forget to log in every so and so often.

Give such a service a trial period and say to yourself that you might have to go somewhere else real soon if, for example, the interface is too cumbersome.

Ditto for the paid storage. Just remember that $10 a month buys you a one-terabyte hard disk in less than a year. Or a 64 gigabytes flash drive in eight months.

On the whole, the problem with cloud backups is that you don't have full control of your stuff.

The ultimate solution

Back it all up if you can afford it.

Ask someone you see almost every day to hold your backups . And they should agree to tell you where that is, just in case. That someone could be your own safe or a bank's safe deposit box. Another argument for flash drives - they take less space and can easily fit into a small deposit box or home safe.