What’s your recommendation for an online backup service that I could give as a gift? Ms. Napier fretfully backs up to a heavy USB disk drive that she carries around in her purse in case the house goes up in flames. We need a better solution for her.
Past issues have included her backing everything up to her own user files as a destination, so that every time she backs up her file space gets a little more than twice as big. And, her not being clear what’s the difference between files, folders, and apps (never even trying to think about physical and logical drives, network mounting, and other slightly more advanced topics).
I think we need something that is set up once, and then mostly forgotten. I don’t think she will ever try to recover an individual file that she accidentally deleted, or an earlier version of a file she’s been editing. The only goal here should be a recovery option if her hard drive dies, including if the whole house is hit by a meteor. The reviews I have read about online backup services make them sound much too feature rich and nowhere near foolproof enough.
She seems to believe that it is my fault that computers so often don’t behave as she wishes, and is very bitter and vocal about it. So, part of the goal is that I should survive this misadventure, and happily.
I’m an Apple user and use iCloud as my safety net, but she’s a PC user who would become hysterical if I tried to expose a whole different system to her world. We are the only two people here. I really think we need something that is exclusively her backup.
Please, I beg of you, can you help me find something that won’t be a mess for her? Thank you!!
You could buy an incremental backup hard drive. It will only adjust files that have changed or been added, so it will gradually grow over time.
I used to have an old one, so I can’t recommend a modern model. Please do research appropriate for her needs. The one I had let me choose which folders to backup, since I didn’t see the need to back up everything.
As for an online backup service, I use Backblaze. I have no idea whether it will be acceptable to the technophobic. If she has relatively little stuff, the fifteen gigabytes available via a free Google Drive account might be enough. And that lets you easily access the files when away from your computer, which Backblaze and similar services do not.
I found out I used AOMEI but that’s offline.
According to Dropbox, they do an incremental online backup service. It’s intended for businesses and I doubt it’s free, but I see no reason why you couldn’t purchase this for someone.
https://experience.dropbox.com/resources/incremental-backup
I’ve been using Google Back up and Sync, along with Google Drive for quite a while now and it works well.
Personally, I have it set to back up my Documents folder as well as a few other things. I found that having it back up the entire drive is kind of a waste. I don’t need some of my storage being used up with programs that I can just download/install again. Also, since I’m usually pushing the limits of the free storage, this allows me to download something huge and just drop it on my desktop without worrying about it automatically re uploading to the cloud. When/if I want it to, I just move it over the Documents folder and it gets backed up in real time.