How to find an online backup service that saves your life?

Be honest with yourself. How many photos and videos and documents do you store on your PC or Mac? In my case this is over 20 GB. Meaning that basically my whole life is on my Mac. All the beautiful memories of my family, my friends, my colleagues and also all the videos I have taken the last couple of years. Imagine all those files vanishing at once. This could happen any time. If you’ve come to my site you’re looking into the right direction. Because I suppose that you’re looking for an online backup service. Online backup services are great because you can save your whole digital life online.

The difficult part, however, is to find the right online backup service for your needs. If you try a Google search you’ll find hundreds and thousands of online backup services that promise to be the perfect solution for your online backup needs. Obviously, this is not the case. Every person has different needs and therefore different requirements for their online backup service. Let’s have a look at different personas and you’ll see whether you’ll fit in one of those profiles and therefore you’re going be able to select the perfect online backup provider for your needs.

Paula the student

Paula is a graduate student at Harvard University. She often writes important papers and essays and is always afraid to lose her data. Imagine hours and hours of work being lost just because there was no backup made. But it is not only the loss of data that is important to consider. Very frequently Paula overwrites her files accidentally. At night she was writing her essay and stopped on the 15th page and the next morning she woke up with a white sheet of paper because she accidentally saved the wrong file. Online backup services however, find ways to keep multiple copies of her files and multiple versions so that she is always going to be able to go back even 30 or 60 days in the past. Paula was wise enough to choose an online backup service that saved her life.

Barbara and Michael – the loving parents

Barbara and Michael have been married for almost 5 years. After busy days at the office they love to watch pictures of their child. They have collected over 20,000 pictures of the last 15 years that go way back until their little baby girl was born. Also, they want to store the images in the best possible quality available today. So each image is about 20 MB in size so that they can occasionally do a huge poster print out. Sometimes, Michael works abroad for couple of weeks. So they like to share their images in a central folder where they can add images and other files. Therefore, they both need access any time and the folder has to be kept in sync. The online backup features that come with syncing saved Barbara’s and Michael’s life several times because of bad viruses that attacked their Windows PCs.

John the geek

John is a true geek. He loves computers and he loves all tech stuff. He has multiple machines: 2 laptops, 2 PCs at home and a server. So he is always struggling with keeping everything in sync. Also, he has to take care that his precious data is not lost when a hard drive fails. As a matter of fact he likes to fiddle around with hardware. So sometimes he tries things that are no good for the hardware. John has also huge data needs because he has been a geek for all of his life. And unlimited online backup service is the best solution for him and has saved his life multiple times.

Harry the doctor

Harry has acquired his M.D. several years ago. He finally has his own practice after working several years in a hospital. He wasn’t prepared for the amount of data that had been accumulating over the last couple of months. Also, the data is very sensitive. It contains all information about his patients their problems, illnesses and other things. Therefore, he not only needs unlimited backup but also he needs a very secure online backup provider. He is very glad to see that the majority of online backup services do have very high encryption standards. But he doesn’t want to rely on a single backup solution. He backs up his data off-line as well as online. Yesterday, electricity went off. After he came back his hard drives just wouldn’t work anymore. His online backup service has saved his life.

Jane the startup founder

Jane founded her Internet startup back in 2008. She sells self roasted coffee. People can select from a variety of roasts and also blend them together. So every clients can have his or her own coffee blend. The core of Jane’s business is her website. It has cost a lot of money and effort to create it. Since Jane is neither a designer nor a programmer she had to hire one. While working on the website they frequently had to exchange files. Fortunately Jane’s online backup service has a unique sharing functionality. She can not only back up all her important files but also select specific files to share with her collaborators. This makes work easy and also saves her a lot of money. If she didn’t have an online backup service she would’ve paid triple for her website.

How can online backup services save your life?

With the different personas I hope I could give you an idea how you might be using your online backup service and give you little help how you can choose the right one for you. It is not easy to find the perfect online backup service provider for your needs. But it is going to be a lot easier when you think for moments about your requirements. Have a look at my top 10 list of online backup services and choose the one that fits best.