Postgraduate Diary: Online Backup with DriveHQ

One of my thesis chapters is on Philip K. Dick, and concerns his representation of the paranoia that arises in a technologised society. But whilst admiring Dick's work a great deal, I have found myself partaking in the culture of replication which he critiques, because by now, after three years of research and with my thesis nearly done, I have become utterly paranoid about the possibility of losing it at the last through a computer error or virus.

As a digital photographer, I have always been quite careful to keep frequent backups, using firstly CDs and then, when my collection became too large, an external hard drive which goes in the drawer when we go away overnight - because I'm sure those robbers won't be rummaging amongst my underpants! My crucial documents are duplicated here on a weekly basis. However, lying in bed fretting one night, I decided that this was not sufficient, and I added a third, internal drive to back them up automatically on a daily basis. Of course, the problem is that these are all in one place. What if the house burns down, or a power surge wipes the whole system?

A few sleepless nights later, and I have discovered the perfect solution. This is the online file store DriveHQ. Through a small but nifty piece of software that loads when my computer starts, I can set it to a real-time backup mode, so that the instant I save a file on my computer, making that critical word change or crossing that final "t," it is duplicated online. The system keeps up to ten previous versions of updated files, so you can roll back if you realise you want to retrieve an earlier version. And, best of all, it's completely free for up to 1GB of files. Paranoid but impoverished PhD students have no excuses; with DriveHQ the digital equivalent of the cat/homework/munchies scenario is a thing of the past!

Labels: backup, Computers and the Internet, DriveHQ, Postgraduate Diary