services that could save your skin in the event of a drive failure

[Revenant]

Having just suffered a massive drive crash and losing around 95% of my information (thankfully, had made a backup image of my OS drive a week before, and could restore bookmarks and COD4 profiles) -- I figured I'd post this list of online services and software that could save your butt in the event of a system failure. (Yes... I'm now digitally paranoid. )

 

1) Dropbox-- you start out with 2 GB of storage, but with use for android camera photo uploading, referrals, etc you can ramp that up quite easily. (at time of writing, I'm currently at 5.4GB) Installing this will automatically sync files between any computer that's registered.

 

2) MiMedia-- Made mainly for storage of video/audio/photo files -- this allows you to have 7GB of free online storage.

 

3) Google Drive -- Creates a folder on your computer, that syncs up with your Google Drive account. 5GB free space.

 

4) SOS Online Backup -- free 5GB -- The nice thing about this service is that it allows you to drill down through your system and select which files you wish backed up to their service. For example, I have this service backing up my Firefox profile bookmarks, and my COD4 Profiles folder.

 

5) Box-- 5GB free online storage (As of the time of writing, untested by me. Though, I plan on downloading it this weekend).

 

6) Idrive-- 5GB free online storage (As of the time of writing, untested by me. Though, I plan on downloading it this weekend).

 

7) Comodo-- 5GB free online storage (As of the time of writing, untested by me. Though, I plan on downloading it this weekend).

 

8) Adrive-- 50GB online storage (Yes... that's 50GB FREE!) Here's the small print though: For the free account, it's only accessable through the web interface, and your file size is limited to 2GB. (As of the time of writing, untested by me.)

 

Now, granted, there are other services out there but I'm only posting the ones (with the exception of Dropbox) that start out with more than 2GB of free space.

 

In the event your system crashes, or you just find yourself with a hard drive that's acting up, there are 2 pieces of software that I use:

 

1) HDD Regen -- This goes sector by sector and tries to regenerate your drive. It's saved a number of drives already, though it's not been enough to save others.

 

2) HD Clone -- This has allowed me to make exact copies of a drive that was suffering from massive delays, and has been able to read past bad sectors on other drives so I can save a good portion of the data.

 

Good luck out there folks, and don't forget to backup those important documents and files.

[Jefke]

double nas system here and only a 256gb ssd (os + most used programs/games) + 500gb hdd (rest of the programs, games) in my pc it self

My personal nas is set up with raid 0 (striping) so in case one of the 2 hdd decide to die I will loose my stuff on there.

 

Not really a problem, on our second 'family' nas (which is said up with RAID 5 I got a weekly backup of my system, can do daily but well if I loose week worth of stuff it isn't a disaster. Most important thing are also backupped on my old external HDD when I save it )

 

I just don't like putting stuff in the 'cloud', but you forget skydrive from microsoft (not very useful though, I like dropbox more to share some stuff with classmates: powerpoints, ...)

ow and you can use firefox sync for bookmarks and stuff , it's not a real back-up system but with a sudden system crash it can come in handy

Edited July 20, 2012 by DrJoske

[Revenant]

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about Skydrive. Free 7GB of space. Thanks doc!

[Jefke]

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about Skydrive. Free 7GB of space. Thanks doc!

 

25 if you got an old account and confirmed you wanted to keep the 25 (I did and still got my 25gb)