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• Posted Sept. 13, 2012, 3:27 p.m. - 12 years, 1 month ago

Cloud and Local Backups Combined for All of Your Devices

We have written about business data on a cloud storage system.  There are pros and cons, but for the most part clouds are good.  We have also written about data backups and archives.

But what about protecting the data on your home computers and other devices?  We will provide an answer that here.

There are many, many programs out there advertised on the radio and TV stations that will back up your data automatically to the cloud.  All of them will back up at least your documents and pictures.  All of them will restore your files.

The downsides to these programs is the initial data backup can take hours or days depending on how much data you have to save.  After the initial backup, new and modified files will be copied to the cloud quickly.

A complete restore will take less time for most users as download speeds are usually four to six times faster than upload speeds.  If you have a synchronous Internet connection restores will take a little longer as you will probably have stored more data from the initial backup.

Local backups are a lot quicker and can be easily accomplished with a USB or network storage array.  Smartphones are another story and are not covered by many backup services.

The best of all worlds would be to have a local storage device for the backups that supports all of your devices and a way of automatically shuffling that data up to the cloud.  Additionally, a single account for all your combined data would be a blessing and also eliminate the extra account charges.

We found a product that will do that.  This product provides a free storage device for your home.  The product will back up the data from all of your computers, tablets and smartphones locally, so the initial backup will be very quick.

The product will then backup the data from your local storage device to the cloud.  Now you will have your data in two places, so if one is damaged or unavailable, you will still have your data secured.

There are a couple of pluses.  One is that you can access your data from any device from the cloud.  The second is the price: $29 a year.  Check out the Pogoplug Family.

 

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