Economy, Insights, IT, Knowledge, Future

Backup Data

. Monday, May 11, 2009

Someone once told me to backup all the data that you cannot afford to lose. What are they? All your assignments, photos, presentations, emails and many other which you may not reproduce again. Well, there are many alternatives available nowadays to backup your data.

  1. Burn them into CD / DVD. I believe this method is beginning to get obsolete as I’ve just recently purchased a 1TB Seagate harddisk. Per GB, harddisk is getting cheaper and cheaper almost at par with CD/DVDs. Hence, even I am beginning to re-transfer all the DVDs back to harddisk.
  2. Cloud storage. There are lots of storage that are available online. The only problem is privacy. If you don’t mind privacy issues, feel free to consider these alternatives:
    1. Gmail (Each email account offers you 7-10GB depending on your usages.) There is even a Firefox add-on (Gspace if I’m not mistaken) that uses Gmail account as online drive.
    2. There are many online companies that provide online storage. So far the best I’ve come across is http://skydrive.live.com. It’s by Microsoft so at least you know they won’t screw around with your data. It offers you 25GB of diskspace. It’s not terribly fast but these is meant to be a great site to store your data as backup. Not something you use daily.
    3. http://picasaweb.google.com is also a great place to store all your images. I’m hooked onto picasa mainly due to its awesome software. I really should start getting into flickr too but until I max out my picasa storage I guess I’ll stick with picasa for a while.
  3. Flash drive. Now this is one device I am terribly worried about. I have personally lost 256MB of data. Mind you that these are text data. 256MB of text data is enormous work and to lose it all like that. Imagine the frustration having to re-search them again. That’s why I’ll only use Flash drive as a transporter. To transport from either office to home or class or another PC. Never use it to store valuable data.
  4. If you’re like me using Thunderbird, you might wanna consider setting your email account to IMAP. IMAP leaves the email in the server and nothing is downloaded. However if you use POP3 account, then you may wanna consider using Mozbackup. Try to backup at least once a month. Then transfer the backup file out of your harddrive onto somewhere safe. Like another external drive? or one of above mentioned.
  5. Gbridge is a wonderful tools to synchronize data in two separate locations. For example, if you’re at work and you would like to pull a file from your home’s PC, Gbridge will works wonder. It’s more technical to set it up but it’s mighty powerful tools to have. Plus it allow you to password protect the folder too. You can download Gbride here @  http://www.gbridge.com/.

Well, that is all for now. If you need further assistance on any of the above, feel free to email me. Otherwise all your comments are welcome too.

2 comments:

SengMing Tan said...

Dude, if you care about you data please go get a new harddisk to backup your stuff. They are cheap enough right now and worth every penny. Also, read this

http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html

taysoonee said...

I hear you friend. I've bought a 1TB Seagate harddrive and store it in a separate location as backup. Was thinking about RAID but somehow felt that's a bit overrated. At least for now.