I have people often write to ask, “How can I keep my files safe from _________?” You can fill in the blank with one or more words. For instance, “total hard drive failure,” “accidental deletion,” “theft of my computer,” or one of the worst, “ransomware.”
The word for today to combat those adversaries is, “Backup.”
It is not hard and could be free to inexpensive depending on several factors. It has been my experience that most people do not have an extremely large number of files they need to back up. That excludes pictures as most people today take an enormous number of pictures with their phones. If you have many, many photos I also have a free suggestion for online storage but more on that later.
You may or may not be a fan of the cloud but cloud storage is usually free up to a point. I prefer Dropbox and Google Drive but there are many more. A startup Dropbox.com account will give you 2GB of space. Google Drive is one of the free larger storage spaces which allows 15GB of free storage. However, for Google Drive, you must have a Gmail account. This is not a big deal and how to get one has been discussed previously. Also, Google accounts were built with Android phones and Chromebooks in mind but they work very well with iPhones and iPads.
It is hard to say how much you can store on 1GB of space. It depends on many factors such as how long the document is, if it contains graphics, how many megapixels the pictures are which you are saving, etc. For example, for 8MP photos, you can store about 700 in 2GB. Whereas, with 12MP photos, you can store approximately 500 in 2GB. Text document files vary too. For example, my Double Click articles are about 600 words and are one page in length. I have written weekly articles since 2002 for the Daily News-Record. They total around 36MB which means that I could put 24 times that on 1GB or more than 384 years of articles.
Next, how about a thumb drive? I saw two for $25 the other day in a big box store. There were 32GB each, so they have a tremendous amount of file storage available. These are good too, as like cloud storage they can be moved to another location. If your house was burglarized and your computer was stolen, your backed-up files are on your thumb drive safe in another location. External hard drives can also be used but these are usually much larger, say 2TB and up (1TB=1000GB). They are more expensive starting at less than $100 and going up depending on size. They are more useful for videos and photos.
Last today is unlimited free photo storage provided by Google Photos. Google Photos can be used on both Android and iOS devices. It can be set to automatically back up all photos taken on those devices. You can then easily access the photos from the phones or with a computer on the internet. You can effortlessly view and edit your photo library. The big news is that Google Photos provides unlimited free storage when you opt to save your photos in their “high quality” setting. The limit for photos is 16MP and for videos in High-definition up to 1080p. Depending on where you look online they say that a 16MP photo can be printed up to about 10″x16″ without distortion. Saving them at the original quality is fine but those will count toward your Google Drive storage.
