Comments on: Managing Computer File Clutter Pt. 2: External Storage

By: dj

dj — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:22:00 +0000

Not sure when my Maxtor One Touch is “full”….as there is no indicator with it. Does anyone have experience with Maxtor?

By: Erica

Erica — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 16:07:14 +0000

What do you think about backing up a mobile phone database? There is an option of periodically going through and manually typing everything up into a word document. Which works well but as it is so time consuming, it’s generally not going to be kept up to date. Then you also lose any special text messages you may be keeping, etc. Any ideas? After losing (then thankfully finding) my mobile this weekend the fear is now in me.

By: tru

tru — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:42:06 +0000

I like the suggestions. One thing im against is online storage. I had over 500 songs online. Long story short, all the data and music is gone. That is what prompted me 2 buy my maxtor one touch. I am making sure it does not happen again.

By: Jose Rivera

Jose Rivera — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:13:32 +0000

I have been using Mozy for a couple of months and it is very reliable. It is not a backup if it doesn’t include an off site component.

By: Leah

Leah — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:40:46 +0000

My favorite Online Storage is GSpace from Google. 2GB FREE online Storage with EACH FREE Mail account you sign up for.

You can play your music from GSpace too. It is an add-on through Mozilla Firefox which is MUCH better than IE everyone seems to use. The add-ons Firefox has are great!

An old-time favorite for file organization without the hassle of “MOVING” the files is: Where-Is-It (whereisit-soft.com)

and last but not least for REAL, no-catch, FREE stuff check out “My Place-Where everything is FREE!” It’s NOT mine, it’s someone named “Dave” in Australia.

He’s got lots of FREE website graphics, JavaScript, Animated Gifs, Flash, Fonts, Jokes, Trivia, Quotes and things like Polls and Counters to put on your website that update every so often…there’s a name for that. (dynamic??)

By: lachlan

lachlan — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:44:28 +0000

i’ve almost completed a 366project of my daughter’s first year, so back up is VERY important to me (can’t replace those photos).

so i back up to an external HDD, then onto my flash drive (which goes onto my work PC) then i upload the photos to flickr.

has anyone noticed though how if you upload a 5mb photo to flickr and then download it it’s only 3-4mb? i’m not sure flickr is THAT good for photo backup

plus i back up anything else i don’t want to lose to the external HDD.

By: Alderete

Alderete — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:26:55 +0000

I’m a fan of CrashPlan, which lets you back up to your friends’ computers, in encrypted form, and also to a central service. It’s a bit more expensive than Mozy, but the user interface and functionality of the application are better. Works on Windows and Mac systems, and should actually work for any system that can run Java.

The best thing about CrashPlan is that it is install, configure, and forget. All backups happen in the background, automatically; in that sense it’s a lot like Time Machine, but your backups are remote, protected off-site.

If you’ve ever had your house burglarized, or had a house fire, you understand why that’s important…

By: Amber

Amber — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:58:23 +0000

I have an external hard drive, but i don’t trust it any more than my computer hard drive. My last external drive blew up for no apparent reason & lost everything. I did buy another one, but now, in addition, i store all my documents online as well.

GOOGLE DOCS is free and i LOVE it! And it has a search box so that finding them takes seconds. I’ve copied all my documents from Word on my drive into Google Docs now. I don’t even think about my hard drives any more because i now do all document writing & storing on Google Docs online.

By: Ellie

Ellie — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 11:32:01 +0000

Funny story – we bought a WD MyBook in the last few weeks to attach to our Airport Extreme Base Station to store our music for our iTunes libraries, some shared documents, and our back ups (we have a desktop computer each plus a laptop each). We set up our back ups from our desktops and laptops to the WD MyBook, transferred the music and the shared docs to the MyBook and gleefully erased music and documents from our computers to free up space.

One week later the WD MyBook went off the air – I don’t think it was a physical failure, it seemed to be related to an Airport firmware update but who knows. Of course, we hadn’t even considered backing up what was on it!

Luckily some recovery software got back what we’d lost, we reformatted the WD MyBook, have set up back ups for it and we are tentatively waiting to see if the WD MyBook is going to do it again…

I’m going to check out some of the online back up solutions mentioned here.

By: amy

amy — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:59:28 +0000

another shoult out for Jungle, lovely stuff…

Although the port it uses is the same as my (EasyPHP) Apache web server so I I cna’t have both running at once.. must sort that out

By: Melissa

Melissa — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:45:25 +0000

our hard drive “bit the dust” on easter sunday. you are right- it is not an if but a when!

how happy was i when i knew that my husband had been backing up our data all along using two external hard drives. our digital pictures, tax returns and music were not lost forever!

