On-line storage/hard storage

[permaquandry]

My laptop is having issues (I think it's had enough of me). Wanna rebuild but have 22gb of photos and vids on there. Have a 16gb key and could buy another one, just s bit concerned as could go missing/corrupt etc.

Does anybody use on-line storage and us it safe?

I bought 10 x 600mb rw DVDs but trying to format them and catalogue my stuff is laborious and difficult.

Any suggestions would be gratefully recieved' thx.

I use Crashplan for my business backup. When my media drive packed in last week, I was able to buy another hard drive and stream the backed-up data straight down to it from the online backup. It seems to work for me and costs me about £5 per month. So yes, it seems to be safe.

I don't use on-line storage because the idea of personal photos being outside of my control is not something that I am comfortable with. Instead I back up my stuff to memory sticks. I recently bought a 32GB memory stick from Amazon for £16 plus P&P which I stuck a big key ring on which will reduce the chances of it being lost. My precious data are backed up onto this.

The way I see it, the chances of losing the data on my hard disk AND at the same time losing the memory stick on which that data is backed upon is minimal?

Pooshtun, it depends on the location of your data. If there's a fire in the house and your memory stick and hard drive are both in the house, you'll lose them both at the same time and your backups won't be worth doing.

If you want to keep stuff on memory sticks, I suggest you buy a small fireproof safe (about £50) and a second memory stick, and keep one stick at all times in the safe which you should (if possible) keep in a garage or shed.

Why don't you just burn them? anything you want burn a back up and have them stored on an external HD (wouldn't really use a solid state as long term storage at least with a HD the chances are it will fail slowly rather then bam it's dead).

Depends on how far you want to take your disaster recovery plan. I mean, I have never known someone who has had a house fire so essentially I plan for my hard disk crashing or a burglar walking off with my pc. Having said that, each Christmas I burn my important stuff onto DVD and I leave them with my parents.

Both. Everything I really, really absolutely cannot lose (uni work in progress mostly) is backed up locally, on an external HD, and via Dropbox. Because I'm paranoid like that.

More practically speaking, I'd make sure that at least one of your backup methods is an offsite one, be it a cloud storage service of some sort, or an external HD stored at someone else's house. That way, if you have a fire/flood/burglary you don't lose your originals and backups at the same time. And don't burn to CD/DVD, the quality degenerates surprisingly fast.

22GB will take you a VERY long time to upload to a cloud storage company. And restore if you have issues. That is unless you are fortunate enough to have fibre broadband.

The most practical solution is to buy a portable external hard disk like this: WD 320GB hard drive

It'll be way faster than another 16GB USB pen drive and store way more.

What I do is I encrypt my portable drive using another program then store the disk in the back of my car. That way if my house burns down my photos are safe. If I need to get the disk, it's only close. If my car gets stolen then the disk is encrypted and I have more important things to worry about....like my car!