Friday 21 March 2014

Personal backup recommendation update

I'm going to adjust my recommendations for personal offsite backup for you photos and videos, but not by much. I used to say "burn your photos and videos to a DVD and take that to work". These days, I have more than that. Lots more. So my new recommendation is to buy a portable hard drive and set up SyncToy (from Microsoft) to keep all your personal media synchronised to the drive. Bring it home every now and then, sync to it, then carry it back to work. If you've got the space on your work PC, you can sync to that hard drive, too, and use the external drive just for carrying the large data sets.

This is more expensive than the DVD option. If you've got small enough collections, you might do better to buy a large flash drive rather than a huge portable hard drive. Use your own judgement on that. One suggestion, though: don't bring it home every single weekend. If your house catches fire on a weekend, then you're still boned. Mix it up.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is also relevant since many computers are being sold without disc burners these days.
PPS - I'm not sure what to do if a tablet is your primary computer. Online backup is probably your best bet.

No comments: