Backing up your Computer Files

Freakin Awesome!!

This post comes directly from our Working Together Day on May 8th. It was a great success and so we are going to have a few posts to keep up the good feedback.

We use a few systems to backup our files – from Mozy.com, to Dropbox.com, to external hard drives, to other cloud services. But all of this is not necessarily useful to an average small business. So here are a few we would recommend and why. Now the reality is that we can’t tell you all the reasons why these are great…too long of a posts…so here are the highlight and favourite.

File Sharing for Small Business

DropBox.com

DropBox is a file sharing utility that you can download onto your computer and use just like a My Docs folder. For free you can get 2G of space to share with as many other people as you want.

How DropBox Works

Once downloaded DropBox will ask you where it should save the folder. I would suggest inside your My Documents folder – especially if this is where you normally keep your files. What happens next is it drops this folder into your My Docs and onto the bottom right of your desktop (see the picture right).

This way you can access your shared folder either way using either of the two folder links.

Anything that you put into this folder will be synced with your online account and be accessible to anyone you share them with.

As a Backup:

Because the files are saved on your computer and online you have access to these file even without an internet connection. The benefit of this is that once you get an internet connection back the files automatically sync. So if your computer falls in the toilet and gets fried (this can happen), no worries. You simple get your new computer download DropBox client and your files will automatically be downloaded to your new computer.

Downsides of DropBox?

Well, the downsides are that only 2 Gigs are free and thus if you want to use this for pics and large file types it might not be for you. But I do have to say that it is worth paying for. But for must of us our business files are excel or word docs. For these people DropBox is probably much more than you will need.

Prices: 2Gigs – Free, 50Gigs – €10 per month per user….and then up from there.

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