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Hey gang here's a little sob story and some helpful advice from someone who just went through digital hell.
BACK UP YOUR DATA!!
Seems like obvious and painful advice. It no longer is. My entire life is now kept digitally (as many young and old folks alike are now doing). Needless to say, entropy took hold of my computer and sent my hard drive to hard drive hades. Of course ALL of our family fotos are now digital and only kept on the hard drive. This was not, of course, the first time this happened to me. Previously our dell laptop needed its hard drive replaced TWICE!. You would think thereafter that I would have learned my lesson. Well I did sort of. I started burning my documents to a CD. This proved difficult to maintain with any sort of regularity. However, due to the recent demise of my computer, I had to pay Best Buy $100 to recover all our beloved family fotos of the past two years. A stupid tax of $100.00!
This compelled me to investigate a marvelous new web development, FREE ONLINE STORAGE! No not the email kind. New websites like http://www.streamload.com/ and http://www.diino.com/ and http://www.omnidrive.com all provide free online storage of at least 1 Gigabyte. All of the aforementioned sites are good. My favorite is Diino, my least favorite: Omnidrive. Streamload gives you a free 25 gig space, but they only allow you to download 1 gig per month free. Diino gives you 2 gigs free, the software is unobtrusive, easy to use, and has a lot of features (like web-sharing/publishing, and password protection). The only issue is that for these free storage site, you have to sign up to get monthly emails from the service provider, but they are easily discarded or junkmailed. The sites have top-notch encryption, so no one can steal your data. They all do not give your address to spammers (Horray!). What is more, these services will automatically synchronize any folder you want from your hard drive to your online storage account. You no longer have to be proactive about backup. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: "Can't somebody else do it?" Yes they can. An ESSENTIAL tool for all digital folks like ourselves, plus IT'S FREE!!! I STRONGLY recommend everyone use one of these services.
BACK UP YOUR DATA!!
Seems like obvious and painful advice. It no longer is. My entire life is now kept digitally (as many young and old folks alike are now doing). Needless to say, entropy took hold of my computer and sent my hard drive to hard drive hades. Of course ALL of our family fotos are now digital and only kept on the hard drive. This was not, of course, the first time this happened to me. Previously our dell laptop needed its hard drive replaced TWICE!. You would think thereafter that I would have learned my lesson. Well I did sort of. I started burning my documents to a CD. This proved difficult to maintain with any sort of regularity. However, due to the recent demise of my computer, I had to pay Best Buy $100 to recover all our beloved family fotos of the past two years. A stupid tax of $100.00!
This compelled me to investigate a marvelous new web development, FREE ONLINE STORAGE! No not the email kind. New websites like http://www.streamload.com/ and http://www.diino.com/ and http://www.omnidrive.com all provide free online storage of at least 1 Gigabyte. All of the aforementioned sites are good. My favorite is Diino, my least favorite: Omnidrive. Streamload gives you a free 25 gig space, but they only allow you to download 1 gig per month free. Diino gives you 2 gigs free, the software is unobtrusive, easy to use, and has a lot of features (like web-sharing/publishing, and password protection). The only issue is that for these free storage site, you have to sign up to get monthly emails from the service provider, but they are easily discarded or junkmailed. The sites have top-notch encryption, so no one can steal your data. They all do not give your address to spammers (Horray!). What is more, these services will automatically synchronize any folder you want from your hard drive to your online storage account. You no longer have to be proactive about backup. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: "Can't somebody else do it?" Yes they can. An ESSENTIAL tool for all digital folks like ourselves, plus IT'S FREE!!! I STRONGLY recommend everyone use one of these services.
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