Simple Backup for Busy People

Storage can be an embarrassment of riches these days. You take pictures and have them stored on Picasa or Flickr or Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. You have Powerpoints spread across Skydrive and Google Docs and Dropbox and Slideshare. Then you have your resume on LinkedIn and maybe Monster or Dice. And you have all sorts of web pages stored on Evernote and Dropbox and probably a bunch of them in your mail. And you may have scanned a number of important papers, passports, credit card numbers, and have them tucked away in a few places too. And my tunes, I may be able to reload some of them, but I have a large collection of tunes I would hate to lose. Oh, movies too. And originals of some youtubes I have uploaded. I have a lot of stuff now that I think of it. Oh, my financial records and tax documents. And health records. I really have a lot of documents these days.  

Back in the day you had a heck of a time just finding things on your hard drive. Today you have trouble just remembering which cloud you put them on. And what happens if you forget to renew a subscription or if that company changes its policies. Can you still find and use everything you have created? This is where you can learn a lesson from the big companies. Keep a copy offsite. And even when I send my pictures and documents and such to the various clouds and social media I keep my own copies. I just do not want to be in the position of not finding pictures of my kids or my friends or especially my grandkids. Or a scan of their first report card. Or a copy of my passport when I am traveling. Or losing my music. 

Backing up and tracking all of this was getting complicated. I tried to be disciplined in synchronizing my devices and my laptop and my wife's laptop. But sometimes I did not get around to it as often as I wanted. But I found a way to simplify all of this – I let Acronis True Image 2014 do it.  It backs up my files from my laptop to a cloud and it does this incrementally, that is, it knows that I created new data and only backs up that new data. Backs it up to one cloud. Backs my wifes data up to the same account. Automatically. Set it up once and it just work

Oh, suppose I get a new laptop? No problem, I can recover my entire laptop from the cloud to my new one. Not just the data, but all of the applications and operating system too! Hopefully I got a new one because I wanted to, but sometimes because it may have been destroyed or stolen. 

Oh, what about my Android and Apple phones and tablets? They work with the Acronis cloud too. I can synchronize and access and share my data from my phone. And if I do not have my data with me I can use any web browser, log into my account, and get my data. 

So I have all kinds of data, tunes, videos, documents. I have it on my laptop, my wifes laptop, my phone, her phone, my tablet, her tablet. And I can access it from any device, even a friends PC. And I can copy the entire system to a new laptop or desktop. And I do not have to remember all kinds of logons to skydrives and dropboxes and other systems because it is all in one account. I know where all of my data is and it was not very hard to set up. 

And one more thing. As much as I trust the Acronis cloud, I make another copy onto a USB drive every weekend too… Acronis True Image 2014 makes backups to the cloud, to a hard drive, synchronizes Android and IOS, prepares new devices and also makes backups to a USB drive. So I have three copies of my data, on different media, and once copy is in a different location. I know where it is, and I know it is safe. And I have my tunes to listen to.