Backing-up Your Photos, Music and Files for Free

Your hard drive will eventually fail. So you need to backup your files. Why not do it for free?

Those of you who know me or those of you who have read through the TechPages know that I hate paying for software when I can find something similar on the Web for free. Why pay for Norton or McAfee for virus protection when you can use AVG virus protection for free? Why pay for anti-spyWare protection when terrific products like Adaware, Spybot and Superantispyware are available as free downloads? And I'm just as stingy when it comes to my backup strategy. I know that I should buy an external hard drive with backup software installed on it. Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, LaCie, Iomega and Sony all make relatively inexpensive external backup hard drives. But if a natural disaster should occur i.e. a flood, tornado, or should my house burn down or should a thief whipe me out, that external drive would probably be gone with everything else.

Backing-Up Your Files to the Cloud

A better option for backing-up your music, photos and files is to use an off-site, Online data storage service like HP Upline, SOS Online Backup, IDrive, Syncplicity or Carbonite. The bad news is that using these services to backup all of your data is going to saddle you with just one more monthly bill you're going to have to pay for the rest of your digital life. The good news is that some of these Online data storage services will offer you a sizable amount of storage space for free hoping that you will become comfortable and enamored enough with their product to go ahead and drink the kool-Aid. The fact is there are tons of places in "the cloud" where you can park your data and have total access to it 24/7 and it won't cost you a dime.

Backing-Up Your Data for Free in "The Cloud"

Cloud Computing is a buzz phrase we hear a lot these days. All Cloud Computing means is using your Web browser instead of your hard drive to run applications to do the work you do everyday. It won't be long until this is the norm rather than the exception. I've written a few pages about Cloud Computing in previous TechPage posts and one in particular pertains to the subject of this post. Back on December 28, 2008 I wrote a piece on Microsoft Windows SkyDrive in which I explained how to use SkyDrive. You might want to have a look at it. I now use SkyDrive to backup almost all of my most important files. All of my expensive mp3 and other music files are backed-up to SkyDrive. (I do pay for all music downloads, by the way) My entire photo collection is backed-up on SkyDrive. In fact, this page your reading and this entire Website is backed-up on SkyDrive. This is made possible by the fact that, as I pointed out on my post on SkyDrive, Microsoft gives you a whopping 25 Gigabytes of free server space on SkyDrive.

Backing-Up Your Files with Windows SkyDrive

A little tip for putting lots of files at one time to SkyDrive: Try uploading in IE rather than firefox. This will give you an interface to drag many files onto the window to be uploaded at once compared to firefox's interface which allows you to browse for five files at a time. Here's another tip: you can't upload folders. You can only upload files.

I also use Syncplicity to backup files that I am constantly editing and to backup folders that I am constantly adding files to. Syncplicity is far more complex and has more features that a lot of simple on-line storage sites. Unlike most Cloud Computing storage sites like Box.net, ADrive or Microsoft SkyDrive, you download Syncplicity to all the computers you want to use it on and then you choose the files and folders that you want Syncplicity to backup and it will not only keep a copy of those files and folders on its servers, it will automatically update those files and folders on its servers anytime you make the slightest changes to them. And this happens in real-time, almost instantly or as fast as your upload internet connection. But that's not all. Syncplicity also makes these changes to those files and folders on the other computers that you have Syncplicity installed on. I have my computer at work synced with Syncplicity to my computers at home so that I can do homework at work and work-work at home. Pretty cool! Syncplicity gives you 5 Gigs on their servers for free just for signing up.

Other Backup Alternatives in "The Cloud"

SkyDrive and Syncplicity are not the only cloud backup I use. I also have music, photos and files backed-up on Adrive and Box.net. ADrive allows you to store a humongous 50GB of any file format with a whopping 2GB uploade limit (if you can call that a limit!). Box.net allows you only 1GB of free storage but their UI looks and "feels" a lot better than ADrive's does. That said, there's nothing really bothersome about ADrive's interface. It allows you to create folders into which you can upload files and it displays those folders in a tree-like manner that has the look and feel of Windows Explorer classic default view. You just click open a folder and upload files to it. Once the files are in the folders you can click them open and view them or download them onto any computer.

