Do you use any Cloud Services?

[Woody]

I was talking with an IT guy the other day at work about buying an external HD for backing up my junk and he suggested why not just sign up for some cloud services in case you have a hardware failure.

So I am backing up a bunch of photos to a Google Drive account and an Amazon Drive account. Google Drive gives you 15 gigs and Amazon gives you 5 gigs, the same as Apple Cloud which I use for my iPhone Settings and contacts. All three have apps for my mobile. You get each if you have a gmail account or an Amazon account.

The other I use is Dropbox which has an app for my phone which you link to your computer. I use it for transferring photos back from my iPhone to my computer mostly. Kind of a temporary storage for photos but it works great.

[emma_Dad]

I have 2 1tb external used to backup computer fully once a week. Then all pictures & documents are back up on Google (100GB a month plane), iphone uses icloud.

[kelsyg]

I use the Cloud for all my Apple devices. Don't know how or why it works but it keeps everything updated, backed up and synced with everything else. Amazing to me.

[bett]

i have an external hard drive, ( whatever that means) and stuff backed up on cloud. (whatever that means)

[doubledip1]

I use iCloud and I have a Time Machine.

[KenZ71]

I will preface with I am paranoid

My data is stored on a drive mirror which means all data is written to two drives simultaneously. Once a month onr drive is pulled and taken to my office. The drive at work goes home and syncs up.

This way my data is protected from fire, theft, flood, etc.

I dont do cloud storage because well, think of all the merchants who have been hacked - Target, UPS stores, etc. Too much risk in my opinion.

Of course the flip side could be my method takes extra effort. Cloud solutions can be more automatic.

[Bamps]

I got iCloud but I don't like clouds. I try to store on externals but I fear that's old school obsolete.

[Mr Kleb]

No, partly because of paranoia similar to KenZ71's. Partly because things like Dropbox'es ToS which limit their exposure by mandating arbitration and forbidding class actions in the (admittedly very unlikely) event their gross negligence leads to compromise of my data.

I back up to an external drive weekly and to a Blu-Ray disc monthly, which is stored off-site.

[Jeff]

Yes and no, depending what it is. I have been in IT for 30 years now, I have a ton of personal data. I still have an original Apple 2+ with the old 5 1/4 floppies. I don't use it anymore, as I have an Apple 2 emulator and a great many years ago I took all those floppies and made them virtual disks the emulator can load. Every computer after that I have full virtual machines that I can load but that's just so I can access something as most data has been moved off or upgraded, but you never know. But I have decades of computer code I have wrote with all the time stamps preserved, as you never know when there may be a patent dispute or something.

My main computer the operating system drive is mirrored. Then the data drives are running RAID 5 so yeah I have 3 drives for data. Nice part is something goes dead, pull it out and replace it and your right back up and running. I don't go as nuts though at home to have hot swap drives. That gets backed up nightly to an external drive. I keep a week worth at a time on there. Once a week I back to a Network Attached storage device. This network attached storage is where everything else, laptops, tablets etc get backed up to. Also the network attached storage is where images for development and so on reside so I can run them from any of my computers. Some thing that never change like old virtual images and so on, I have backed up to an external drive that refresh usually between Thanksgiving and Christmas and give it to my sister so it's at her house off site. Everythign else that is actively being used gets set to Amazon cloud storage.

Why do I still have an apple 2 emulator. Well you never know when your going to need to play a game of Karateka and save the princess from the evil shogun warlord.

[Woody]

I was kind of worried about security as well but if the world wants to go through a ton of photos of two dogs they can have it.

I downloaded a free back up program that zips up files and puts a password on it. I used this to make a few back ups of documents that I put on a data stick.

Our work was also selling off old laptops so I bought one with a 160 gig hard drive and set it up as a windows home network and backed my files onto it as well.

I think I am going to pick up an external drive as well and make an image of my laptop and have it backed up too. After the board crash I am wearing of losing everything.