I had a bad dream the other night: my apartment burned down. The fire chief at the scene calmly informed me that no one was hurt and the cats were OK (whew!). My computer, however was toast. "That's OK, I backup...", I said coolly. Then he held up something that looked like a big chunk of General Tso's chicken: It was my external hard drive - which I back up music, photos and half of my brain to - fried to a crisp. Nooooooooo!
OK. Not the worst dream ever, but real-life remote backup options aren't exactly sweet dreams either. One could spend hours backing up stuff to CD or DVD and then mailing them to a friend or storing it at a bank or... something.
The alternative is online storage. Mac users get ONE gigabyte of storage for $100/year at .Mac or FOUR (4) gigabytes of storage for $200/ year. Xdrive.com will give you 5GB of remote storage for just $120 and backup.com will give you 5GB for $500.
It's a pretty hefty price to pay for such a little amount of storage. I could pay for 5GB of remote storage and it will be just enough space to save my (small) collection of digital photos. Meanwhile my music, documents, calendars, pets, etc. would all go up in flames or drown in a flood etc.
A FREE utility to turn your Gmail account into a 2.5 GB virtual remote hard drive can be had at rjonna.com. But again, it's a piddling amount of storage.
Does anyone have any suggestions for remote backup and storage solutions?
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Buy a second external HD and leave one in your office (or anywhere you seem to visit often). Every Monday swap them so that if everything were to burn down, you will lose no more than a week's worth of stuff.
Offsite backups don't need to be anything fancy, just off site.
Cost: ~$100 total.
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