There are a number of online services to prevent data loss. But with all of the options out there, such as capacity, restore features and cost, how do you pick the right one?
The first thing that is essential is to go with a paid service. Free services is like getting free medical care: the last resort. Free services have limited quotas and basically function on the cheapest possible systems possible. Is that what you want protecting your information and priceless memories?
The second thing to keep in mind is to identify what you want to back up. Chances are, it will be some important documents and a lot of pictures. You may not be a photographer but you have received pictures from your friends and family over the last several years. These photos may not be replaceable. They may not exist on other people’s computers but even if they did, it would be difficult and time-consuming to get them all back.
Thus, you need to get backup storage that measures in the gigabytes. Over time, pictures will take up a lot of space, consuming gigabytes. Since pictures accumulate over many years, the last thing you want to do is to wonder how to keep track of them.
A backup program will search your drive on a daily basis and transfer new files only. This is called an incremental backup. You do not transfer everything on a daily basis. That would take too long and stress your bandwidth. Smarter programs will detect when something has changed, like updating a document.
This means that you should leave your computer on at night to allow the program to work without interfering with your usage. This is important, especially when uploading a lot of pictures, which can take a lot of time depending on how fast your internet speed is. If your upload speed is slow, it could take many nights to transfer the entire contents of your computer.
You control what to backup. A good program gives you the ability to choose which folders to transfer or which file types. You can adjust the backups so that only pictures get backed up or certain kinds of documents such as PDF, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel files. From now on, whenever you transfer pictures to the computer, they will be backed up that night.
A good plan will be able to grow with your needs and it is a good idea to backup several computers. Despite all of the talk about mobile devices, space-hogging pictures are still being sent around, turning computers into photography archive machines. Your mobile device will run out of memory much faster than your computer, at which point, you transfer videos and pictures from the mobile device to the computer for safekeeping and archiving. When you use a Carbonite coupon code to get a great plan, you will be sure to get a great set of features for backing up everything on your computer.
You then free up space on your mobile device to take lots more pictures and videos without agonizing over which ones to delete in order to take that great picture.
Videos are huge space hogs, typically consuming upwards of 100 times the space of an image! If you are a budding videographer, you definitely need a generous backup plan.