Day and Night Digital | Irish Independent

We all know what a pain it is to damage an electronic device. Whether you stupidly drop your phone down the toilet, put your iPod through the wash or lose all your data on your laptop (Disclosure: Only one of these did not happen to me), you are sure to be kicking yourself. Either you have to restore your phone numbers into a banjaxed brick of a phone with a broken screen, or you have to convince Apple customer care that the iPod just inexplicably ceased functioning (Tip: Sunlight and hairdrying it for a week might help, but I didn’t tell you…), or you have to transfer all your files from that external hard-drive you cleverly bought. But here’s a very 21stcentury dilemma. What happens when both your external hard-drives containing all your music, videos, photos and important work files stop working at the same time??

This is what happened to me last week. I lost hundreds of hours of music, some of my older web design stuff, video clips for live visuals, work documents, etc. Basically, loads of information I wanted to keep. Having bought six hard drives in the past few years only for all of them to fail, and having backed up the same data on DVDs that my drive now won’t read, the only logical solution in these days of highspeed internet broadband seemed to be online backup.

After asking people on Twitter for recommendations services like Mozy, Zumodrive, backupanytime.com and Data Deposit Box were mentioned, but the solutions came most recommended were Dropbox and Jungledisk.

Dropbox offers 2GB backup space for free and then 50GB for $9.99 (€7.70) per month afterwards. Dropbox will backup your data from multiple computers automatically if it is updated or deleted and it also acts as an online recycle bin, allowing you to retrieve files you accidentally removed. You can also send friends links to your files and folders across the web. The only downside is that if you want to backup data you have to move the folder into a special dropbox folder, which is counter-intuitive and obtrusive to your workflow. They promise to fix that shortly though.

Jungledisk is an application which uses Amazon.com’s storage service as a backup service. It allows you to do all of the above with the exception of public sharing, but it adds the online backup as a network drive on your computer allowing you to access files much easier. Crucially though, you only pay for the space you use at a cost of $0.15 (11 cent) of GB per month stored with smaller charges for transfers/requests and a onceoff fee of $20 (€15.50) to purchase the Jungledisk app. It works out a little bit cheaper in the long run and you get to decide just how much you want to pay per month. So backup – it’s worth it!

What backup method do you recommend?