Oct 29 2009
The Best Ways To Back-Up Your Computer & Online Work
I don’t consider myself too much of a “worry-wart,” but I figure I’ve spent a lot of time into developing my website, many materials stored in my computer, and my various blogs and, even though I have a lot of confidence in the webhosts and my computer hardware, anything can happen. And given that possibility, it doesn’t hurt to “play it safe.”
I particularly like these services that provide automatic back-up for all my work. I don’t have to even think about it, and just receive daily, or even more often, reports from them confirming that my materials have been backed-up. I’m sure that there are others, though, so please leave your suggestions in the comments section of this post.
One is Mozy, which backs-up everything on my computer. And I’ve barely used half of the capacity you get for a free account. And it costs peanuts to upgrade, if necessary.
For my blogs, I use Blog Backupr.
For Twitter, I use Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feed of my Twitter account. Surprisingly, though, I haven’t been too impressed with the ability to search my “tweets” though Google Reader’s search function.
There’s also another different kind of back-up site called BackupURL.
BackupURL lets you enter a website address and then it immediate creates a backup copy of the site with it’s own url address. All the links remain live, and when I tried it with my website I was pleasantly surprised to find that it actually copied all the pages of my site and not just the one page address I had entered.
It’s different from the other online back-up programs in that they will create a copy of a site that you can access and then “re-launch” if you lose all your data, and you have to register for them. Those also automatically update new addition.
BackupUrl sort of “takes a picture in time” and makes it immediately accessible. If you want to update it, you have to enter the site address again and get a new url address for that updated site.
It could definitely come in handy for me since very infrequently my website (with 9,000 categorized links accessible to English Language Learners) might go off-line temporarily. Having a back-url will be useful because students could just use that instead.
Feedback, of course, is always welcome.
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3 responses so far
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Good post, I’ve been finding DropBox to be user friendly and reliable. I haven’t used it long enough to get a feel for it over time, but it is worth looking at.
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I just got hit by my first computer virus and I can tell you it is a pain to get everything up and running again. I’ve spent hours just reformatting and reloading all my programs. All my links are gone and I never want to do this again.
I wish I had read your post before this all happened. I am going to check out these sites and I will let you know what worked out.
Great post. Keep them coming.
jim
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Thanks for sharing this. In the past few months the number of files I have seems to have increased enormously (I’m thinking Gizmo mixed with water -if you recall 1980s movies), particularly web-related stuff, and I was actually beginning to think seriously that I needed to find a way of backing up the info in some more dynamic way than a memory stick.
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