Do you back up your files?

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How often, if ever do you back up your files? Do you have hundreds of photos and videos of your children stored in only one place? What would you do if you lost them? My gran lost a whole biscuit-tin-full of photos when she moved house. All her wedding photos and lots of photos of my dad and his brother and sister when they were children. She is still very upset about losing these, especially since my grandad and my father are both no longer with us. But, in this day and age, we really have no excuse for losing photos. Because they’re all digital. Yet, I never really thought about backing ours up. A bunch of them are uploaded to Flickr as well. Some of them are on Facebook. And a fair few of the videos are on You-Tube. But there are others that are only on one of the computers, some on two of the computers and some on all three. Gah!

This is where something like Norton Online Backup can be really useful. It allows up to five household computers to be automatically backed up. So, you can set it up to back up the photos folder on all your computers, for example. And all your photos will be accessible in the same place. Or, if you work from home, you could use it to back up current work projects and ensure you have an off-site backup, in case of fire or flood or the like. It’s fairly easy to use and works in the background, so you can pretty much forget about it once it’s set up. You should make sure you check which folders it’s going to back up, though, as the defaults could put you over the 25 gb limit.

I haven’t tried out any other online backup services, so can’t compare. If you’re looking for an online backup service, you will probably be able to find a number of them for different prices and offering different levels of service. Norton’s costs £49.99 a year for 25 gb of storage and you can add more gb if you need them. Norton is one of the big anti-virus companies, so a brand you can trust. I think £49.99 sounds like a bit much, but I haven’t compared it to others, so it might be the going rate or a good deal. I would definitely make sure you look around at the different options available but, if you do choose Norton’s, it works well and is relatively hassle-free to set up and certainly to maintain.

Thanks to Matt Churchill from Edelman for letting me try this out and also to Lucy Davies from Edelman, too.

What would you back up? Would it be your children’s pictures, your half-written novels, or your accounts? Have you ever lost data for good?