I’m looking for a good backup solution for my daughter’s laptop at college. I’d like to find some sort of wireless or network storage solution so that she wouldn’t have to plug in an external drive to take the backup. Instead, the laptop would just communicate with the drive on the network or when it’s in close proximity to automatically do the backup.
However, I’m concerned about security with it being used in the dorms. There are many network storage devices out there, but it’s not easy to find out what kind of security they have. If you are using it in your home, only your home systems will have access and likely you can trust them. Security is not a huge concern in that case. But in a dorm, anyone would be able to see it on the network.
Are there consumer-based network storage devices which have sufficient security to be used in an unsecured environment like a dorm? How do they handle security so that only my daughter’s laptop could use it?
Mozy. It’s not on the student network (and I’d be very surprised if students had storage on the college network), it’s free, and it will back up everything.
An alternative is to use Dropbox and save all your files to dropbox folders. This makes it easy to find them if you’re not on your own computer.
I suggest using Dropbox or some equivalent. I was in school at the end of the “carry everything on a USB stick” era, and when Dropbox came out it was a miracle. That will let her access her files from a friend’s computer, or the library, or wherever she is when she [del]remembers an assignment due in 30 minutes[/del] finds an opportunity to get work done early.
If you’re slightly paranoid about her entering Dropbox passwords on a public computer, she can set up two-factor authentication.
You have two good technical solutions. There are most certainly others that will be posted here.
But the critical factor in this is your daughter. How computer savvy is she? How concerned is she when it come to realizing some things in her life at school must always be private to her? I mean, really, once you remove the ego and college-bound bluff? The secure technical answer will fall flat if she is unable or unwilling to ensure her data is properly backed up and she takes security precautions every time without fail. Granted, she is of the generations now that do not view privacy in the same light as in the past. Yet, there will always be people in every generation, on every campus, in every dorm that will take advantage if the opportunity presents itself.
The security issue was more about not allowing the network drive to be visible/browsable/usable by other people on the network. I’m not so worried that she has secret stuff in her files, but more about other people being able to connect to the drive itself.
I hadn’t really thought about using online backup solutions. I’ll check those out. That would be convenient and avoid those security issues.
Solutions such as Mozy (I think) and CrashPlan back up everything, automatically, continuously. She can’t forget to take steps if she has no steps to take.
I know that CrashPlan transmits a large amount of data, though. Is there a data cap on the dorm Wi-Fi connection?
Most college kids I know just back up to the cloud or the university server via the campus wifi. I’m guess I’m not clear what kind of serious “security” concerns there would be for run of the mill college kid classroom notes and project data.
My original though was to get a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. This is a physical hard drive in a box that attaches to the network and your computer can mount it as a remote drive. It’s useful for automated backups, but my security concern was that other people on the dorm network could see the drive. I wasn’t really thinking about using cloud-based backups. This led to the ambiguous use of ‘network storage’ in the title. In my mind, this meant a NAS device. But it could also mean a cloud backup solution over the network.
I don’t have security concerns that the data in the cloud-based storage will compromised. I just had concerns that a physical box connected to the dorm network could be compromised.
No, really. I know that Word docs are unnecessarily huge, but just how much data does she expect to generate in four years? An embarassingly small thumb drive will suffice, with a couple more for backups.
Flash drive on the keychain, but as above, Dropbox is more convenient.
Emailing documents to yourself is another great backup process. I do it about once a month with an entire folder of word documents I’m building to create a D&D/Pathfinder world. If someone breaks in my apartment, gets my computer, backup drive AND flash drive, I still have a copy in my saved emails folder.