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I had been working on my book and had all my work product on it stored on a separate hard drive that crashed today. Something came loose inside it and is rattling around as I removed the drive to inspect it.

I fortunately have all my research and photos backed up.

The drive is in warranty, but the data is non recoverable for the work product I had written. I was not even close to finished, but I lost 50 pages of composition, without supporting photos embedded.

New beginnings I guess. Anyone use something like IDrive or any other automatic on-line backup they would recommend?

I don't want to have this happen again. First personal data drive I have lost in 15 years.

Everett

The only truly reliable backup is paper. Nothing that involves computers is ever going to be totally reliable. Cloud backup is no more reliable than what you are already using. If you expect to rely on computers for backup, you need multiple separate drives/computers. It isn't likely they will all crash at the same time, but it is likely that they will eventually crash.
And, you need to be checking them constantly for functionality so you know right away when one dies.

Daily, redundant, automatic backups to separate destinations.

I’ve used Dropbox for years, and also Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. Dropbox is my favorite. It’s very unobtrusive, super-easy to set up, claims a high level of security, and has been completely trouble-free in my experience. The paid subscription service also keeps version histories of your data.

You can set up a Dropbox folder on as many PC’s and mobile devices as you wish. When you edit a file, you’re actually editing the copy in local storage. A Dropbox service runs in the background, and copies new/revised files to the master version in the cloud. From there, it pushes the latest content out to local storage on all your other linked devices. So you wind up with copies of your latest data not only in the cloud, but also on as many devices as you wish. All completely automatic. Losing any one device is then a complete non-problem.

I generally leave all my devices set on automatic updates, but you don’t have to. If a device is turned off, or the updating service is disabled, it’s local content can’t be changed. So it would then be impervious to bugs or even malicious software in the cloud service.

I also have a Google Drive account that is set up to operate exactly the same way, and it works very well these days. So I suspect that all you need to do is move your work files to a non-public folder in your own Google Drive, and you’ll be pretty bulletproof.

Edit: I’d still link at least two PC’s to whatever cloud service you choose. By default, for Dropbox at least, revised data is pushed to mobile devices only on demand (to conserve the limited local storage).

The fact that something came loose inside your hard drive sounds bad. Normally I would recommend a Ghost recovery. But that may not work.
Maybe a computer repair shop can recover your data.
It's worth asking.

You may want to try a product like carbon copy. They make a copy of your data and store it in a number of locations. So baring a world wide disaster they will have a copy of your data.

I have no idea of the cost but have been told by people that use the service that is far cheaper than trying to recover lost data. Plus you are protected by lost from a local fire, flood, break in, storm and localized disaster.

Before you think much about cloud storage at some other site, think about Photobucket.
For years, people recommended and raved about storing their pictures on Photobucket. Nobody is recommending it anymore. Relying on someone else for your backup is short sighted if your data matters.

garys wrote:Before you think much about cloud storage at some other site, think about Photobucket.
For years, people recommended and raved about storing their pictures on Photobucket. Nobody is recommending it anymore. Relying on someone else for your backup is short sighted if your data matters.

The nice thing about Dropbox et. al. is that your data is stored both in the cloud and on all of your linked devices. You can access your data directly from the cloud with a web browser, but I very rarely do that. If the cloud service dies, all of your data is still stored on your own hard drives -- on however many machines you wish to link. It effectively provides automatic distributed data backup, in addition to cloud storage.

The other nice thing about this storage model is that when you access your data from whatever application on your PC, you're actually accessing the copy on your local drive. So there are no lags for retreiving data over the internet. And if your internet access goes down, no problem -- you keep working on your local copy, just like normal. Then when your internet access is restored, the background service will automatically push the revised files to the cloud, and then to local storage on all of your other linked devices.

Don't over look cloud drives that live in your house. While not a great solution for things like fires they are good for general data back up and disk failures.

I have two of them, one with 2TB the other with 4TB. The 4TB unit has a native 2TB drive and then a USB3 attached drive. The other one that has the 2TB also supports USB3 so I could add more space if and when I need it.

The ones I have are WD My Cloud drives. They have different sizes and models of these but for those that prefer local storage and not exposing data to the internet they are a pretty good solution.

I run a gigabit Ethernet in my house and the cloud drives are connected by wire which makes them pretty fast. For those of us who are still on slower networks for our web connections they are much much faster.

This may not be where you want to go but it does have some advantages that shouldn't be over looked.

Ed

I use Google Drive but like an idiot I forgot to copy my work in process document to it.

The document had no pictures in it yet only <insert here references>

When I write I find that documents flow better and certainty save much faster without embedded photographs.

I add those later.

I cannot believe I failed to back it up to my Google Drive even once. I had bought a brand new NAS (Network Attached Storage) for my project, and that new drive was What failed.

I guess I needed to buy a Raid level version of NAS with multiple drives and a hot spare but I was trying to save money.

I am definitely looking into cloud back up and I found IDrive has a free small option and one for $5.00 / month that will backup what I need. Can't believe I didn't do that first.

The NAS cost alone would have paid for three years of I Drive cost.

I have asked for a full refund on it since it failed in 5 weeks use. It was New Old Stock but carried full warranty from Fry's Electronics. They will make it right I know and I have some other non computer gear I want there anyway.

Thanks everyone.

Everett