<p>It's that time of year when all types of services are sending students information. I usually just toss them but DD just got a flyer about a back up service. For I think it was $5/month the service backs up your files when you leave your computer on at night.</p>
<p>She's not good at backing things up so it seems like a good idea. Buf course I have security concerns. Does anyone have experience with these services?</p>
<p>The only thing college students need to back up are their school projects, like the essay due next week. What mine do is email the the file to themselves as an attachment, and that way the file remains on the mail server until deleted. Write a few pages, email it to yourself before moving on to something else. Edit the draft, email it to yourself. Work product lost once and redone, painfully, will instill the discipline required to do this little task at each step.</p>
<p>I use Mozy and have been very satisfied with it. It's free for up to 2 GB, or $5 a month for unlimited. You install a little program and then backups are automated every day. Mine is done overnight and I see a notice on my screen in the morning letting me know the backup was done (or an error message if it wasn't - sometimes there's a connection error).</p>
<p>My son uses it, too, while he's away at college. He has a thumb drive, and he knows that he should email his important documents to himself just to be safe, but of course he never does it. It's just a safety precaution. Check out Mozy at Online</a> Backup, Data Backup & Remote Backup Solutions from Mozy.com – Welcome.</p>
<p>You can buy an inexpensive USB external drive to use as backup and some software which runs on a schedule. I backup everything on our computer weekly using this software (financial files, email, contacts etc). For a student I recommend backing up daily. After S lost his college paper because of a hardware failure, we purchased him a backup drive as well.</p>
<p>When my daughter was working on her thesis, at the end of every day she</p>
<p>1) emailed me a copy
2) emailed herself a copy
3) backed it up to a secondary hard drive </p>
<p>Me, I have a RAID array (mirror system of two hard drives) and I still email myself copies of really important stuff--and put it on my husband's computer.</p>
<p>My sister just had lightning strike the house next door; apparently everyone's computer is fried.</p>
<p>DD knows she should do the backing up, emailing etc. I know I should too but she's like me - not always as responsible as she should be! Considering that I killed one computer and had the hard drive die on my other one, I wish I had a service that is more responsible than I am! Any other suggestions for services?</p>