Tech News: February 2010
by Alaric Willi
A friend of mine recently suffered a terrible loss: the death of their hard drive along with all their precious memories. It was after this incident that I began to ponder the idea of how to avoid such problems occurring again. The answer is simple – eliminate the need to rely on a computer’s hard drive by properly utilizing a selection of websites that can assist you in backing up your data. The advantages of data storage are that you can access your information any place you can get on the web without having to worry about losing information if something happens to your computer. It also allows you to easily share your information with your friends. Here is a list of what and where:
Word processing and spreadsheets
docs.google.com has almost the entire Microsoft Office suite for free and then some. You can centrally manage all your documents, upload and export various formats including Microsoft Office formats, while sharing, collaborating and publishing your documents.
Photos
flickr.com is undoubtedly the world’s most popular photo sharing site. While the standard free membership only offers 100MB of photos a month, the pro account ($24.95 a year) gives unlimited uploads and the ability to download the original version of your photo for later use. You can also edit photos with an online Photoshop clone at
Organizer/calendar
google.com/calendar is a no-nonsense organizer. It’s geared towards effectively getting the job done and allows you to attach files from Google documents.
Data
Large data storage is something you are probably going to have to pay for. There are sites out there that will do it for free, but you may risk losing the data. Only paid-for storage can offer you the security and longevity for your data. sugarsync.com offers a range of plans starting from $4.99 month, and box.net can provide an unlimited data storage plan at $25/month. An alternative to this is to use the good old-fashioned method of keeping your data on a USB flash drive. These are relatively cheap and rarely fail.
While there are plenty of alternatives to the above, I have suggested the most reliable, easy-to-use web-sites. Storing your infor-mation on a new website with great prospects is fine until the website closes down or the server crashes. In the digital age, we keep most of our information on computers. Using the above tools, you can be sure that your data and memories won’t suffer at the hands of bad luck– and you’ll learn some new tricks along the way.
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