I am always reminding people I know to back up – and before I proceed with this post – yes I gave myself an uppercut.
I recently lost a Hard Drive that had not been backed up. It was a second drive on my Home Theatre PC (HTPC) but it did contain photos that a friend gave me as part of a 3-2-1 back up plan. Apart from that, it had nothing of importance saved on it and I had been delaying transferring the photos to One Drive until after I had high speed internet from NBN.
The drive failed about 2 days before the NBN was connected.
My HTPC was built in late 2016. I have an SSD for the main drive with a 2TB spinning drive for storage. It was the 2TB spinning drive that failed. It is a well known brand and was/is only about 2½ years old.
SO BE WARNED – Hard Drives can and do fail!
BACK UP WITH the “3-2-1 PLAN”
For important data I use the 3-2-1 method, three copies with 2 local and one off premises. The 2 local copies are the original on the computer and I use the inbuilt Back Up function of Win 10 and Time Machine on the Mac for the second local copy to an external hard drive. The third copy is to One Drive using the 1TB that you get with Office 365.
If you don’t want to use on line storage, you can back to a drive that is held by a friend or relative but this involves setting up a system to rotate the drives and getting them to and from the location.
By far the most convenient is to use an on line storage option. You can start by using all the free stuff but eventually you will probably have to buy storage.
Common free storage:
- Google Drive 15GB
- Microsoft One Drive 5 GB
- Apple iCloud 5GB
- Dropbox 2GB
There are others but these are the ones that I have used. Google Drive with 15GB is a good place to start but make use of all of them.
We all should back up to “off premises” but if you have important data ( business or student) then you should look at professional options like Carbonite or similar. I have not used any of these so look around and check them all out.
AND remember if you run out of free space and decide to get another G Mail / Hotmail for more free stuff, you will run into difficulties with syncing etc., but it is not impossible.
If you have a lot of photos or home videos, eventually you will exhaust the free offers. However, it is not all that expensive to buy more. There is large of variety to suit all needs. Google Drive has a number of smaller and cheaper plans, but 2TB costs AUD $125 per year against Microsoft’s offer of 1TB PLUS the full Office suite for one user for AUD $99 per year (AUD$129 per year for 6 users with 1TB for each person). If you use Office, the Microsoft Option seems better, but don’t take my word, check all.
Go through and clean up your computer and get rid of all that junk. Few people require more than 2 TB and most can easily get by with 1TB.
BUT NO MATTER BACK UP and at least have a second copy on a local hard drive. Hard drives are cheap.