How Do I Back up My Data to the Cloud?
The subject of file backups and online storage came the other day at a Lifehacker staff meeting, and resident door owner Nick Douglas struck that his solution to backing up his laptop was simple: He never stores any important files on it. Everything – and he means everything – lives in the cloud.
On paper, leaving everything on someone else’s server sounds like a perfect setup (assuming your files are encrypted, the server is secure, etc.). And there are a number of different services that you can use to manage data of all kinds. This piqued our curiosity at Team Lifehacker: What settings do you use to store your valuable data in the cloud?
Let us know in the comments for this post and we will post the most interesting configurations in the next article. Here’s how Nick’s setup works to get you thinking.
Using the Cloud for Everything: The Nick Douglas Method
Local storage? Pfff. When Nick is busy writing – and he always seems to be busy writing – he throws all of his documents into Dropbox . Everything. But he doesn’t just fill one folder with a pile of electronic documents. He organizes his documents into several different folders and sets up Dropbox to sync only specific folders to the different computers he uses.
Moving on to Photos, Nick uploads all of his photos to Apple iCloud. (I can only assume he’s paying for extra storage, as photos and device backups will surely eat up that free 5GB pretty quickly.) He also backs up all of his photos to his Dropbox, which happens whenever he launches the app. Dropbox on your iPhone. … And since you’ll never be completely safe, it also backs up its photos to Google Photos (free version).
At home, he backs up his desktop content to both his local hard drive and the cloud via Carbonite , but he’s starting to think about it. From what I understand, he is most concerned about keeping all his music intact, but he just signed up with Apple Music, which helps him keep everything organized and accessible from whatever device he uses.
It’s not that hard, is it?
David Murphy’s lazy approach to the cloud.
Hello. I try not to pay too many monthly fees because I’m just a journalist, so here’s my step-by-step approach to using the cloud. It’s a bit like Nick, but not nearly as thorough.
As for the documents, I just say, “Fuck it all.” I can’t remember the last time I opened a word processor on my desktop or laptop because there is such a wonderful thing called Google Docs or, in my particular case, typing text directly into a content management system. But when I had a job where Kinja wasn’t everything to me, I still try to use Google Docs if I can. On the rare occasion that I’m forced to use Pages or Office, I treat documents as data and combine them into whatever file backup solution I’m using at the time. More on this later.
I also use the free version of Dropbox to move files back and forth between my computers because they’re easy to drag and drop and to get what others send me. That’s all.
For photos, I admit that I use both iCloud and Google Photos. Basically, I hate the fact that I have to pay Apple $ 1 a month for 50GB of iCloud storage, but the ability to download all of my photos to different Apple devices is too great to ignore. And now, since I said this, Apple will never expand its free storage with anything else. Great.
I use Google Photos as my primary photo backup service. I guess I could use it as my main photography program instead of paying for iCloud – and I really should look into that, I should, but I haven’t done it yet. Anyway, paying Google just $ 2 a month for 50GB (which gives you full resolution storage in Google Photos) makes more sense, and I love the Google Photos web format a lot more than Apple’s awful web interface for iCloud. So maybe it will be a month (or a year) when I finally ditch iCloud. May be.
I haven’t thought much about the musical situation lately. I used to pay for Apple Music simply because using Siri with CarPlay is so much more convenient than messing around with Spotify. However, lately I’ve been very popular with podcasts – hey Acquisitions Incorporated – so I let my music subscriptions expire. I kind of want to follow in the footsteps of the old school and just transfer all MP3 albums to my iPhone.
In terms of data, I regularly send my most important files (C: \ Users) to my NAS box, which keeps all my data safe via a RAID 5 array. I combine this with a Backblaze backup because you can never there are too many backups. I also use my NAS to store almost all other files that I need to keep for a long period of time. This is similar to my free cloud storage, although the prospect of two out of four hard drives failing at the same time scares me. You will never know. I suppose I could back up that too, but then I have to pay for another online service, and I just … no.