Drop It to Keep It Safe
It sounds contrary at first glance, and I will explain, but dropping your important files may be the best way to save them. We all know that computers don’t live forever and no matter how technical or non-technical you are, you know something is bound to break sometime. With a little know-how you can recover from most failures. The one that becomes more tricky is the harddrive and that is why you just might want to drop your important files.
The harddrive is what stores information on your computer. They are built to last, but since they contain moving parts, they do eventually stop working. When it stops working, what happens to you important data? You might be able to pay large amounts to a specialized company to try and recover it, but most likely it’s just gone, unless you have a backup.
The concept of a backup is simple; keep a second copy of all you important data somewhere other than on your computer. But how? You could manually copy everything to another networked computer, or an external harddrive, or USB drive. You could use software that comes with your external harddrive to do an “automatic” backup, but when it compresses and manipulates your data into it’s own format that you cannot directly read, how will you know it really did what it claims to “automatically” do? Better yet, you could use some of the fantastic open source software that is available to automatically synchronize you data to the external drive, this leaves it readable and usable. That is a good solution, but you need to be a little bit tech savy for that. Just talking about it in this paragraph is ugly enough, much less actually reading the tech stuff to do it.
So what’s a regular non-tech to do? Now we’re getting to the punchline; drop the files! The online site GetDropbox.com offers up to 3 gigs of free online storage space. While 3g is not huge, it is most likely enough to backup your critical files. They have both a desktop program for your computer and an Internet interface so you can access your files from any computer connected to the Internet.
Their process is easy, even for non-technical users. Go to GetDropbox.com and click to download their software, install it and it will walk you through creating an account and setting everything up. It will create a folder called dropbox in your My Documents folder. Simply “drop” your important files into the dropbox folder and that’s it, the software will do the rest and keep a copy safely and securely stored on their remote computer. No worries for you.
They have a good tutorial and some documents to help explain what is going on. If you want to get a little more advanced you can use the public folder to share with everybody, create public photo galleries, or share with specific people to collaborate on work.
They have versions of their software for Windows, MAC, and Linux so everyone can take advantage of their service. All told GetDropbox is a wonderful experience and a great way to keep a safe copy of important files outside of your business or office. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s useful! For me that is a winning combination, so why not give it a try and drop some files.
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