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« My Business Goals - reworded

Computer Backup

January 6, 2007 at 10:02 am

I mentioned in my goals a few days ago and I will be buying a backup for my computer when I buy my new laptop this year. But as Cynthia pointed out I really shouldn’t wait to back things up given that my hard drive is misbehaving and I have to reboot much too often for comfort. The other day my microsoft office program folder was corrupted, not good.

I back up my general files onto CD but my images are just too large to burn onto a CD (I have 10 gig of quilt images and another 11 gig of other pictures). So I checked out a service my dad pointed out to me for storing files on the internet called dropboks. And as we speak I’m uploading my raw image files of my quilts to the site. There is a limit of 1 gig so I can’t fit everything but these files are the most important ones to save at this point.

The interface requires selecting specific files to upload which I find a bit tedious (I’d like to just select a folder and have it upload everything in the folder) but I will be a bit less worried about my computer crashing with these files saved.

I know this isn’t exactly art related but it is certainly art business related as we all have files on our computer that should be backed up. Check out the service at http://www.dropboks.com/. They only ask for an email address and request a $5 donation (not required) when you sign up. You can read a bit about who they are and what they are trying to do on their blog here.


Posted by Lisa in: Art Marketing

8 Comments

  1. Brian Kliewer said,

    January 6, 2007 @ 7:12 pm

    Lisa,

    Another good online storage option is http://www.box.net. I’ve had good success with them. 1GB free storage. For a small monthly fee I can store up to 5 GB with up to 20 GB of transfers (bandwidth). They offer RSS file sharing as well and I can even stream videos from my “box” if I want to. They also allow uploading of entire folders. I’ve intergated it with my site. All my downloads are through my box account with their direct linking option. No problems yet. I don’t work for them…just thought I’d pass this along. It’s a great service.

  2. Chad said,

    January 7, 2007 @ 2:30 am

    I’ve tried box.net and it’s pretty good but it has all these options and features that I will never use. Dropboks is so simple! Also you can upload multiple files at a time by clicking the plus symbol at the bottom.

  3. Colin Jago said,

    January 7, 2007 @ 6:56 am

    SuperDuper! or a Windows equivalent and a cheap external hard drive?

    Fast, frequent and cheap. No hang on that’s a bus advert.

    Thanks for the tip about dropboks.

  4. Lisa Call said,

    January 7, 2007 @ 10:18 am

    Thanks for the tips all. I decided I was being lame and I bought a 250gig external hard drive yesterday (thanks for the info dad). Dropboks annoyed me fairly quickly because I had to browse to each of the files I wanted to upload so I gave up after a couple of multi file uploads.

    Although I think dropboks will be great for transferring files between work and home when needed.

  5. cynthia said,

    January 7, 2007 @ 7:32 pm

    Thanks for the info on Dropboks and some of the other options listed here. There’s a service for everything isn’t there? I was just popping over to mention just getting a jump drive, but sounds like you’re covered with a 250 GB external hard drive…I was just eyeing a 4GB jumpdrive that I saw advertised in the paper today.

  6. Natalie said,

    January 9, 2007 @ 9:16 am

    Lisa,
    I had a hard disk failure recently and lost all of Bob’s pictures. I thought about on line backup and decided those could fail as well so I got a 500GB My Book. It has enough space to store pictures from all my computers and I just carry it around to the computer I want to download from. I just nominated your blog for an award in the bloggies

  7. CJ said,

    January 12, 2007 @ 4:36 am

    Lisa, the external USB portable drives are wonderful. I use a SeaGate one for backups, and it’s great to take it from laptop to laptop, and it even works with my Bernina, I keep my embroidery designs on it as well.

  8. Karen said,

    January 21, 2007 @ 10:27 am

    Hi Lisa,
    Just after Christmas, my hard drive totally died on me. It was very depressing. I also recommend getting an external USB hard drive. It’s so easy to use; you just drag your files into the disk image (at least on a mac). You can read my tale of woe on my blog at http://artful-journey.com/2006/12/31/backing-up-your-computer/ . ~Karen

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