My best friends hard drive just crashed.
She lost all of her information and data.

Makes me think I should look at a back up service.
Anyone ever use any of these?
ANy suggestions?
Any warnings?

Thank you.

-Worthy

I use dropbox.

it's less of a backup than it is a way to keep files synced across multiple computers, but it works as a backup in a pinch.

2gb for free, paid plans work too.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

USB hard drive. Plug it when needed. Put data you want to keep there + keep a copy on main on hard drive. There you go, instant backup.

Always be prepared to lose everything on a main CPU hard drive. If you can't live without it, then it goes here, or even better, two of those, one which you keep in a secure location such as a fireproof box.

8 to 20 bucks at Wal-Mart. Various sizes. There is no difference between them other than that.

Carbonite, unlimited backup for 55.00 per year.

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Devil

Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Windows Home Server + Cloudberry + Amazon S3 for the win.

Dropbox works for me as well. Nothing wrong with having a USB thumb drive, but keeping it in the clouds as well is always a good idea.

Storage is very cheap, there is no reason not to have some redundancy...best advice you can give anyone that doesn't know a lot about computers is to keep backups.

JungleDisk works well for some friends of mine.

http://www.jungledisk.com/

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Avoid JungleDisk like the plague. Their billing is suspect.

Had all kinds of problems with MozyPro.

Carbonite FTW, I tell you. I have had no issue I am using it on my server at home (windows 2008) and could not be happier.

http://www.carbonite.com/

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Devil

Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Carbonite is good stuff so long as you're within their requirements. If so, it's your best solution. Outside of it, your options are still limited =/

Example?

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I can't legally provide one. Let's just say that any potential issues that myself, and a few other folks/businesses might have had were likely resolved to our satisfaction.

I was just curious. No biggie.

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Sorry, hate to be ambiguous is all. In all fairness, part of it is how Amazon handles logging data transferred. The entire system is annoying. =//

I use a 1tb usb drive. (100 bucks) Online would be too slow for me. - shoot, i get impatient waiting for files to transfer to the usb drive.

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You don't get impatient when you automate backups and do it overnight, nor do you get impatient when it's done transparently, as in dropbox.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

yeah I don't even know its running, once the first backup was done it only backs up changes so its very fast

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Devil

Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.
Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

You don't know me.. heh.

A lot of times, I just want to move files off my computer... not wait for a nightly back up.

Say I get in the mood to sort through 5 years worth of pictures. Part of that is going to be moving files on and off my computer. That's no good.

Say I want to watch a movie I downloaded 2 months ago, but It's not on my computer, its on the backup server. Crap, now I gotta wait for a download instead of a USB transfer.

I guess maybe we would just use it in a different way, and so for me, it wouldn't work.

I get horribly frustrated with upload speeds.

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I only back up critically important things to dropbox, and all of them are contained within encrypted containers - videos and music don't count as "critically important" (critically important here are things like my resume, my spreadsheet containing my software keys, my personal address book, several work documents that are labeled as "non sensitive yet vital", my insurance documentation, etc)

for video and music, I have a piece of shit p4 with three 1tb drives in a RAID5 in the closet, connected to the network with file shares. I just open them directly from the network.

I do keep a backup of my music collection on a 500gb external drive that's only plugged in to sync up my music, then it's unplugged again almost immediately.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]