When you travel, one think you need to keep in mind is that your computer can disappear anytime. Stolen in your Airbnb room while you’re out for diner, broken at a security checkpoint at the airport, your computer is at risk almost everywhere… While getting a new computer is easy, your data is irreplaceable. Your work, your pictures, all of this represents hundreds of hours of your time.
To make sure that you don’t lose any data in case of a sad event, only one solution is really practicable: continuous backup of your data. You can do a few manual backups on a regular basis, but it is really hard to remain consistent with this, especially when you are on the road. In addition, your external hard drive or usb key might also disappear in the unfortunate event.
To achieve this, tons of solutions are available on the market, from Dropbox to Google Drive or Box. So, which one to pick?
The user experience of Dropbox is really great, but it will only let you sync one specific folder on your computer, and do not allow several devices. Google Drive is not very intuitive to use and maintain.
The solution I really recommend is SpiderOak. It is less well known, but is really a great option:
- You can pick any folder in your computer that you want to sync (for instance your Desktop folder, your Personnal Documents folder…)
- You can connect up to 5 computers to the same account
- It never deletes anything: if you delete something by mistake on your computer, it will be moved in the trash in SpiderOak, so you can recover it later (great if somebody logs in your device and erases all your files)
- Everything is fully encrypted locally on your machine, so nobody sees your data
- Backup, sync, and sharing for all of your devices included with every account.
- ONE ensures all of your data is protected before even leaving your computer. Data is encrypted while in transit to, and at rest on, our servers.
I have been using it since years and really recommend it!
Another good option is Backblaze, starting at $5 per month per computer for unlimited storage.
Backing up in the cloud is essential in case you lose your laptop and hard drive. We use Backblaze which only costs $5 a month for unlimited data and is really easy to use, automatically backing up everything on our laptops. The initial backup does take weeks (depending on your internet speed) but now new documents and changes are backed up quickly.
https://www.backblaze.com/company/partners.html
Dropbox : https://db.tt/7iglFXmC
If you want to do manual backups, a small external hard drive is a good option. The recent ones, like the [] are light and offer a good amount of space. On my side, to make things easy, I also have a copy of my most important business files on a 32GB USD key, easy to update and keep hidden in your bag.
However, if you keep sensitive information there, encrypt them.
The main advantage is that potential restore is much quicker from an external HD or key that having to download everything from your cloud backup service. However, it’s likely that the hard copy will be out of sync if anything happens. On my side I keep doing it but less and less regularly.