Out of left field a little, but I’m in the middle of doing a computer swap right now. Some things have been a total pain in the ass in terms of data backup and getting it all put together in the new system.
The forum is pretty split between mac and pc users, so I thought asking everyone how they deal with their data seems like it’ll give me a ton of ideas I haven’t thought about.
I had used Carbonite to keep my client files backed up along with my photos. The only headache I have with Carbonite is that it’s SO freaking slow, and a restore took literally 36 hours for like 15gb of stuff. Plus, if I move to another computer, it deletes all of the backed up files on their server after restoring your data from your old computer to the new one and then has to re-upload everything. You’re looking at like several weeks at the rate this sucker uploads.
I’ve done the storage drive thing but there’s two problems with that. The first one is that I don’t want it on all the time, so I’ll plug it in, back it up, then put it away. Which leads to the second problem – it’s not truly secure. A fire or theft would render it worthless.
So I’m kind of back to some kind of cloud solution. I’m thinking of doing Dropbox and just opting for $10 a month and tossing all my client folders and photos on that thing. If I change computers I just install the software and it’s all available. That might be the most viable but I was curious what other people are doing in case I’m totally overlooking something, or if someone’s tried the dropbox thing and it didn’t work out.
At some point I’m seriously considering moving over to a mac, but it’ll probably hinge on either this or the next iteration of the mac mini or if I end up going with a macbook pro and pair it with my existing setup. So there’s that additional cross platform issue :)
