And while all data is protected with military strength AES 256 encryption, any open connection, particularly on Windows PCs, is worrisome. The automatic backups put a persistent, if minor, load on your computer and on your broadband connection.

Although this file-and-forget method is more convenient, it does require that there's always an open Internet connection to your computer. These changes are automatically recognized, and the changed or added files are backed up in real-time in the background. IDrive has a setting you can use for automatic updates that watches for any changes made to files and folders up to 2GB in size. But they by their very nature require your proactivity. Manual uploads took only a few minutes to transfer any new or changed data to my cloud vault. The PC and Mac apps let you set up how incremental backups are conducted either manually or automatically. IDrive has apps for Windows and Macs, as well as iOS and Android mobile devices. Less than a week after shipping the hard drive back to IDrive, my data was available in my online account, ready to accept the much less time-consuming incremental data backups. The full-disk backup took about 3.5 hours - a walk in the park compared to the Arctic winter of a cloud-based upload over home broadband connection. Hook the drive up to a Mac or Windows PC and run a backup using the pre-installed software, then ship the hard drive back in a prepaid USPS Priority Mail box. It's called IDrive Express: after opening a storage account, the company sends (at no cost) a 1TB external loaner hard drive. So I welcomed the opportunity to try the why-didn't-they-think-of-this-before solution offered by cloud backup company.

That's exactly what I experienced when I tried to be a good digerato and initiated my own cloud-based backups. Here's what they don't tell you: backing up a PC hard drive full of data to a cloud-based storage service is a glacial bandwidth time-suck that ties up your computer for many hours, even days. That way, you're protected in the case of a disaster, like your house burning down. IT pros - or anyone who's done their research - will tell you to save your data in a cloud-based service that's located somewhere other than your home. Lesser known is the concept of offsite backup. Everybody * knows this: backing up your computer will save your ass (and your data) if your system crashes.

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