Back in October 2012 I dropped my laptop and I lost EVERYTHING that was on there, including some pretty vital business files. I sent it off to two different data recovery companies. You know the kind that the police use to recover data from crime scenes! However, neither company were able to recover the data and it ended up costing me over £600. The REALLY annoying thing was that JUST before I dropped it, I was wondering if it might be worth me spending the $4.99(£3.30) for 100Gb of online storage with Google Drive!

I really wish I had done that! For £600 I could have had 181 months of backup, or 15 YEARS and NO HEARTACHE AND PAIN! Plus, it’s taken me the best part of 3 months of work, just to recover back to where I was in October last year. What an enormous pain that was.

With DiaryBooker of course, all your backups are done for you automatically because everything is stored securely on the Google servers up in the cloud!

I now backup EVERYTHING on my laptop to the cloud, constantly and continuously, no relying on remembering to back up, no more having to plug in an external drive, no more remembering to use two drives and leave one at a remote location, just in case there is a fire at my house. Nope every time I am online, it’s backing up everything I need all the time, in minutes… it only backs up the stuff that’s new, so it’s not a lot of bandwidth, and one of my backup systems even backs up the last 5 versions of each file too!!

PLUS, because I wasn’t sure which system to use, I have subscribed to all of them, and I’m using all of them FOR FREE!! I have not yet run out of space, but when(IF) I ever do, you can be sure I will be VERY happy to pay a miserly £3 a month for the service!!!

So here’s what I am using:

DropBox
Google Drive
SugarSync
Box.Net
SkyDrive
Amazon CloudDrive

I have recently been looking at crashplan.com as it seems like a really cool option. I have now implemented this to backup locally to an SD card that is sitting there in my PC, and it seems to work pretty well for that!

There are some others listed here. but I’m not currently using any listed there that are not already listed above!

Finally, you may not know this but there is a pretty good internal backup system (not well publicised) for Windows 8 to backup onto a connected hard drive (which, for example could be plugged into your home WiFi) and it will back up again the last few versions of every file. This is basically the same functionality that Mac users get with their “Time Machine” function. I have used this for people who have very slow (OR NO) internet connections….LifeHacker for more information

There is a similar feature in previous versions of Windows, but it is a bit techy to setup and only creates the backups when the PC is rebooted, but I’m mentioning it here for completeness