holy backups, batman

One of the many drawbacks of living geographically separated from your Better Half is that transferring files from one another can be notoriously painful and/or complicated. Sure, AIM (one of the easiest and cheapest ways to keep in touch, I might add) does support file transfers, but they are crotchety little things, and as prone to wandering off somewhere and dying as they are to actually making it through. Any other options require assumption as to your network setup/connection, how-to knowledge, and so forth, and therefore stand an even lower chance of working or being implemented.
Another thing that can be royally problematic is having your hard drive crash on you. Yeah, I know, “Backup often, backup often, backup often,” is the mantra of any computer-user in this day and age, but who, honestly, remembers to do that on a relatively frequent basis? And what happens if your physical backup hard drive dies in the same cataclysm that killed your computer? Or your cat eats your DVD-Rs? Never hurts to be doubly sure.
How are these two related? Well, you could always assume your host is simply insane, which is a plausible explanation. But wait, there is more!
Thankfully, some companies are specializing in Online Backup. What does that mean to you? Basically, anything you want to share with someone else (IDrive-E allows you to set up multiple accounts), or anything you want to reasonably ensure that it does not get lost when your computer goes crispy (IDrive-E gives you two whole gigabytes… yes, gigabytes, for free, no strings attached), online backups are good options.
IDrive-E itself makes this rather simple for you. With no limits on upload or download bandwidths, you can store whatever you want on their servers, and download it again whenever you so desire, and getting it there and back really could not be any easier than what they offer. You can either set up an automated backup system to take care of the files without your direct involvement, or you can make use of their remarkably Windows-Explorer-like interface if you want to do it by hand instead. Additionally, you get goodies like automatic file compression for faster uploads and more efficient use of your space, 128-bit SSL encryption on uploads and 256-bit encryption on storage, stats, and even a mappable drive. And, if you have a whole lot of stuff you want to back up (understandable, I definitely do), you can get unlimited storage space on their servers for a scant $4.95 a month, or $49.50 a year. To say that is cheap would be putting it mildly.
Who knew backing up your data and keeping it safe and secure would be so easy… or cheap (or even free, if you like)?
—This post sponsored by IDrive-E—