In "
Backups - Part II (Local Backups)" I wrote about backing up your valuable and irreplaceable genealogy data to local storage media like USB flash drives. In today's post I will touch upon saving a copy of your information out in the Internet AKA "cloud".
Whereas with local storage once you have bought the media you own it but with cloud-based storage you might have to pay on-going fees. Additionally, high-speed Internet is highly recommended since trying to send a gigabyte of information over dial-up might just take a little while. The other drawback with cloud storage is you might not be able to get to your backed up information when you want to. It might be that your Internet provider is having problems or the file hosting service is not available due to a failure.
There are a number of places out on the Internet where you can easily save a backup of your information. For a long list of file hosting services I refer you to the "
Comparison of file hosting services" on Wikipedia. Below are three of the better known known services.
Dropbox provides you initially with 2 GB of free storage but you can easily increase that to 18 GB via referrals of friends (500 MB per) or by following Dropbox on social media. You can purchase 100 GB of space for $99. The nice thing about Dropbox is that, in addition to web access, they support a large number of clients for desktops, laptops and smart phones.
Google Drive comes with 15 GB of free storage and you can buy 100 GB of space for $60. In addition to file storage the space is used for your Google Docs, Google+ photos and Gmail. Like Dropbox there are a number of ways to access your information ... from the web to using clients on your desktop, laptop or mobile device.
Microsoft's SkyDrive has 7 GB of free space and for $50 you can purchase 100 GB of space. If you already have Windows 8.1 you have Microsoft SkyDrive and, much like the other two, there are clients for Windows, Mac, and mobile devices.
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