By: Jenny

Jenny — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:46:08 +0000

For all online backup, file sharing and storage related info, I recommend this website:

http://www.BackupReview.info

By: N. & J.

N. & J. — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:28:11 +0000

I have three external hard drives. I realize this may sound a bit excessive but two of them are what I call palm drives because they are the size of my hand and are 60GB. One we use as an everyday backup for our computer. The other ones is a backup to the backup and kept in a locked box in case of fire, theft, external drive failure. We have scans of all our important documents and of course all our digital photos so we want to keep it all safe. The third drive is 300GB and houses my 150GB+ music collection so that those files don’t slow down anything else.

http://badhuman.wordpress.com

By: Todd

Todd — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:44:42 +0000

As far as remote backups go i use jungledisk and gmail. Jungledisk I have installed on a few of my computers–windows, mac, and linux–and it’s worked great so far. The jungledisk program itself is $20 after the 30 day trial although I ended up buying on day 2. Plus the licensing is pretty loose. Basically as long as you own the computers, you can install it on as many as you want. I like the option of encryting the data before sending it to s3 so even if amazon was forced to hand over your data for whatever reason, it would still be encrypted. And this is transparent to you. There are completely free interfaces for s3, but none as simple as jungledisk. I mainly use jungledisk for data that is completely irreplaceable, mainly my photos and purchased music. I have around 7gb of storage on there and my bill is around $1/mo from amazon. Not bad at all…

I use gmail to do weekly offsite backups of my mysql database files. I compress the files, encrypt it with my pgp key, and just email it off to my gmail address. Now I have an archive of database backups.

All other important stuff I just have a second computer at home I copy everything too. Only problem for that is if my house catches on fire or someone steals all my computers that are spread throughout the house.

By: Amie

Amie — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:31:05 +0000

Another big fan of Flickr for photo storage here, and a plug for a different way to think about file storage: Gmail.

I’m in law school, and documents (reading notes, class notes, and projects) are absolutely essential to my success. My laptop’s hard drive crashed the first week of my first year, and that was bad enough. But external drives get lost, and learning new software is a bit beyond me right now. So at the end of each week of class, I email myself with the class notes as an attachment. I currently have 6.5GB of storage on gmail, it grows every day, and it’s free. Plus, I can tag every email with class names, and it’s so easy to find files when I’m looking for them.

By: xgravity23

xgravity23 — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:11:17 +0000

I don’t have a serious amount of backing up to do, but I am careful with my pictures (I like to think of myself as an amateur photographer) and school documents (I’m a university instructor). We use a 300gb Trekstor external hard drive at home, and I back up my flash drive at home (on my laptop and the external) and at school.

In addition to backing up picture on the external, I have started uploading the most precious–our wedding pictures, whose rights we purchased from our photographer–to ADrive.com, which offers 50gb of FREE storage. There are two downsides, though, but I guess you get what you pay for. 1) The upload interface is not the best and 2) the navigation is also not the best. Since I am just using it to back those memories up.

So, I would like to recommend ADrive to anyone looking for loads of free storage. I haven’t come across any other service offering so much space for free, and that’s what I like about ADrive.

By: Dustin

Dustin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:23:36 +0000

I know of lot of techies that read this blog will appreciate a mention to the Linksys NSLU2. It is one of the NAS devices where external hard drives are required. Its unique quality is that you can load custom firmware on it to make it function like almost any type of server you could want (web server, file server, fax server, music streaming server, etc.).

By: lana

lana — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:39:42 +0000

Another vote for SuperDuper. I hate setting up RAID HDs and always had bad luck with them on Windows, so when I switched to OSX, I bought a MacPro and use SuperDuper to mirror my primary drive every day. This way, in the event of drive failure, I can be up and running on my secondary drive in a less than a minute.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:11:50 +0000

I'd like to chime in with yet another endorsement of JungleDisk. To those who found this article interesting and helpful (I did), I also highly recommend reading The guide to a (mostly) paperless life over at 43Folders. Ryan Norbauer lays out a complete workflow that contextualizes data backup generally, and JungleDisk specifically.

By: Zak

Zak — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:44:05 +0000

Interesting. I’m thinking of trying out JungleDisk, but I already use ElephantDrive. It also uses S3, but you pay them a fixed rate.

Also, I use ElephantDrive for two computers – does JungleDisk have a limit you to one? Or is there any limitation?