<p>First let me state I know little about computers. At work they back up the computers nightly and it is all done for me. At home I don’t have much on my laptop.
Son has an external hard drive.
My D has never backed up her laptop. She has been lucky. She recently started putting some items in a drop box. She does not have an external hard drive. The other night she had a panic attack when her laptop seemed to stop working. She unplugged and it started back up.
Is the drop box good enough or does she need an external hard drive? Also how complicated is it to use an external hard drive?</p>
<p>Dropbox is a cloud computing service - meaning that it is a service that syncs and stores files online. If your daughter is using dropbox, then she has set up an account with that service that is accessible wherever she goes, no matter what happens to her laptop or her own computer. </p>
<p>I feel dropbox or similar services are better than an external hard drive, but they only will work for someone who has a consistent internet connection. That is – if your computer isn’t connected to the internet, putting stuff in the “dropbox” (a special file or folder on your computer that is linked to the internet backup service) won’t work.</p>
<p>The problem with external hard drives is that they can get lost or damaged, and are subject the same mechanical failures as the computer itself. I think they are more useful for archiving stuff like music, videos and photos then for day-to-day backup, unless the person is very disciplined about backing up their work every day. I think a flash drive is more useful for on-the-go backup for someone who is shifting work from one computer to another.</p>
<p>It’s better to do both - use an external hard drive as backup and also use an offsite internet based backup service like dropbox and others. If you only do the offsite backup service you’re relying on them to never have a technical issue or go out of business that might result in the loss of your backed up data. If you only do the external drive then you’re at some risk of a multiple drive failure, which is extremely low if you back up quite regularly, but at much greater risk if someone steals the computer and the hard drive in which case you lose both at once. </p>
<p>Another option is offsite backup to another computer located elsewhere but accessible via the network. This can work well for those who have a computer at work and abother at home and they regularly connect to their work computer from home. It doesn’t sound as if you do this though.</p>
<p>I’m the only one in our family who thinks about such things, so I need to deal with family members who will not be compliant with any backup work. Here’s what I’m doing with the “away” child: When he’s home, I do a complete backup to an external drive that can fully restore his computer at that point in time. At school, MozyHome (free) backs up his documents and images folders when he’s connected to the internet (which is pretty much all the time in his case). In the case of a theft or catastrophic computer failure, he can retrieve papers, work in progress, etc. </p>
<p>Knock wood that I haven’t had to test the effectiveness of this system, but it’s good in theory!</p>
<p>I have a mirrored hard drive (meaning I have two identical hard drives). I also use Carbonite, which is an internet backup service. I also email myself important stuff, which means it’s on Google’s servers (since I use Gmail). So I’m backing stuff up three different easy ways.</p>
<p>Why? Well, over 27 years of owning computers, I have three hard drive crashes that would have destroyed everything if I didn’t back stuff up.</p>
<p>DH had his computer crash completely two years ago, six months after he started using Carbonite. It took four days for Carbonite to rebuild his files, but in the end, they were all there. Cheapest $50 I’ve ever spent. Rebuilding from his backups would have taken weeks–there were TEN YEARS of photography on his computer (which was, BTW, a four-way mirrored drive (meaning one main drive and three copies)–which fried when lightning struck the fuse box (at least that’s what we think happened)).</p>
<p>I have a Dropbox account that automatically backs up my OneNote notebooks every 12 hours (contains ALL my notes/ppts). I also have an external HD where I back up my documents, music, and pictures occasionally.</p>
<p>I wish i had some kind of drop box type thing. My stuff is all on my external which just died. I’m hoping to try to save it, but we’ll see.</p>
<p>Juba–can you explain to me what One Note is? It’s on both my computers, and I really haven’t looked into it or know what it’s for.</p>
<p>Backing up–I, believe it or not, work between two desktop computers in two houses. (just still don’t like laptops; I’m a dinosaur). I use a flash drive to carry the writing I am working on back and forth, and save everything to both, plus the flash. I send myself important things in email so they’ll also be on that server. Recently we got an external hard drive to archive all important documents, music, photos, etc.</p>
<p>Dmd–how does one “mirror” two computer hard drives?</p>
<p>The free Dropbox is only 2GB, probably not enough to back up all the files on your computer. It is very convenient to use if you need to access a document from different computers, or want to share files without emailing them.
External hard drives are cheap - you can get a 500-1000GB of memory for well under $100. They back up automatically, and are worth the peace of mind.</p>
<p>Garland, I have no idea how one mirrors two hard drives. I bought it that way from Dell. It added a few hundred dollars to the price, if I remember correctly. Here’s a Wikipedia article on the process: [RAID</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID]RAID”>RAID - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>I should also mention that Carbonite runs completely in the background and backs up every single file. I pay for the service but it’s invisible.</p>
<p>Thanks, Dmd. I’ll probably continue my old-fashioned “mirroring” which consists of scrupulously saving everything I work on to the hard drive, then uploading to the other computer.</p>
<p>[Amazon.com:</a> LaCie Hard Disk 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive designed by Neil Poulton 301304U: Electronics](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-External-designed-Poulton-301304U/dp/B0010YWPZ8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1284137392&sr=8-3]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-External-designed-Poulton-301304U/dp/B0010YWPZ8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1284137392&sr=8-3)</p>
<p>this one comes with a software that backs up files automatically as often as you want</p>
<p>An external hard drive could get fried together with the computer since they are physically located at the same site. I use a network drive at work that is backup every night. For my home I use Dropbox. I actually have two accounts since I needed more than two GB. It is great when I want to bring work home. I also have about five hundred ebooks, which are in ePUB or MOBI so that I can read either with a Kindle or an iPAD. The Dropbox is essentially my private library shelf.</p>
<p>garland: The nice thing about OneNote for notetaking is that you can click and start typing anywhere on a page and you’re not restricted with formatting/typing on a certain line like you would be in Word. Also, you can “print” PowerPoint slides (or PDFs, etc) to the program, and then annotate as the lecturer goes along, drawing on them (easier if you have a tablet) or typing on them as you need to. To me, it’s almost like taking notes on a paper printout, but without the paper.</p>
<p>I also like that it keeps me pretty organized, because I can keep a different notebook for each class, then have folders for a particular subject containing pages with all the lectures on that subject.</p>
<p>You can also do shared notebooks with people if you’re collaborating on a project or something. My program does a lot of self-directed learning, so that feature can be useful for sharing if someone finds a good resource for something we’ve been talking about.</p>