RSS Feeds: Online Backups or Local Computer Backups – Which Do You Use?
There is a veritable plethora of online backup services in existence while computer drive prices continue to drop. Even blank Blu-ray disks and solid-state drives are continuing to get cheaper. It begs the question: If local computer backups are cheaper to maintain, then why on Earth would anyone want to use an online backup service? In these days of what I would call a technological glut, even big businesses should consider local computer backups instead of high-priced online backup services. In this context, "local" does not mean in the same office or even in the same building.
Online Backup Services
Again, for the individual, I don't see the point. Individuals get wooed into using online backup services because the services offer some amount of drive space for free or at a low cost. IDrive offers 2 gigabytes for free while IBackup simply offers a low-cost plan. Dropbox seems to be an upcoming favorite for some people and they too offer the first 2 gigabytes for free.
How much can you store with 2 gigabytes? It all depends on what you're storing. If you're storing nothing but documents, then it's more than enough for your needs. If you're storing video, however, you'll find that 2 gigabytes isn't even close to being enough storage space. Once you start using online backup services for storing video (or even some audio files), things can get really expensive really fast.
Local Computer Backups
External hard drives are getting cheaper all the time. I would stay away from the one-touch backup type, though, because they use proprietary circuit boards which fail long before the drives themselves do. I converted one from external to internal, so I know what I'm talking about.
Blank, rewritable CDs, DVDs and even Blu-ray disks can be used to backup data. Blu-ray looks exceptionally well-suited due to the anti-scratch surface and the fact that researchers are learning on how to store more and more data (up to 100 gigabytes with a just a firmware upgrade) on each disk.
I now have two internal drives in this PC, the first being 250 gigabytes and holding the operating system and related files while the second is the backup drive at 750 gigabytes. I'm also getting ready to convert an internal drive from my dead notebook computer into an external drive. I'm not sure, but I think it's 150 gigabytes in size. For me, these drives are more than I need for backups.
Mobile Computing
It's obvious that external hard drives and disks aren't feasibly used with mobile computers, especially for hand-held computing devices. It defeats the entire purpose of having those devices. In my opinion, cheap online backup services (or free ones) are suited for mobile device users.
I still think a small, external hard drive would be better and more cost-effective, but then I'm not into the mobile scene. The iTouch (or whatever it's actually called) is an interesting device I've been able to use first-hand, so if I can get a cell phone that does all that, I'll definitely jump into the mobile scene head first.
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i end to use a local computer back up, as we are on a large network it all gets stored onto a local server, i store my private work on a seperate hard disk which is backed ip weekly :) x