Box your important files online
December 9, 2008
Back up your files already. Seriously, right now. In the information age, a hard drive crash can affect your life as much as a house fire (except for, you know, the possibility of being burned alive. All right, it’s really not that much like a house fire — a car theft, perhaps…). Think about it — your music collection, vacation photos, your screenplay that you’ve been meaning to finish someday — all of it is vulnerable to the whims of a fragile construct of plastic and metal.
In the dark ages of 2003, I once spent an entire afternoon backing up my work computer with Zip disks. Nowadays, Box.net lets you back up 1GB of whatever you like online, for free. Creating an account and uploading your files takes less time than it took to write this article. And with that much storage space, you don’t exactly have to be choosy about what you upload. I just hit “select all” in my writing folder and hit “Enter.” A few hundred files are now backed up, just in case my hard drive decides to go into early retirement. A gigabyte won’t get you as far with music files, of course, but you can upgrade to more storage space for a small fee.
If there’s anyone in your life who needs this more than you do, it’s your students. With Box.net, they can eliminate all headaches due to hard drive crashes, literal computer crashes (as in, falling off a tabletop), and whatever other maladies may affect their systems. Box.net allows users to share files, so it’s good for collaborative projects, too.
Data backup is the electronic version of the bomb shelter. Box.net will help ensure you’re ready for a hard drive meltdown. -BILL FERRIS
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