Cinnamon Posted July 27, 2011 Share Posted July 27, 2011 I didn't Then we had a power outage of some sort & despite the surge protector my hard drive got fried & I have lost the lot Including our 2010 - 2011 business accounts which I had almost completed & are due in this week Luckily the photos from my recent holiday are safe,as I had uploaded them to Facebook (photos are MUCH more important than accounts!) So,is there a way to back up your computer automatically online? - a friend says his machine is now set up to back up daily & it is free. Anyone know anything about this or can recommend a reliable source? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WitchHazel Posted July 27, 2011 Share Posted July 27, 2011 There are a vast array of utilities which will do this for you. If you have a Windows PC you can schedule a job to run a programme to do your backups. I use a programme called WInzip a lot, as I send and upload large files and this compresses them. I can schedule this as a job to zip up and copy specified directories/files, and I do this to an external hard drive. I do a full back up once a week, and a differential backup (which only backs up things which have changed since the last full backup) every evening. This is because when I am working, even losing a day's work would be a real pain to redo. My photos are on an external hard drive and I have DVD backups of these You can also backup to an online (cloud) service. BT Vault do this, Dell has something called Datasafe. There are other suppliers as well, these are usually paid-for services. The advantage of this is that you don't have to worry about your external hard drive going pop or being stolen, and you can access them from anywhere. Hope that helps Hazel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chickric Posted July 27, 2011 Share Posted July 27, 2011 If it's for Windows then I use Windows Live Mesh, which syncs folders between computers on a network, so if i change a file or upload some photos to the Laptop it automatically updates the corresponding folders on the Desktop. It also includes syncing to 'the cloud' although I don't know how much storage you can have for free. It is fully customisable(sp?) so you can select which folders you sync. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WarrensWorld Posted July 27, 2011 Share Posted July 27, 2011 We use 'FileFort Backup' its free. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HarrisonFamily Posted July 27, 2011 Share Posted July 27, 2011 We use Mozyhome ...2gb free or if more space required £4.99 a month...never had a problem with it ...backs up daily when your online.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sadietoo Posted July 27, 2011 Share Posted July 27, 2011 We use Mozyhome ...2gb free or if more space required £4.99 a month...never had a problem with it ...backs up daily when your online.... That's the one our IT guru recommends at work. I also discovered today (and I am a computer numpty so apologies if I am stating the obvious to all you techno wizards) that it is actually possible to clone your hard disk using an external hard drive, and the appropriate programme, Clonezilla and Norton Ghost were mentioned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cinnamon Posted July 27, 2011 Author Share Posted July 27, 2011 Thanks - I shall look into all of those. Great news - the old 'puter has gotton fixed now,so we can get the accounts off (thats tomorrows job!) So no more slaving away over accounts for me..........plus I have a new Computer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ain't Nobody Here Posted July 27, 2011 Share Posted July 27, 2011 Result on both scores . (I'm currently backing up all my photos onto VirginMedia's backup thingy .) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Dogmother Posted July 27, 2011 Share Posted July 27, 2011 You should be able to get someone to recover your old files; I have a friend who specialises in forensic IT and he can usually find any files (he works for the police). On his recommendation, I use Acronis to back up. I started with a full back up which took an age and now it is scheduled to do an incremental back up every month. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Speckled Hen Posted July 28, 2011 Share Posted July 28, 2011 Mac and Time Machine onto external drive My mac gets backed up every whatever I want to set from hourly to every minute. If you want to stay with windoze then there is any number of cloud stuff that enables you to back up as you go. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
donald Posted July 30, 2011 Share Posted July 30, 2011 I always backed up onto a toshiba external hard drive and it went wrong so off it went to toshiba fortunately still under guarantee and unless I spent about £150 sending it to a forensicy type service...I ended up being able to get all holiday photos off old tower hard drive and then toshiba sent me a brand new external hard drive free of charge..but I had lost everything I had backed up(which is ironic as thats why we got the external hard drive). The Toshiba folks were very helpful and they did tell me to put all photos and anything important onto Disks and label them.So thats what I do now! Good old fashioned way! It took me a long time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
