Backup your Backups

What would you do if you lost all of your digital data?

Over the past 11 years I have been buying my own laptop and desktop computers, I have never had a hard drive crash.

Maybe it was because I was buying a new machine every year or two and so I didn’t wear them out.

There was one place I worked that had hard drive crashes and it was after the fact that they discovered that their backups were not really being done.

(I recall 25 years ago when my Mom used to carry floppy disc backups home every night, just in case).

But any data losses I’ve personally experience was due to my own fault.  Deleting stuff that I wanted later, or saving stuff on a flash drive that I later lost.

A couple of years ago I started using Dropbox as a system that replaced my flash drive habit.

I was using flash drives to move data from one computer to another.  A work project that I wanted to complete at home, or perhaps a spreadsheet from home that I wanted to print at work.

A few years ago I had a clunky old Windows XP laptop that was owned by the company I worked for and it was nearly impossible to use, compared to my sleek Windows 7 Ultrabook laptop.  Because there were certain programs that I had to use my work laptop for, I couldn’t ditch it entirely.  But what I did was all my other work files went into a Dropbox account folder that I could access from either computer.

Later, when I was working with a brand new shiny desktop computer at work, I set up a new Dropbox account so I could have access to my work projects when I was out of the office, (which was 40 miles from home.)

But what about the backups?

I discovered the value of Dropbox as a backup service in 2013 when I left one job and they deleted all of my work Dropbox folders off my company laptop before I could move them somewhere else.  I was mad for a couple of hours until I discovered something.

Dropbox saves your stuff in two (or more) places.  It creates a Dropbox folder that resides on your computer and it also keeps an identical copy on their servers in the cloud.   Even though my former employer thought they deleted all my work product, I was able to sign in to Dropbox.com and there was all my stuff.  They don’t keep it online forever, usually 30 days or less, but I was able to recover everything I had created for work and save it again.

Want to try it?  You’ll get 2GB of free storage right away and there are ways to get up to 16GB of free storage when you refer others and they sign up for Dropbox!