Backing-Up Your Files to the Cloud

One thing you might want to keep in mind about using cloud storage providers is that they could go belly-up at any time. You may recall that this happened to AOL-owned Xdrive in or around August 0f 2008. With this in mind, you might not want to consider using backing-up in the cloud as your only method of securing your data. But if on-line backup is to be your only method, you should park your most valuable 25Gigs of data on SkyDrive. This is because Microsoft isn't going belly-up any time soon. However, most of you will recall that Windows Live Sync took the place of an older Microsoft program called FolderShare. All of the data left on Microsoft's FolderShare servers was lost when it went down in December of 2008. To Microsoft's credit, they did give FolderShare users ample warning and an abundance of time to move their data off the FolderShare servers before they went down. So bottom line, you can trust The Evil Empi... I mean Microsoft to be there tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, whereas, I can't really see how a company like ADrive can afford to stay afloat giving away 50 Gigs of free server space. Ok, so unlike Box.net, they put an ad at the top and bottom of your MY Files page. But 50 Gigs for free!

Both Box.net and ADrive are similar to SkyDrive in that you can only upload files. You can't send up whole folders. On all three programs, once your files are up you can move them into folders that you create within the programs. In both Box.net and ADrive you can create a new empty folder. Once you've named the folder and clicked OK, the new empty folder will open and there will be an option to Add Files. You click this and you will be taken to your My Computer configuration. From there you click down to where the files are you want to upload. In both programs, you can highlight more than one file to be Opened (added) by holding down the Shift key or the Ctrl key while making your selections. Or you can drag and drop with both Box.net and ADrive. As stated earlier, you can also drag and drop in SkyDrive but only in Internet Explorer. And as with SkyDrive, you can choose to share or keep private anything you put up on ADrive or Box.net.

Google will store a lot of stuff for you on Google Docs. How much stuff? Here's what Google says about that:

"There is a limit on how much a user can store on their account, and files may only be uploaded or downloaded one at a time. Documents may not exceed 500k, embedded images must not exceed 2MB each, and spreadsheets are limited to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, and 99 sheets. A user can have a total of 5,000 documents and presentations, 5,000 images, 1,000 spreadsheets, and 100 PDFs at one time."

And don't forget about Google's Picasa when your looking for someplace to store your photos. You can store a gig's worth of pics on Picasa. An added plus to storing backups of your stuff on Google Docs and Google Picasa is that, like Microsoft, Google looks like it'll be around awhile.

Here are some Cloud storage entities that allow free storage. This is not an exhaustive list by far. There are many enterprises up and running that allow free cloud storage so this is just a partial list.

• Skydrive     gives you 25 gigs!


• Box.net    gives you one GB of free storage.


• ADrive    gives you 50 Gigs of free storage


• Google Docs    lets you store Google Documents.


• MS Office    allows up to 5 gigs of free storage.


• Zoho    gives you 1 gig


• Flicker    allows for free photo storaqge


• Picasa    gives you one gig of storage space.


• Dropbox    gives you two gig of storage space plus sync functionality.


• File Qube    gives you two gigs of storage space.    -Thanks, Tom in Baltimore.

Email me your favorite free storage site and I'll add it to this list

Gladinet Cloud Desktop

Once you have music, pictures and documents stored on Google Docs, SkyDrive, ADrive, Box.net or Amazon, you can download and install Gladinet Cloud Desktop to keep track of everything. Gladinet Cloud Desktop allows you to access files stored in the cloud as if they were in a local folder. A virtual drive is created on your desktop and each storage service will be added as a folder in that directory.

This is a wonderful application. You can drag and drop a file or even a folder into a locally mapped cloud storage folder on Gladinet's desktop application and its contents will be transferred to the cloud storage service. Drag and drop an object from the locally mapped cloud storage folder to your desktop, and the reverse occurs. You can even copy and paste between the cloud and your local machine. For instance you can copy and paste a spreadsheet from a local Excel spreadsheet into a Word document stored in the cloud just as easily as if both files were on your hard drive. Now that's amazing !

Gladinet Links to Your Backups

With Gladinet Cloud Desktop you can even do Cloud to Cloud Backup. Most backup applications upload files from your local computer to the web for safekeeping. Others backup files from the cloud on your PC or external hard drive. Gladinet breaks this mold with backups from one cloud storage application to another. For example, it allows Google Docs files to be backed up to Amazon S3 or any other selected storage provider like SkyDrive, for instance.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop is brand new software and the company is still adding functionality to its product. Currently, it only works on PCs. A Mac version is expected soon. For now Gladinet Cloud Desktop works with Google Docs, SkyDrive, ADrive, Box.net and Amazon S3. The company claims that soon it will work with other web storage providers.

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