Over the last eight years, we have amassed a large amount of digital pictures and videos.? 132 gigabytes to be exact.? And the number keeps growing.? What to do with all those memories?? How do I make sure they are never lost?
For a long time, I’ve been keeping them on the hard drive of our home computer.? I have an external hard drive where occasionally I copy everything.? But what if there is a fire or flood in the house?? Both would be lost.?? I needed a better solution.
One low budget idea that came to mind was to keep the external drive at a friend’s house.? That way it would be safe from a disaster at my house, but it would be a pain to keep it in sync with the latest pictures and videos. ? A better idea would be to store them in the “cloud”, using a backup service to copy files to a hosted computer that is secure.? But all the online backup services I looked at were expensive, costing hundreds of dollars a year to maintain.
Enter CrashPlan.?? (Disclosure: I received a free one year subscription to CrashPlan+ to write this review, but what I put in the review is completely my own).? CrashPlan has the features I’d expect from a backup service.? Install a client to your desktop, select which folders you want to backup, and it runs continuously in the background keeping your files in sync with the backup location.? But here’s where it gets interesting.? The backup location can be 1) Another folder like an external hard drive, 2) Another computer anywhere like a friend’s house, or 3) Online at CrashPlan’s computers.? The first two options are completely free.? If you don’t have a trustworthy friend you can pay a few dollars a month for option 3.
Your backed up files are available online, to download whenever you need.? You can even restore the files as they existed at any point in time, which is handy if you mistakenly overwrite a file, or if tiny fingers on the keyboard manage to delete a file.? There is even a free iPhone or Android app to let you access files remotely.
If you have lots of digital pictures and videos, you need a backup plan.? I suggest you take a look at CrashPlan.
