I am a big proponent of data backups at regular intervals in order to avoid problems or bad accidents. The nature of technology is parity and duplication. But hard drives are known to fail, and not everything always goes according to plan. It is often best to keep yourself organized by making local backups easy to perform and easy to sift through.
A solution many techies have avoided is performing online data backups. These are handled through cloud storage companies that offer limits on HDD space. But their services are often very reliable, with almost 100% uptime. This means you can tunnel in to grab copies of your backups at any time. You can even do this from another computer if you have Internet access.
Postulating a key provider is tough because it all depends on your needs. If you are a gamer who likes to keep digital copies then maybe you would want to consider local storage instead. But if you are a creative artist, musician, writer, web designer, director, producer, or anything similar then it could be worthwhile to invest in a cloud solution. You could easily transfer files between computers without much of a struggle.
I do notice that the performance changes dramatically considering online Windows and Mac backups. Windows 7/8 and the latest version of OS X have been gaining lots of publicity in the tech world. I haven’t personally enjoyed Windows 8 so I choose to use Win7 instead. But I have heard that most of these options work great on any copy of Microsoft Windows.
On a similar topic Mac users will be in for a treat. Plenty of cloud-based web hosts can offer brilliant support for Operating Systems with a free copy of their native application. OS X users should check out the competition and find a provider who is willing to support you with a downloadable app. Common solutions like Dropbox have released plenty of support for Mac OS X users. But the space is very limited and only meant for a short time period.
Overall the capacity for online backup has grown very quickly in a few short years. Hard drive prices are going down and it has become a much easier process, too. This means large server farms may be put together without a whole lot of capital. Even if they are rented out by providers it’ll still be lightning fast downloads through a private connection.
Companies and freelancers alike may have a need for these services. Cloud-based freelancing applications are becoming much more popular. This is true of everything from design, writing, coding, and even marketing.
Think carefully about your needs and what could benefit your workflow. If you have no need for online backups then it would just turn into a mild annoyance, rather than providing much value. As the Internet advances further it will be interesting to see how many changes occur within methods of data storage.
