ISP automatic forums » Metrocast Communications → Online Backup Service

I have been thinking about backing up to a cloud service.
Anyone have any recommendations ?
Pros & cons of the service you use ?
Any help in picking one would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I use carbonite and have been happy with it. I don't have to think about it. I just right click on a folder, left click on carbonite and select "back this up" and there's a green dot on the folder icon and I know it's backed up. Voila.

If you have a need for more aggravation than any human should have to endure than try Acronis! You set everything up and it runs fine for a while and than you get errors that tell you to try again later and ultimately the solution is to delete everything and start over.

A backup is worst than useless if you cannot count on it when you need it. Any backup service should allow you to save a disc image as well as back up files in my opinion.

I ultimately gave up and bought a large USB 3.0 flash drive and back up often. It is much cheaper and more reliable. If you positively can't lose data alternate between two of them and keep the one you are not using in a remote place like your car or a safe deposit box.

Just one man's opinion.

Chick do you get that backup out of your house? What good is a backup if your house burns floods or the thief spy's that nice drive to go along with the computer.

If you want a simple drop dead why to back up your files I think it would be Carbonite. The only thing I would do is take a very close look at the fact they do not backup .exe files or movies unless you take action to back them up. The default is for it to backup docs photos and music. I put my kids laptop on that as I do not have worry about it.

I will not use Carbonite as I am fussy about my computer and hate the red green or yellow buttons on my files icons. I know I am a bits nuts.

Here is what I do (note I run Windows 8 and Office 2013)First I have an SSD boot drive and a large spinning disc for large files. So I use the win7/win8 full image backup that is built in to windows and free. (I used it when I changed to a larger SSD it worked flawlessly BTW)

Then I use the built in windows backup program to back up my new or changed files from the ssd to the spinning drive every night at 7pm.

Then once a month I back up all the files in my user folder and public user folder to a hard drive that I bring to work I also put the files in a folder on the spinning drive. I have a removable drive bay so in fact two drives for it as such one is always at work the other home.

Then if that is not enough I am grandfathered in to a free 25 gig skydrive for free so I installed the desktop app for skydrive in Win8 and it syncs what ever you put in those folders to the cloud. So I have moved all my files to the local skydrive folder. Office 2013 integrates with skydrive.

So let me see I have my files on my ssd drive, in the cloud on skydrive and backed up every nite to my spinning disk. So three copies of every file safe every night at 7pm. Then depending on the time of the month I have copies my files on three spinning drives two in my computer and one at work that are between 1 day and 30 days old.

Wow that's nuts now you see why I tell normal people to use Carbonite.

Bill, Looks like we run similar systems and backup practices. I love the SSD boot drive it extended the life of my main box by at least a year. Sorry I forgot to mention Skydrive.

I take the view that it is not if a hard drive will fail but when, which is why I place a high value on back up disc images which I do twice a month in addition to file back ups once a week. Since I retired my files do not change as drastically as they once did. I totally agree that Windows built in backup is the way to go.

I keep a complete backup off site and one in the house.

Full image backups are awesome I forgot to mention I update mine monthly as well. But while they are good for fast restores If something happened I am not adverse to doing a nice clean install either.

It really bailed me out twice.
Once when I had a drive crash and, even more important,
when a bunch of documents went bye-bye due to a misunderstanding. I did have a local backup, but it was not 100% up-to-date.

I did verify with MC that exceeding the nominal monthly data cap
would not be a problem (I was restoring a ton of stuff). There was no problem.