Free Online Backup Services
2013-08-25
Don't lose your data when it's free to keep it safe
I know a lot of people that keep all of their data on a single computer. This is all of their digital photos, important documents, etc and they don't have any other copies of them. That means that if their computer's hard drive goes bad, there goes all of the files they didn't want to lose. If they somehow get a virus, it can wipe out all of their family photos, digital music, and everything else on that computer.
Backup your data outside of your house
There are quite a few data backup services. Many of them charge a fee to keep a copy of your files. But there a couple free options that have a high amount of storage that you can use. The first one is Mega. They offer 50 GB of storage for free, with options to upgrade if you need more space. Mega focuses on privacy, which might be interesting to you in light of the recent NSA issues.
The second option to back up your data offsite is Shared.com. They currently offer 100 GB of free storage. That's pretty unheard of in the online backup world, so you might want to sign up in case they decide to lower it for future users. Shared.com has a nice website like Mega, which makes it easy to upload files that are important to you.
Automatic backups
There are a lot services that automatically back up files in a certain folder on your computer. However, they generally offer lower amounts of storage space for their free options. Dropbox, Crashplan, Google Drive, and others are in this group. You can check out each of their websites to see if they fit your needs. I mentioned Mega and Shared.com first because I have more data than the automatic services can handle on their free tiers.
Regardless of which service you use, or even if you want to use an external hard drive, make sure you're backing up your files. You'll wish you had when you no longer have all of those photos you've been taking for years.
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