Trouble with the cloud-based backup and storage industry is that there are way too many vendors. While that’s not bad necessarily, it just makes you cry what with having to choose between all those options.As I’d later admit in this post, I could never arrive at one single solution because of options, choices, and the freedom to go shopping. Given that scenario, how do you deal with your options? What do you do with plenty of free storage space available? Here are some tips and my own experience with cloud backup:
Research to pick favorites and make layers of data copies
I suggest multiple layers of storage and backup. It means that you start with your Hard Drive on your laptop or PC/iMac and make copies of your data elsewhere. To achieve redundancy, you can safely pick at least 2 layers of copies for every set of files.
You could even diversify your vendor choices so that your data is “spread out”. This necessarily means that you can pack your data copies into the free space that cloud backup and storage vendors dish out for free.
The question: Which vendor? Only you can take a call on that. Cloudbackingup.com can provide you with spot-on reviews, research, advice, and opinion. But as an adult, you make your own choices.
Work, life, entertainment, teams/projects and those big personal secrets
We all have multiple facets to our personalities. We come with different tastes, needs, and interests. Take music or movies, for instance. We have our favorites, don’t we? Of course, some of us work on the Internet everyday and we deal with tons of files that need safekeeping. I liked what Life hacker suggests : Why not maintain free space given by most vendors (by singing up for as many vendors as you need) and demarcate each volume of space for a particular need?
Choose trusted — but separate vendors — for work, photos, general interests, personal files, and fairly large amount of space entertainment (music, torrents and movies, for which you). You might need a separate account (maybe with another vendor) if you need space to collaborate and work with teams on your business.
If you’d like to store some data that you’d never want anyone to ever tap into, you could choose an exclusive vendor account to store your big secrets. With all that storage available, no one’s complaining.
Just because it’s there, you don’t have to use it
It’s compelling when those offers for free space comes up. 5 GB, 10 GB, and 25 GB – you name it. Each vendor comes up with an offer that’s more compelling than others. I am sure you must have suffered information overload – across any niche now – if you have been on the Internet for any length of time. Now, you have free storage space overload too. What do you do? Pick and choose one (or maximum two) storage vendors and store, sync, and access your files through them primarily. Additionally, you might want to use a third vendor for automated backups of all data that you store on vendor 1 and vendor 2.
How I deal with a sea of options?
I am not a compulsive shopper. I have a Macbook Pro 13” with a 500 GB Hard Disk so the first layer of original data automatically embeds here on the Hard Drive. I use a Western Digital “My Passport” for Mac and it’s the default directory for Apple’s “Time machine” feature. This neat feature gives me a second layer of storage and backup for my original data.
I use Dropbox for file syncing but this is always limited to work files – Microsoft Word Docs, Spreadsheets, Adobe Files, Images (Includes Snapshots) and others. Essentially then, DropBox Kicks in only when I add files to specific folders assigned to my clients.
As to the actual, semi-permanent back-up solution, I’ve use a combination of SugarSync, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, and LiveDrive. I am now checking out CrashPlan. Admittedly, the search never ends. My data is ported each time I decide to change (which is more frequent than my breathing).
A note on Storage and Cloud backup: I am a big fan of cloud services and I have a strong reason for that: I know that my laptop and the WD My passport are both susceptible to theft (It happened in Vietnam a few months ago) and I am glad I had copies of all my data saved on the cloud. Further, free is no more an option when you begin to depend on one or two chosen vendors or when you need more space for your work or projects, just saying.
How do you deal with your options? How do you utilize options for storage space?
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