Backup Solutions for Students
Monday, November 2, 2009 by Mike Bertolino 
Oh dear. Photo via Leadership by DanThe worst thing that can happen to your computer is frying the hard drive. I had this misfortune two summers ago. I'm grateful that it was the summer though and not before finals. All of your stuff is lost. Music, movies and TV Shows can be re-downloaded, but pictures and documents cannot be easily recreated.
The Cloud
DropBox
A good solution that can sit right in your documents folder is Dropbox. You can just drag and drop the files into a folder that's placed in the location you choose and the files will be uploaded to Dropbox while still being able to access from that folder as well as from any place that has an Internet connection.
The pricing for Dropbox is 9.99/a month for 50 GB of storage and 19.99/a month for 100 GB. The free version of Dropbox give you 2 GB of storage. The prices may seem a little steep but the service is much better than Mozy, which I'll get into below.
Mozy
Over the past two weeks I've been playing around with Mozy and it's been pretty good. I started with a mammoth upload, which took a couple of days then it just died. Which I don't blame it, 24 GB is a lot of information to go over an internet connection. I was surprised it got 18 GB across. It didn't get to upload my documents so on my next backup I just selected the things I need to be backed up for school. That's worked really well.
On the download, or restore functions wasn't what I was expecting. You have to wait for an email from Mozy in order to restore your files.
There is a free option of Mozy which is right up college students' alleys. It has 2 GB of space which should be enough for a semester's worth of work and slideshows. The unlimited version of the servicecosts five dollars a month. While backing up offsite is good if your dorm burns down, it doesn't seem worth it when you can pay a larger one time price for what I'm going to talk about below, the portable HDD option.
The Not-Cloud
Hardware
One of the pitfalls of online backups is that if you have a slow internet connection then your backup will take days if you have a lot of files. So, for the students who want to back up their music, movies and pictures, it's probably better to go with a portable hard drive.
Western Digital came out with some pretty stylish My Passport drives not too long ago. They are worth checking out. They are compatible with all Windows OSs including Windows 7. They work on OS X too but in order for that to happen you have reformat the drive.
For OS X, I recommend a Verbatim or Seagate drive. They both work with Time Machine right out of the box which is really swell.
Do you backup your files? How do you do it? Comment below to share your backup method!
Reader Comments (11)
If you use Portable Dropbox, you can the two in one benefit of backing up to a physical drive and to an online drive.
I own a PC, and I use a Seagate 1 TB external hard drive. To date, it has proven very reliable. The only complaint I have is that my xbox360 doesn't pick it up for some reason.
Also, if you have a Windows Live account, you have access to a small amount of free storage through Window's Skydrive.
I use OS X's Time Machine on an external drive to do hourly backups. I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable exact-copy of my hard drive every once in a while. And I use Backblaze, which is comparable to Mozy. The cool thing about Backblaze (I'm not sure if Mozy does this or not) is that they give you they option of ordering all your backed up data on an external harddrive that they will ship to you.
@jake
Woah, that is cool.
@jake
They do have a DVD option when you want to restore your files.
An important thing to remember is that external drives don't offer the off-site backup benefits of online services. In the rare (but not impossible) event that a natural or other disaster wipes out your computer you'll lose your backups as well.
I find Mozy better to use. It is easy to setup and you get 2GB free to backup your most important files.
And by using this code you get 256MB extra to the free 2GB account: https://mozy.com/free/?code=NN32HH
I use a Personal Server, a old computer running Freenas (a form of openBSD) It sits in a cabinet with no moniter, runs 24/7 and has a web interface (which i have set up for WWW and FTP access) so i can come home, dump my work on it, and then access it anytime on the LAN or outside world. Very nice setup, the only extra i lack is the automatic part, which would be done by SyncToy or a script
I use syncplicity. Free 2GB, backup any number of directories immediate after a change (unlike dropbox), has revision tracking for backed up data, and syncs with Google Docs.
Also, I owned a 1TB Harddrive and after 2 months of use the entire thing died. Luckily it was under warrenty but I never got that data back. So use a mixture of online and home backup. Sucks to have to download a whole harddrive over the internet though. Maybe Backblaze ($5 a month unlimited backup, can send you a hardcopy instead of network restore)
I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable exact-copy of my hard drive every once in a while. And I use Backblaze, which is comparable to Mozy.
I have two hard drives, a 320GB WD something or other I think and a 750GB Samsung 752LJ. The second of which is clicking the first of which is quite a few years old. I have neither filled and keep my second one as disabled in device manager on Windows to ensure it doesn't impede my computer's performance (which it will if it's on). So I keep both backed up on three things
-A 500GB Clickfree backup hard drive (fully automated). This I have the whole family use and is currently in another state so my sister can use it, but I go there often enough.
-A 1TB LaCie BigDisk+ that I bring with me to college and update regularly.
-A 740GB Samsung 752LJ I keep at home and update each vacation.
I see no reason not to use Gmail to backup any documents you may need, sure it's probably not the best method, but it's free and easy.