PropellerHeads like a cloud/hard drive combo

Dear PropellerHeads: My old laptop just died, and a bunch of my important files did along with it. Now that I have a new machine, can you help me back that thing up?

A: Yeah, I hate the thought of losing my vast collection of selfies from my travels too. Granted, travels may mean anywhere outside of my mom's basement, but don't judge me! At one point, due to a combination of cost and the tech proficiency required to run them, back-up solution options were limited for the home market. Businesses spent obscene amounts of money for on-site, off-site, and online solutions as part of their disaster recovery plans, but the average Joe typically relied on media-like floppies (remember those?), CD/DVDs, and external hard drives.

All of those solutions worked to some extent, but they also had a limited shelf life. Media could degrade, or become corrupted or damaged. External hard drives were susceptible to mechanical failures. Fortunately for you, there's a plethora (yes, a plethora, El Jefe) of options available to you these days and we're just the folks to walk you through them.

This PropellerHead recommends a hybrid back-up approach if you can afford it. This involves using an external hard drive as a 'convenience back-up' that holds important data that you may need quickly and is faster to use than pulling files (especially large ones) from cloud-based backup solutions. Solid state drives are more expensive than their traditional counterparts, but have a longer shelf life and lower risk of mechanical failure. Typically, anywhere from 500GB to 1TB should give most users more than enough space for what they need and the backups can be set through built-in utilities that come on both PCs and Macs.

For online solutions there are ever increasing options for you. If you want to save some coin, you can look into Google Drive (drive.google.com) and Dropbox (dropbox.com). Both give you a finite amount of free data storage that you can access on your laptop, phone, or tablet. They have fairly intuitive drag and drop user interfaces, and come from big, trusted names in the field.

There's a limit on the amount of free space they give you, with fee-based space increases available. They both offer collaboration tools so you can share files with colleagues/friends/classmates. The downside is that they lack some of the advanced features such as File System integration and Full Disc imaging, which means you can get to your files, but if your laptop fails you won't be able to do a full restore from either solution.

If you want a more advanced solution and are going to pay for additional storage anyway, there are many competitive options out there right now. Most people have heard the names Carbonite and Mozy, but I think that for personal backup solutions these two companies are living more off name recognition than actual performance.

One name you may want to consider is Crashplan (code42.com/crashplan) by Code42. It's one of the more innovative products out there that's chock-full of features and is competitively priced at $59.99 per year for an individual plan. The user interface is great, you are paying for unlimited storage, and it gives you a lot of flexibility for a hybrid backup. Like most of these services, you can back up to the cloud, but it also gives you an interesting option of using any of your other Internet connected computers as an off-site physical back-up. The downside for Crashplan is the limited web and mobile interface that it currently has and it does not support File Explorer integration. For advanced users, the flexibility may outweigh these negatives.

My top recommendation for an online backup solution is iDrive (idrive.com). It's affordable at $59.50 for one year, easy to set up, allows for unlimited devices on one account, full disc imaging, file sharing, etc. It has a great mobile/web interface, and even has an option for a physical hard drive in case you need to mail in data for a back-up. The only downside I see with it is the 1TB limit at the introductory price; but for most users that is more than enough to meet their needs.

Hopefully this gives you what you need for your own disaster recovery planning. I'd hate for you to lose all your original lol kitteh memes to another Jolt Cola spill on your laptop...

When the PropellerHeads at Data Directions aren't busy with their IT projects, they love to answer questions on business or consumer technology. Email them to questions@askthepropellerheads.com or contact us at Data Directions Inc., 8510 Bell Creek Road, Mechanicsville, VA 23116. Visit our website at www.askthepropellerheads.com.