Rebooting XP question

[spearchucker]

I like upnorth's idea but be careful since many consumer NAS units are slow. Much slower than USB 2.0, but they are very convenient. You can also use an old desktop with a big hard drive on the network as a NAS. USB 3.0 is now out and PC are just starting to have that capability too.

[delcecchi]

As my son pointed out, if you have stuff like pictures that you really really really want to be safe, back it up on the net. He suggested jungledisk dot com but you can find a bunch of them.

Others are available. Couple bucks a month and you are safe, even if your house burns down or someone steals all your hardware.

[spearchucker]

As my son pointed out, if you have stuff like pictures that you really really really want to be safe, back it up on the net. He suggested jungledisk dot com but you can find a bunch of them.

Others are available. Couple bucks a month and you are safe, even if your house burns down or someone steals all your hardware.

Just make sure that you trust someone else with the safekeeping of your data. If I was to do this, I would choose a very reputable company. If you miss a payment they can dump your data.

If you have several GB of data it could take days or weeks to get a complete backup depending on your internet speed. Even the fastest cable internet usually only has a 1 or 2 Mb/s upload speed. Just something to think about. I keep my external drives in a fireproof safe, and as cheap as they are I have thought about keeping one off site (at work, friends house, bank lock box). The off site one would only be a monthly backup or something.

[delcecchi]

Sure, that works, if you have somewhere to keep the backup. If it is too much trouble you won't do it.

Many cable connections are a megabit upload. That is 8 or 10 seconds per megabyte or 10,000 seconds per gigabyte. That's about 3 hours.

It would be worth it for irreplaceable data like pictures.

I mentioned it because I had never thought about the issue of fire or flood etc, just the drive dying with my data on it.

[spearchucker]

Del, I was just pointing out some things to think about, not saying don't do it. The reason I prefer a physical drive is to keep disk images of my drives as well. These are huge and would take a long time to upload and retrieve if needed. For pictures, the online backup should work well, plus once the initial backup is uploaded only changes need to be uploaded from then on. I would have around 100GB of stuff to backup so it would take a long time to complete.

Depending on how much data you want to backup, MS Skydrive has 25GB for free. Only catch is that you can't have files bigger than 50MB. This would work for pictures, but video could be too big.