Most of us don't usually think about backups until after we've lost something. Nothing is more boring then sitting down with a stack of DVDs and burning 50 gigs worth of family photos to disk. Things got a tad easier with the advent of cheap USB connected hard drives.
The problem with both of these technologies is that unless you take all your backup DVDs and USB drives and put them in a safety deposit box, then they are likely sitting right next to the computer that you are using. If your house catches on fire, or you have a major flood or something, then you will lose both your computer and your backups (and your wife will never forgive you for loosing all those precious baby photos).
You need an off-site backup. At the very least you should periodically backup your data to an external drive and keep it somewhere other than your house. That sounds pretty good, but many of us are lazy and want an easier solution.
Enter: Cloud-based mass storage.
Cloud-based backup services have been around for quite some time now, but many of them are starting to allow for higher capacity backups, some even offering 5 GB for free when the norm used to be 1 to 2GB. Some cloud providers even offer all-you-can-store unlimited plans.
Cloud-based storage providers also provide the ability to sync documents between devices such as tablets and smart phones. You can work on a document on your iPad and pick up where you left off when you get to your computer at home.
While cloud-based storage is great, some people (myself included) don't completely trust that it will be there when we need it. What if the provider goes out of business or gets hacked? I still advocate that you keep a local backup of your critical files on physical media and use cloud storage as a "hot backup" in a secondary role.
Let's look at a couple of strategies for using cloud-based backup services to provide off-site storage:
1. Document storage
If your only wanting to store office-type documents then you have a lot of options that are free to you unless you have a massive amount of documents. The free accounts from Droxbox, Sugar sync and others are more than enough storage for text-based documents.
These services have desktop client software that will allow you to have it backup specific file folders on a regular basis.
2. Photo Storage
Since your picture library is typically a lot larger than your document library you will want a service that provides a lot more gigabytes worth of storage. A couple of good options include Flickr and Photobucket.
Photobucket allows you to store an unlimited amount of photos and has online editing capabilities as well.
3. Video and music storage
Digital video and music are probably the biggest storage hogs after photos. In addition to photos, Photobucket also allows you to store up to 500 video files under the free plan. On the music side, both iTunes and Amazon both offer cloud-based access to tracks you've already purchased. iTunes also offers a iTunes Match service to allow access (for a yearly fee) to tracks in your library that didn't come from iTunes.
Nearly all of the cloud storage services out there offer free plans with limited storage and paid plans that usually upgrade both the storage and the features available to users.
You can choose to use multiple providers to get the most out of the freely available options or you could opt for a single backup storage provider such as those offered by Mozy or Carbonite.
