ANyone have experience with online backup? I was looking at Idrive Mozy, norton...

 

I don;t purge a lot of photos when I take them....I got about 40g now.

My cd collection is ripped and is about 25g.

SO I'd need 65 easy....It seems an unlimited plan would be best.

 

so what's wrong with a plug in usb drive?
I can understand the advantage of an off site that you won't lose it in a fire.
It just seems ... addictive.

 

USB drives are great. Even the larger thumbsticks are decent ways to do a backup. If you need it to be offsite... take it to work and leave it in your desk.

If you truly want an online backup I believe Google and Amazon both sell online disk space. There is also a utility called dropbox that works well and gives you 2GB free -- it's intended more for sharing documents that backup but it might work. It's $10/month for 50GB and $20/month for 100GB.

 

I have everything on a backup drive in the box....and a plug in USB drive.....I want multigeographic redundency...I fear total loss.

My office is 1.8 miles from my house....although outlandish....a regional disaster could destroy my data....

I'm not just thinking a back up for my photos...but generational space.

Am I crazy?

 

I second the physical USB back up. My external was around $100 and I've got something like 300 gigs of space. Everything is backed up on it and I have an additional 2 gig flash drive I hold onto/ travel with for current files etc.

 

With the cost of external drives today it just really does not make sense to pay for online backup. I just bought and external USB 3.0 drive with a 2 terabyte capacity for a measley $99. If your worried about physical damage to the drive ex: a fire than purchase 2 and keep one in another location. The other advantage is your not limited to bandwidth limitations when uploading downloading from that online storage site and you don't even need online access to it when you store on your own physical external drive.

 

I've got a Dropbox account, but only use the free amount (which starts at 2 GB, but will increase if you invite others) It's meant for day-to-day use. But you can buy more space there if you want.

If you want an invite (www.dropbox.com) let me know... (we will both get extra storage space) so shoot me a PM or something.

I use redundant hard drives within the computer just because HDD failure is a very likely reality for most computer owners. It'll happen at some point to most of us. I have a spare HDD in a fire safe as well, but it's in the same room.

For my serious "Oh sh!t" backup, I bought a portable HDD for cheap. It's a 250GB 2.5" form factor, uses a single USB cable for power & data, so it's convenient. I encrypted the drive and I leave it in my desk at work. Due to where I work, it's quite safe there.

Mostly I do that for my digital photos/videos. Those are the only things I really cannot replace if lost.

 

This is the HDD I use for my off-site backup. It's cheap for the storage. I'd recommend that or one of the hundreds of similar ones on the market.

We have another similar one (Western Digital) that we use on our iMac with Time Machine automatically doing backups. Which is good, because the HDD on the iMac failed.

I like the Cloud storage, but anything big enough to really backup all my stuff ends up costing a lot of money over time.

 

Wasn't paying attention... just noticed your post after I wrote a response...