OK this is a REALLY quick blog post, i will hopefully tidy and expand on it at a later time.

Back in October I dropped my laptop and I lost EVERYTHING that was on there, including some pretty vital business stuff. I sent it off to two different data recovery experts, but neither 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 SOOOOOO wish I had done that before…for £600 I could have had 181 months of backup, or 15 YEARS and NO HEARTACHE AND PAIN! Plus, its taken me the best part of 3 months of work, just to recover back to where I was in October last year…. what a pain in the ******

Anyway, I now backup EVERYTHING 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 my parents, just in case there is a fire at my house… nope every time I am online, its backing up everything I need all the time, in minutes… it only backs up the stuff thats new, so its 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 wasnt sure which system to use, I have subscribed to all of them, and Im 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 heres 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 (shared secure backups amongst friends – clever but I have not started using it yet)

There are some others listed here. but Im not currently using any below that are not already listed above!
http://www.thetop10bestonlinebackup.com/cloud-storage

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….click here 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 listing it here for completeness