October 25

Part 2 of a set of articles in our series on Data Safety

One day I’ll back up my data. One day.

Sound familiar? How many of us put off the little bit of maintenance and housekeeping needed to keep our machines running in tip-top shape, only to pay the price later? Well, for an almost no-brains solution to backing up, “One day” is here. Mostly.

Data Safety Series A variety of online backup services offer desktop-syncing programs to provide automatic backups of specific folders or files. Many of the services offer free, lite-versions of their backup applications with limited online storage but until now these have been fairly tech-centric requiring a high level of technical knowledge or competency.

Now, following some successful beta launches, Microsoft has now made available the Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite for Windows Vista and 7, and included is “Windows Live Sync.” If you have a Windows Live ID, you can use the Sync software to synchronize up to 2Gb of data. And with Microsoft Office 2010, you can use your Windows Live ID to store and share documents on Microsoft SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online sharing and storage service.

Not a Windows Live User? DropBox (www.dropbox.com) also offers a lite version of their cloud-based sync software. Simply download a small program to your computer, and after it installs any files copied into your local “dropbox” will automatically be sync’ed with DropBox’s servers online, for any time, any where access.

For more manual control, Gmail users can now upload any file types to Google Docs, so if you really needed to control just a few critical files, you can now store then for free in your Google account. The drawback here is there is no automatic folder syncing, but for those requiring granular control of just a few files, loyal Gmail users can stay in the Googleverse.

While other companies offer some similar online backup/synchronizing services, with Microsoft’s large userbase and ease-of-use software, this backup solution can be easily recommend to all.

Go back to Part 1

Category: helpful hints, data loss prevention

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