Cloudy
November 19th 2011 00:37
A concern everyone who has any amount of data on a computer is how best to back it up. The old hardware models are fine, but have some issues. For instance, we have two back-up drives, one of which will automatically pick up any changes you've made when it's plugged in. The drive recommends that you keep it plugged in at all times, but that seems somewhat counterproductive to me. I don't know whether it would be affected if the computer had a meltdown, but I'm not keen to discover that.
Consequently I have to plug it in every so often and catch up. The second back-up drive doesn't do anything automatically, so you have to go through your computer's files and figure out what might need updating. It's a bit of a job, but at least there's plenty of room on the thing.
And then there's the Cloud. I tried Dropbox at while back, when I was still at work, and one day, when my son sent me umpteen photographs via Dropbox, I discovered that the back-up system at work wasn't doing a complete back-up because of the files that Dropbox
had dropped onto my computer. At that point I closed the programme up, and didn't use it for a while.
I've started to do so again, because in spite of the two drives, neither of them is 100% secure. One lives in another room in the house, which means if the house burns down we've lost both the computer and the back-up. The other one lives in the car, so at least it means if the car crashes things are still safe at home, and vice versa. Nevertheless, it's not ideal.
Dropbox is rather like this second back-up drive: it only picks up what you manually tell it to save. This is fine up to a point, but it's easy to forget that you've changed something somewhere in a brief foray into a seldom-used file. Furthermore, Dropbox has a limited capacity, and I was quickly getting to the extent of it.
So I looked at SugarSync.com. It has the advantage of giving you more space in the Cloud for free, (3 gb) so I did a
bit of shuffling around, put the less-used files on Dropbox and the regularly-used ones on SugarSync.
The advantage of the latter is that once it's uploaded everything for the first time it keeps on updating any changes automatically. It's okay if you get all the files you want on there the first time you upload; after that you're supposed to use something called Magic Briefcase. This, however, puts the files in a separate folder, rather than in your main folder. Transferring them to your main folder is achievable, but it seems difficult to get them into the right folder; at present some of my folders are sitting inside a folder they shouldn't be in, on the Cloud. Still as long as it does the job, that's okay.
I've also tried another Cloud option, that of Google documents. This is an efficient enough system, and it seems to have an unlimited capacity, like everything else related to Google. It's rather fiddly doing it, however, and it's easy to forget that you want to save things. On the other hand, I've put all the variations of my musical scores on there as I've made changes, and if I really wanted to go back and find something I'd done earlier, I could. I think the other two Cloud systems I've mentioned keep a certain number of old versions of files, but not an endless stream.
So maybe Google wins out again!
Consequently I have to plug it in every so often and catch up. The second back-up drive doesn't do anything automatically, so you have to go through your computer's files and figure out what might need updating. It's a bit of a job, but at least there's plenty of room on the thing.
And then there's the Cloud. I tried Dropbox at while back, when I was still at work, and one day, when my son sent me umpteen photographs via Dropbox, I discovered that the back-up system at work wasn't doing a complete back-up because of the files that Dropbox
I've started to do so again, because in spite of the two drives, neither of them is 100% secure. One lives in another room in the house, which means if the house burns down we've lost both the computer and the back-up. The other one lives in the car, so at least it means if the car crashes things are still safe at home, and vice versa. Nevertheless, it's not ideal.
Dropbox is rather like this second back-up drive: it only picks up what you manually tell it to save. This is fine up to a point, but it's easy to forget that you've changed something somewhere in a brief foray into a seldom-used file. Furthermore, Dropbox has a limited capacity, and I was quickly getting to the extent of it.
So I looked at SugarSync.com. It has the advantage of giving you more space in the Cloud for free, (3 gb) so I did a
The advantage of the latter is that once it's uploaded everything for the first time it keeps on updating any changes automatically. It's okay if you get all the files you want on there the first time you upload; after that you're supposed to use something called Magic Briefcase. This, however, puts the files in a separate folder, rather than in your main folder. Transferring them to your main folder is achievable, but it seems difficult to get them into the right folder; at present some of my folders are sitting inside a folder they shouldn't be in, on the Cloud. Still as long as it does the job, that's okay.
I've also tried another Cloud option, that of Google documents. This is an efficient enough system, and it seems to have an unlimited capacity, like everything else related to Google. It's rather fiddly doing it, however, and it's easy to forget that you want to save things. On the other hand, I've put all the variations of my musical scores on there as I've made changes, and if I really wanted to go back and find something I'd done earlier, I could. I think the other two Cloud systems I've mentioned keep a certain number of old versions of files, but not an endless stream.
So maybe Google wins out again!
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