JonesPC

Do you perform regular backups of your files?

Let me tell you a little story. Last week a friend called me and was asking quetions about his PC. One day he got the dreaded messages saying that his drive was corrupt. The files were unreadable, and it doesnt  boot to anything. Says the drive is bad or needs formating. We did a little troubleshooting and it looks like his only option is to reformat/reinstall. Probably needs a new drive all together. needing a new drive isnt the biggest problem. The PC is about 5 or more years old. He has kids younger than that computer.

On that PC there is every picture he has taken of the kids, weddings, any family events for the past 5 or so years. He also does his taxes and finances on his computer, all of that info for the last 5 years is also there. His wife is a school teacher. Test, teaching materials, records…Everything dealing with her job is also on that PC.

You get the picture right? That PC was well used for important things. As of right now, that is all lost.

That made me think about how important it is to have some sort of backup. After hearing about that, Amazon’s S3 storage sounds really good. I’ll be honest, I only do some minor backing up, but I tend to not do things that would be a big deal if lost.

Alone, Amazon’s S3 storage is just that, a place where you can log in and upload files you want to save. It becomes a lot more functional when you add one of the many tools available to create a complete backup solution. Jungle Disk and S3 Backup are 2 tools available that sound interesting. Amazon’s S3 storage pricing structure is a bit confusing but its pretty cheap, could be as cheap as 15 cents per gigabyte per month.